cold case – CrimeFeed

William Desmond Taylor was Hollywood’s most prolific Irish director at the time, working behind the camera on some 60 movies and as an actor in 27 more. He worked with some of the greatest actors and actresses of the silent era, including Mary Pickford, Wallace Reid, Dustin Farnum and others. But it was the fame of his shocking, unsolved murder that would ultimately overshadow Taylor’s cinematic career.

Born William Cunningham Deane-Tanner in 1872, the man who would become William Desmond Taylor left Ireland for the United States in 1890, where he worked at a dude ranch in Kansas before moving to New York where he married Ethel May Hamilton in 1901. They were married for almost seven years before William abruptly disappeared, deserting his wife and young daughter. After his disappearance, it was revealed that he had suffered from “mental lapses,” and some friends thought that he might have wandered away while suffering from amnesia.

William traveled through Canada and the northwestern United States until, in 1912, he found himself in Hollywood. He had changed his name to William Desmond Taylor, and he quickly found work as an actor before directing his first film, The Awakening, in 1914. In the decade that elapsed between Taylor’s arrival in Hollywood and his murder, he directed dozens of films, and also served in the Canadian Expeditionary Force near the end of World War I.

On the morning of February 2, 1922, Taylor’s body was found in his bungalow in Westlake, Los Angeles by his valet Henry Peavey. A crowd quickly gathered, and someone who identified himself as a doctor stepped forward and declared that Taylor had died of a stomach hemorrhage. When the police examined the body, however, they found that Taylor had been shot in the back with a small-caliber pistol. The “doctor” vanished, and was never seen again. It was only the first of several strange clues and unexplained disappearances that would plague the case.

Taylor’s wallet held $78 in cash, and he wore a two-carat diamond ring, which would seem to discount the idea that the murder was a robbery gone bad. And yet the day before, Taylor had shown his accountant a large sum of money which was nowhere to be found. The ensuing investigation became as much a matter for the papers as for the police, with many sensational—and often inaccurate or downright fabricated—newspaper reports coming out surrounding the murder.

Robert Giroux, a renowned book editor, publisher, and author of the 1990 book about the murder A Deed of Death, has been quoted as saying that, “The studios seemed to be fearful that if certain aspects of the case were exposed, it would exacerbate their problems.”

A police detective who worked on the case claimed, many years later, that within the first week of the investigation they “got the word to lay off.” Perhaps due to these desires to hush up certain aspects of the crime, much of the physical evidence relating to the murder was lost either right away or over the intervening years.

In spite of these setbacks, the police and press identified more than a dozen possible suspects in the killing. There was even one confession, though no one was ever charged and the case remains officially unsolved to this day. While most of the suspects were ultimately cleared by the police, many of them present their own strange stories that could have come straight out of a film noir:

Edward Sands had worked as Taylor’s valet until about seven months prior to the murder, during which time he had forged Taylor’s name on checks. Sands had even burgled Taylor’s bungalow, leaving his footprints on the bed. For some, Sand is considered the most likely suspect, while for others he’s another victim of a larger conspiracy. In the wake of the murder, he was never seen or heard from again.

Murder suspects Henry Peavy and Mabel Normand. Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Henry Peavey took over as Taylor’s valet after Sands and found the director’s body. While the police cleared him after intense questioning, the story goes that a reporter for the New York Daily News was convinced that Peavey was the killer, and thought she could trap him into a confession. Believing that he would be afraid of ghosts due to his race, she offered to pay him $10 if he could identify Taylor’s grave in Hollywood Park Cemetery. An accomplice had already gone ahead and was waiting at the grave site draped in a white sheet. When Peavey approached, the sheeted accomplice claimed to be the ghost of Taylor and said, “You murdered me. Confess, Peavey!” Unfortunately for them, Peavey saw right through their charade, thanks in no small part to the fact that they hadn’t known that Taylor had a strong British accent while the “ghost” was from Chicago.

Mabel Normand, a popular comedic actress, was said to have been a lover of Taylor’s, and is one of the last people to have seen him alive. While most have ruled her out as a suspect, she was, at the time, addicted to cocaine, and, in an effort to help her kick her dependency, Taylor had recently met with federal prosecutors to assist them in charging her suppliers. Some have since theorized that Normand’s suppliers may have hired a contract killer to take care of Taylor.

Mary Miles Minter was a former child star and protégé of Taylor who was allegedly deeply in love with him. Passionate letters from Minter to Taylor were found in his bungalow, and many sources alleged a sexual relationship between the two that had begun when Minter was only 17 and Taylor was 47. According to Minter’s own statements, however, Taylor refused to reciprocate Minter’s advances and said that he was too old for her.

Charlotte Shelby, Minter’s mother, who many contemporary sources characterized as manipulative and greedy, is a favorite suspect among many amateur detectives and true crime writers in the years since the murder. Circumstantial evidence connecting her to the killing is exacerbated by the fact that she owned a rare gun similar to the one that killed Taylor, and after his murder she threw it in the Louisiana bayou.

Margaret Gibson, an actress who worked with Taylor when he first came to Hollywood, died of a heart attack in 1964. Having recently converted to Catholicism, she gave a deathbed confession in which she is said to have confessed to having “shot and killed William Desmond Taylor.” This didn’t become public until 1999, when it was printed in the newsletter Taylorology, devoted to collecting and transcribing newspaper articles and other accounts relating to the murder.

In spite of these and other suspects, the murder of William Desmond Taylor remains a tale with more mysteries than solutions, and has left behind a legacy that influenced films like Sunset Boulevard and Hollywood Story, as well as dozens of true crime writers and Gore Vidal’s novel Hollywood.

We may never know what really happened to William Desmond Taylor, and perhaps that’s where much of our continued fascination with his death lies.

This article originally appeared on The Lineup.

The post The Shocking Murder of William Desmond Taylor in Hollywood’s Silent Era appeared first on CrimeFeed.

On February 9, 2004, University of Massachusetts student Maura Murray crashed her car on an icy road in New Hampshire, over 100 miles from her dorm room where she should’ve been quietly studying. She was never seen again.

Over a decade later, there remain more questions than answers in Murray’s disappearance, and some of them are so strange that it’s no wonder this cold case has never been forgotten.

Maura Murray. [Photo: Investigation Discovery’s “Disappeared”]

1. What was going on in Murray’s life?

The official website created by Murray’s loved ones includes a multi-part biography of Murray, calling her an “All-American Girl,” a model student, athlete, and daughter. She had attended West Point before transferring to UMass at Amherst to study nursing, and was planning to marry her high school sweetheart, Billy Rausch, who was stationed at Fort Sill in Oklahoma.

But behind Murray’s smile, what secrets could she have been hiding? It remains unclear why exactly she left West Point – some investigation has suggested that she may have been asked to leave for an Honor Code violation. During her time at UMass, Murray ran into some legal trouble, and was charged with improper use of a credit card a few months before her disappearance for possessing and using stolen credit card numbers. According to the blog of true crime writer James Renner, her arrest record was once public and he was able to retrieve a copy, but it’s now no longer available to reporters.

In the days before she disappeared, Murray uncharacteristically emailed professors to tell them that she would not be attending class, claiming there had been a death in the family. But there was no death, and nothing except a few internet searches and a phone call to a Vermont rental property to give any clues as to where Murray was headed or why.

2. How could Murray have vanished without a trace?

That February night in 2004, Murray drove her Saturn up Route 112 in New Hampshire. It was dark, there were snowbanks on either side of the road, and her car had been having problems. In fact, her father, Fred Murray, had visited her at school only a few days before to go car shopping, although they never ended up purchasing a new car.

Local bus driver Butch Atwood was on his way home when he came across the wrecked Saturn and a woman matching Murray’s description. He offered to help, but she insisted that she had already called AAA – strange, he thought, since cell phone reception was notoriously spotty in the remote area. Atwood went home, filed some paperwork for his job, and decided to call the police anyway. By the time the police arrived at 7:46 p.m., the Saturn was still in the road, but Murray was gone.

There were no sightings of any other vehicles, no footprints in the fresh snow. The area has been searched many times over the years, and if Murray was taken by one of the few people living within walking distance of the crash site, or if she wandered off to die in the elements, her body has never been found.

Courtesy of the Maura Murray Missing Facebook Group

3. Could Murray still be alive?

Murray’s father maintains that Murray was abducted, and he has not given up his search for his daughter, whether dead or alive. Although investigators have never been able to detect any pattern between Murray’s disappearance and that of other women and girls gone missing in similar circumstances, there have been cases that might indicate the possibility of a connection. Four years before Murray’s disappearance, 16-year-old Molly Bish seemingly vanished from her lifeguard post in Warren, Massachusetts. Her remains were found three years later in a wooded area only miles from her home. Her murder is still unsolved.

The disappearance of Brianna Maitland is also eerily similar to that of Murray. Maitland’s abandoned car was found approximately 100 miles from where Murray’s was, one month later. The case caught the attention of Murray’s family, who added a page about Maitland to their official website. To this day, Maitland’s disappearance is unresolved, and her body has never been found.

Renner, who wrote True Crime Addict about his obsession with Murray’s disappearance, and has maintained a comprehensive blog tracking his investigation, posits at the end of his book that Murray may have willfully disappeared and is still out there, alive. There have been reported sightings of her in Montreal, a possible picture pulled from Facebook, individuals who insist that they have seen Murray in the 12 years since she disappeared. Either way, every time one lead seems to suggest answers, it splinters and multiplies into more questions. If Murray met with foul play, where is the evidence? In all this time, how has no one slipped and revealed information that might point to her killer? And if Murray did disappear of her own free will — why? Will she ever come out of hiding to tell us?

Maura Murray Missing

My Search for Maura Murray

“Miles to Nowhere: Maura Murray”

Boston Magazine

WMUR

Fox News

True Crime Addict: How I Lost Myself in the Mysterious Disappearance of Maura Murray

Maura Murray Missing Facebook Group

Main photo: Maura Murray Missing Facebook Group

These are the crime stories making headlines today, July 28, 2016 …

Man convicted in Chandra Levy’s murder won’t be retried. Washington, D.C.’s U.S. Attorney’s Office said they are dropping the charges against Ingmar Guandique, whose conviction for the 2001 murder was overturned last year. The prosecutors said they could no longer prove their case beyond a shadow of a doubt “based on recent unforeseen developments that were investigated over the past week.” It’s unclear if this decision means the investigation into Levy’s murder will be reopened. [AP]
Feminist writer leaves social media after receiving rape threat targeting her five-year-old daughter. New York Times bestselling author and Guardian columnist Jessica Valenti said she received the threat from someone on social media. “I can deal with a lot of things, I’ve taken a lot of abuse over the years,” she wrote on Twitter. “But my child? No.” Valenti called out law enforcement and social-media companies for not doing more to protect people from online threats and abuse. Valenti said she will be suspending her social-media accounts indefinitely. [NY Daily News]

This morning I woke up to a rape and death threat directed at my 5 year old daughter. That this is part of my work life is unacceptable.

— Jessica Valenti (@JessicaValenti) July 27, 2016

NYPD searching for a man who groped and then beat a woman in Manhattan’s East Village neighborhood. According to police, around 1:45 A.M. on Saturday, the victim was walking home when the unknown assailant grabbed her butt; when she confronted him, he punched her in the face repeatedly before taking off. The suspect is described as a white male, age 20 to 25, 5′ 8″ tall and weighing approximately 140 pounds. He was last seen wearing a dark-colored shirt and blue jeans. Police released a surveillance photo of the suspect and are looking for any information that leads to his arrest. [CBS New York]

Former Fox News reporter arrested for rape in Virginia. Orlando Salinas, a former reporter with WDBJ in Roanoke, is facing rape and forcible sodomy charges stemming from a January 2016 incident. According to the indictment, the victim has not been identified, but she is not his wife. Salinas is currently being held without bail. [Roanoke Times]
Alan Bennett will serve two life sentences for killing his girlfriend and ex-girlfriend within only minutes of one another. Bennett first stabbed his girlfriend, Lynne Freeman, to death, and then went over to his ex-girlfriend Jodie Betteridge’s house and stabbed her 132 times, killing her in front of their three young children. The 34-year-old is expected to serve at least 32 years behind bars for the brutal murders. [BBC]

Domingo Juan Andres [Photo: Riverside Police Department]

Southern California police are looking for a man they say is contacting underage victims over Facebook Messenger, then sexually assaulting them. Investigators are trying to track down Domingo Juan Andres of Riverside – who may use the nickname “Junior” – for allegedly committing two separate assaults against a 12-year-old and a 15-year-old. [NBC Los Angeles]
Vermont man sentenced to three years in prison for killing his girlfriend’s disabled son with vodka. Walter Richters pleaded guilty to manslaughter, admitting he put the alcohol in the child’s feeding tube; he was credited with already serving one-and-a-half years of the three-year sentence. In exchange, he’s agreed to testify against the child’s mother, who he said gave him permission to give the 13-year-old boy the alcohol. [NY Daily News]

Jessica Broom [Photo: Police handout]

Another day, another woman with a bag of heroin hidden in her vagina. Jessica Broom, 28, was stopped by North Dakota police and a search of her person allegedly recovered a bag of heroin found inside her vagina. KNEXT]

Main photos: AP Images

These are the crime stories making headlines today, September 1, 2016 …

The FBI’s Chicago Division has appealed to the public for help solving a cold case involving the brutal murder of a 13-year-old girl. On August 13, 2005, Alexandra Anaya — known to friends and family as Alex — was reported missing from her home in Indiana. Three days later, boaters on the Little Calumet River in Chicago found her dismembered body floating in the water. Despite investigations by both the Chicago Police Department and the Hammond Police Department, her killer remains at large. Her case is one of many now being reviewed by FBI Chicago’s recently established Homicide Initiative Task Force. “We believe this was not a random act of violence and that Alex knew her assailant,” FBI Chicago Special Agent Michael J. Anderson of the Homicide Initiative Task Force said during a press conference. “It has been more than a decade since Alex was murdered, and during that time people and relationships have changed. We are hopeful that someone will come forward now.” [FBI]

Lanny Bush’s mug shot

A Texas appeals court has reversed the capital murder conviction against Lanny Bush. The 11th Court of Appeals reversed the April 2014 decision of Bush, 57, earlier this month after ruling that evidence was insufficient to support a conviction for capital murder based on kidnapping. However, the court found that there was sufficient evidence to support the “lesser included offense of murder” in the death of Michele Reiter, his 38-year-old ex-girlfriend. Bush is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole for killing Reiter, whose body was found in September 2012 in a shallow grave in Coleman County. Prosecutors sought a capital-murder charge by arguing that Bush kidnapped Reiter before killing her. During the trial, Bush admitted to setting up a fake Facebook account to communicate with Reiter in order to harm her. The crime was the subject of the Investigation Discovery show Web of Lies. The court case ordered a new trial on punishment only for murder. [Brownwood News]
A woman set herself on fire in U.S. Representative Danny Davis’s office in Chicago. Police say an unidentified woman walked into the congressman’s office on Chicago’s West Side at around 3 P.M. on Tuesday and drank out of a bottle of hand sanitizer, which she then poured on herself before setting herself on fire with a lighter. She was taken to a hospital in serious condition, but police say her condition has stabilized. Davis, a Democrat, has said he has no idea why he was targeted. [CBS News]
A recently unsealed Drug Enforcement Agency affidavit describes how Sonia Martinez-Gamboa allegedly arrived at Dayton’s airport with more than a pound of heroin inside her body. Martinez-Gamboa, 38, is the third woman to be charged in a federal drug-smuggling case that involves couriers hiding drugs in their body cavities. She allegedly made 25 minutes worth of cell-phone calls from the airport before taking a taxi, which was pulled over for speeding. She was later taken to a hospital and found to have 625 grams (1.37 pounds) of heroin concealed in her vagina, according to court documents. Martinez-Gamboa was charged with and later indicted on counts of conspiracy and possession with intent to distribute. She is the fifth person to be charged in connection to the case, following Fernando Villegas Montoya, 31; Jose Mercado Herrera, 30; Angelica Perez Martinez, 23; and Susana Castro Beltran, 24. [WHIO]
Sonia Martinez-Gamboa’s mug shot [Montgomery County Jail]
Police in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, are hunting for an armed — and naked — candy bandit who robbed a convenience store at gunpoint. The robber walked into a Scotchman store just before midnight last Monday, according to a Horry County Police Department report, wearing nothing but a bandana and a pair of black shoes. He then pointed a gun at a 51-year-old worker while running toward the candy. The perp then grabbed “Reese’s peanut butter cups and left,” police say. Police estimate that the robber is between 18 and 30 years old. [The Smoking Gun]
Now aliens are being blamed for a string of mysterious cat killings in Croydon, England. RSPCA chiefs have been hunting the twisted “Croydon Cat Killer” for months, and since the case has made headlines and sparked a police investigation the charity and investigators have been inundated with calls claiming that the killer is a neighbor or relative — and some even believe that the slayer is an extraterrestrial who came in a UFO from outer space. Three cats have been killed in Croydon this month alone, and the total number of deaths now tops 100 since last October, which prompted the police investigation. The latest death linked to the prolific pet killer is a black cat called Pebbles, who was attacked and lost her leg before passing away at the emergency vet. Commenters on the South Norwood Animal Rescue and Liberty (SNARL) Facebook page have posted photos of Pebbles and appealed to the public for help in the investigation. [Daily Express]

A prisoner at a Staten Island hospital has been charged with attempted murder after attacking a rookie cop with her own gun. Dante Martin, 36, was handcuffed to a gurney at Richmond University Medical Center on Sunday when he asked to use the bathroom after urinating on himself, according to police. When she unhooked him, he punched her repeatedly and knocked her down before trying to grab her gun. [New York Daily News]
Police have released surveillance footage of the man wanted for stabbing a Walgreen’s employee to death in Tallahassee, Florida. The Tallahassee Police Department has named 25-year-old Tavon Q. Jackson a suspect in the murder of Javona Glover, a 25-year old mother of one, who was working at the drugstore on Tuesday morning when Jackson allegedly attacked her. The video released by police appears to show images of Jackson at the scene of the crime during the time of the homicide. Rapper T-Pain, whose real name is Faheem Rashad Najm, is Glover’s uncle and used social media to get the word out about the killer on the loose. “The police are still lookin for the coward ass n*gga that just killed my niece at Walgreens in Tallahassee. If you got info pls help us out!” T-Pain tweeted Tuesday, adding, “if anybody in 850 got any info on this then step up pls.” [WCTV]

Main image: Alexandra (Alex) Anaya [Photo: FBI]

In 1971, 18-year-old Middlebury College student Lynne Schulze disappeared without a trace. Police know that she was last seen on December 10 at a bus stop across the street from a Vermont health-food store called All Good Things.

The store was co-owned by New York City real-estate heir Robert Durst and his wife, Kathleen Durst, who vanished in 1982 after she threatened him with divorce. That case became newly infamous in 2015 by way of the HBO series The Jinx, which led to Robert Durst presently facing murder charges for the 2000 slaying of his friend, Susan Berman. New developments may now link Durst to the earlier disappearance of Lynne Schulze, as well.

On the day in question, first-year student Schulze was traveling with friends at school to take a 1 P.M. final exam. Along the way, she split from the group and returned to her dorm room to retrieve a favorite pen. She never showed up for the exam. Schulze was next sighted at the bus stop eating dried prunes that she’d purchased from the Dursts’s store. Since then — nothing.

Schulze’s friends didn’t think to report her missing for several weeks. Some said she had joked in the past about faking her death and starting over under a new identity, but no one took her seriously. In addition, given the free-wheeling youth climate of the era, college students bolting off campus for various adventures hardly seemed unusual — until this one did.

Authorities found that Schulze had left her ID and checkbook back in her dorm room and surmised that she had no more than $30 cash with her. Although Schulze was reported to be mildly depressed and embarrassed about her severe acne, all indications were that she was not suicidal. The situation became a mystery that remains unsolved. The intervening years brought unconfirmed sightings and people claiming to have been involved in the case, but no final answers.

Following the controversy surrounding Durst in 2015, the FBI had requested that police across the country look into any cold cases from locations where Durst had lived from the times he’d lived there. Some of the locals who knew Schulze were shocked to learn that Durst had resided in their area. Why would a millionaire in real estate from New York own and operate a tiny health-food store in small-town Vermont?

It’s not clear if police have moved Durst from “possible link” to “person of interest” just yet, but the investigation is active and they are very interested in speaking to Robert Durst about anything he might know.

ABC News brings us this report:

Main photo: Lynne Schulze [screenshot from ABC.news]

The Los Angeles Police Department has released sketches of two men considered persons of interest in the 47-year-old murder of a young woman found near a Manson Family murder site. Reet Jurvetson, 19, flew from Canada to Los Angeles in 1969 to meet a man named Jean whom she’d met in a Montreal coffee shop, People magazine reports. Her body was found six miles from the site of the Sharon Tate murders on Mulholland Drive later that year. She had been stabbed over 150 times.

Reet Jurvetson. Photo: LAPD

But police interviewed a witness in Montreal this summer who told them that she remembers seeing Jurvetson with two men named Jean at a coffee shop. The LAPD created sketches of the pair based on the witness’s description.

Detectives have said that while they cannot say conclusively that Jurvetson’s death is related to the Manson murders, due to the timing and location of her body, they cannot rule out a potential connection.

Jurvetson’s family had believed that she had started a new life in the U.S., so never reported her missing. Her body was not identified until April 2016 when investigators matched DNA on her bra with a sample provided by her sister.

Police are also attempting to find people who lived in Jurvetson’s building in Hollywood. If you have any information about the murder of Jurvetson, contact LAPD’s cold case unit at 213-486-6810.

Main image: Sketches of the two men [LAPD]

It’s a case that could have remained cold and unsolved, but now it appears that one murder victim’s family may finally be seeing justice. The Broward County Sheriff said a man walked into a police station 1,500 miles away to confess to a murder committed in 2002.

According to a press release, authorities from three separate agencies vetted the murder confession of 38-year-old Joshua Odom. On August 11, Odom entered a police station in Des Moines, Iowa, and confessed to killing 70-year-old Richard Busey. Busey was found beaten to death inside his apartment 14 years ago. Odom reportedly sat down for a lengthy confession and confided what he knew to Detective Brad Younglut.

The Des Moines Register reports that Odom claimed that God wanted him to make the confession. He explained that he’d been a drifter, and he’d gone to Busey’s apartment to drink and have sex. His reported motive was to get money to buy crack. Odom said he allegedly hit Busey with a vase or a pot after the victim was choked. Although he didn’t remember exactly where the murder occurred, Odom said he remembered being arrested the very next day for stealing a case of beer in the area. He also said he could remember what the apartment complex looked like.

Youngblut didn’t take the confession lightly. In fact, the release said he didn’t hesitate to send a bulletin to law enforcement agencies in south Florida. Although “dozens” of emails and bulletins were sent to area detectives, one investigator realized the information he was reading was spot-on.

According to the press release, Detective David Turner of Wilton Manors recognized the “needle in the haystack.” The release said Turner remembered Busey’s murder, and realized the details were most likely not made up. One report said the case hadn’t seen a viable lead in more than a decade. In 2002 a tipster said the suspect’s name was “Josh” and he had a large tattoo on his chest. That lead at the time did not go anywhere. All these years later, authorities can confirm Odom does have a tattoo on his chest.

John Curico, a homicide detective with Broward County, spoke out to the Des Moines Register and said, “Give credit to God, because that’s why (Odom said) he wanted to come in and confess.” He added, “A lot of people come in and confess to a lot of things. It’s not typical that an arrest and a record puts them in the right place at a certain time.”

Fingerprints at the scene of the crime match up positively to Odom, the report adds. As for other DNA, it’s currently being tested. Within a couple of weeks, on August 25, Odom was in handcuffs. He was charged with first-degree murder and theft on September 7. It’s not clear if he’s retained an attorney.

Miami Herald

NBC Miami

Broward County Sheriff press release

Des Moines Register

Main photo: Joshua Odom (left) and Richard Busey (right) [Broward Sheriff’s Office]

These are the crime stories making headlines today, September 14, 2016 …

An Ohio ex-mayor has admitting to repeatedly raping a four-year-old child, and called her “willing,” according to prosecutors. Richard Keenan, 65 (above), served as mayor of Hubbard in 2010 and 2011 and has claimed in the past that he “dedicated his life to Christ.” Prosecutors said Kennan admitted to sexually assaulting the girl over a three-year period, beginning when she was four years old. He confessed the abuse to several family members and a social worker, but said that the child had been a “willing participant” in the abuse. He was indicted last month on eight counts of rape and 12 counts of attempted rape and gross sexual imposition. [Rawstory.com]
A landlord is accused of using his Central Park pad to drug and rape multiple women before videotaping them while unconscious, according to prosecutors. Eliseo Adorno, 67, was indicted in July with criminal sex act, rape, sex abuse, and unlawful surveillance charges. Prosecutors allege that Adorno raped women inside his two-bedroom apartment at the Langham at 135 Central Park West, which rents for $8,500 a month, according to the New York Post. Manhattan prosecutor Melanie Soberal said in court that the victims have “absolutely no recollection of any of the conduct depicted in the images or videos,” and added that on some recordings “snoring” can be heard. Authorities uncovered 350 sexually explicit photos and 45 videos taken between October 2014 and March 2015. [New York Post]

The Langham, 135 Central Park West [Photo: Google Maps]

Scientists are one step closer to being able to predict who will be a violent offender based on their genetic profile. An international team of researchers have conducted a study and concluded that a mental condition called Antisocial Personality Disorder (APD) is common among a large percentage of inmates. Experts say that this disorder is linked to aggression and manipulation, and they now believe that 40 to 70 percent of the prison population has APD compared to the 1 to 3 percent in the general population. Individuals who are antisocial or have alcoholic parents are also at a greater risk, and far more men are affected than women. [Daily Mail Online]

Michael Darnell Harris [Photo: Michigan State Police]

Michael Darnell Harris [Michigan State Police]

The Michigan State Police has launched an investigation into its crime lab after new DNA emerged pointing to a different killer in a convicted serial killer’s case from 1981. Ingham County Circuit Court has set a September 23 hearing to consider new evidence that could overturn the conviction of Michael Darnell Harris, 53, in the murder of Ula Curdy, 77, of Lansing. Harris, 53, is serving life sentences for the murders of Curdy and three other women in 1981 and 1982 — but has always maintained his innocence in all four killings. Harris’s attorney said that his client’s conviction for Curdy’s murder may have prejudiced decisions at later trials. According to court records, a former crime lab supervisor who testified against Harris in two cases was forced to retire in 2004 after officials learned he fraudulently submitted a DNA proficiency test that was actually completed by someone working under him. [Officer.com]
Two men have been linked through DNA testing to the 1973 murders of two girls in a small northern California town. William Lloyd Harbour and Larry Don Patterson, both 65, have been arrested after being linked to the disappearances of 13-year-old Doris Karen Derrybery and Valerie Janice Lane, 12. The two friends were reported missing on the morning of November 12, 1973, when they failed to come back from a shopping trip, and their bodies were found a few hours later in a wooded area of nearby Wheatland. They had been killed by shotgun blasts at close range. The case was inactive for years, until a DNA hit in 2014 prompted investigators to take another look at the investigation. [Yahoo News]
A 25-year-old woman in Japan has confessed to killing her brother and storing his frozen body parts in her house. Emi Takeuchi, 25, said she and her brother Ryo, 21, had a disagreement over a “trivial matter” and she killed him before trying to dump the corpse after dismembering it. The partially frozen body parts of Ryo, who had been living in the house with Takeuchi and thought missing since late August, were found in a house on Monday in Shisui, Chiba Prefecture. She was arrested Tuesday on suspicion of dismembering and abandoning the corpse, sources said. [Japan Times]
Suspects who lit a Muslim woman’s blouse on fire in New York targeted two other women in the same area, police say. The NYPD’s Hate Crimes Task Force has been helping police hunt the two men who walked up to Nemariq Al-Hinai and used a lighter to set the left sleeve of her blouse on fire Saturday night. Investigators learned that two other women on Fifth Avenue had their clothing set on fire in separate incidents, and believe that the same attacker targeted all three victims. Neither of the victims attacked on Wednesday were Muslim, so detective do not now believe that the crimes are related to religious beliefs. Al-Hinai managed to put the fire out herself and is unhurt, police said. [New York Daily News]

A three-year old boy in Louisville, Kentucky, has died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Police say that Anthony Blake Wells picked up his father’s gun, which was in an unsecured location behind a television, and shot himself in the head at around 10:45 P.M. Sunday night. They believe that he saw another family member put it there. No one else in the home was hurt, and police say his parents were sleeping at the time. Investigators say that a similar situation happened in the same area about a month ago when a four-year-old girl found a stolen gun, and are warning people in the community to be vigilant about properly securing their weapons at home. [Wave 3 News]

Main photo: Richard Keenan’s mug shot [Photo: Trumball County Sheriff’s Department]

Does the ghost of Sigrid Stevenson still haunt Kendall Hall? According to rumors at what is now The College of New Jersey, yes, it does.

The murder of 25-year-old graduate student Stevenson happened just as classes were gearing up in fall 1977. The campus was already abuzz due to stories of the Son of Sam terrorizing nearby New York City, but when the murder was in one of the university’s buildings? That brought the terror home.

Shortly before midnight on Sunday, September 4, a campus police officer noticed a bicycle that had been left chained up near Kendall Hall. All of the building’s external doors were locked, and the last people said to have used the facility was a group of actors and theater crew members. One theory supposes Stevenson had attended that performance, and stayed behind by herself to practice on the building’s piano. Again, though, that’s just one theory.

When the officer entered Kendall Hall that night, he spotted a blood trail on the stage that led to the piano. He lifted the instrument’s dust cover and found Sigrid’s lifeless body stashed beneath it. She had been stripped naked and tied up, her head and facial features so badly bludgeoned that a professor could only identify Stevenson by her hair color.

Police found no sign of robbery. The medical examiner found no evidence of sexual assault, and determined that Stevenson died of a fractured skull, compounded by profuse bleeding.

Although they lacked modern tools such as DNA testing, investigators questioned more than 100 individuals in their pursuit of justice. Among those interrogated, dozens took lie-detector tests, including at least one campus police officer. Divers scoured a local lake in hope of finding a murder weapon. Nothing turned up. Authorities reportedly even brought in a psychic to zero effect.

No leads, let alone conclusions, emerged — not then in 1977 and still, 39 years later, not now. Police have never even been able to name a single suspect. Click here to see a photograph of Stevenson.

All that persists is the rumor of Sigrid Stevenson’s ghost in Kendall Hall, along with the tragic questions of her loved ones that remain unanswered.

Photo: Dedicated Public Domain (CC0) Photo of Kendall Hall taken by Tom Sulcer.

On August 23, 1992, Grinnell College senior Tammy Zywicki drove off from the Chicago suburb of Evanston toward the school’s Iowa campus. She never made it.

The following day, an Illinois State Trooper ticketed Tammy’s abandoned 1985 Pontiac T1000. A number of Tammy’s possessions were missing from the vehicle as well, including her purse, a Canon camera, and a watch that played “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head.” A massive eight-day search commenced, ending when a passerby “smelled an odor” and called the cops.

Responders found Tammy’s dead body wrapped in a blanket and bound with duct tape, nearly 500 miles away on a highway entrance ramp outside Sarcoxie, Missourri. Someone had stabbed her to death.

Reportedly, the killer stabbed Tammy seven times total; six times she was punctured in a “circular pattern” around her heart. One of the cuts was to her right arm. Greenville Online reports it’s possible the murder weapon was small, perhaps a penknife.

Tammy Zywicki. Photo: FBI

The last time she was seen alive, Tammy had stopped in Evanston to drop off a traveling companion identified only as Daren. The pair’s long road trip had kicked off back in New Jersey. When police questioned Daren, he told them that the car overheated along the way, suggesting the possibility that Tammy had pulled over on the highway due to mechanical trouble.

In immediate pursuit of suspects, police set up roadblocks, interviewed numerous parties, and continued to sift through information and leads, reports say. Two months into the investigation, a local nurse said she saw an ex-con turned trucker named Lonnie Bierbrodt with Tammy before the disappearance. Police brought in Bierbrodt for questioning and took his fingerprints, but his alibi proved credible and he was cut loose.

In 2015, NBC Chicago said the Illinois State Police had assembled a team to run down fresh leads in the case. A former investigator, Martin McCarthy, told the network he believes Bierbrodt is guilty of the crime. Illinois State Police Master Sergeant Jeff Padilla strongly disagrees. “There is a lot of misinformation about him out there. For as much circumstantial information that there is about his involvement, there’s as much that indicates that he’s not involved,” Padilla said. One of the most damning facts that would seem to implicate him in the case is that the blanket she was found wrapped in bore the logo of the type of truck Bierbrodt drove.

At present, the case remains open and active, while Tammy Zywicki’s memory lives on. The FBI is looking for your tips to finally close this case. If you know anything at all about Tammy’s murder, please contact Special Agent Jorge Fonseca, Illinois State Police at (815) 726-6377, Ext 286.

NBC Chicago

Greenville Online

Iowa Cold Cases

Main photo: from FBI poster

For years, police have been using Ground Penetrating Radar (GPR) — the same technology used in construction projects to find underground water, power, and sewer lines — to dig up forensic evidence including buried drugs, weapons, and even bodies.

Rather than sending radar waves through the air to pinpoint airplanes and speeders, GPR sends radar energy into the ground. Some of that energy then bounces back to a receiving antenna when it hits something in the soil, and “pings.”

Kristin Smart [Photo: Wikimedia Commons}

Kristin Smart [Wikimedia Commons}

It can be key to cracking cold cases. GPR was used to unearth the remains of King Richard III, who died in the 15th century — and much more recently in the investigation of the 1997 disappearance of college student Kristin Smart.

According to the The Blade, GPR technology was also used to search for the remains of Natalee Holloway in Aruba after she disappeared in 2008.

But the technology has its limits, and factors including soil condition and the experience of the technician using it can make or break a case.

A ground-penetrating radargram collected on a historic cemetery in Alabama, USA. [Photo: Wikimedia Commons]

A ground-penetrating radargram collected on a historic cemetery in Alabama, USA. [Wikimedia Commons]

GPR can’t find skulls or bones.

Instead, scientists say that the technology finds breaks and disturbances in the soil’s natural horizontal layers, such as a blanket or coffin that the body could be buried in.

GPS can detect irregularities, but often can’t be more specific about whether they are tree roots, rocks, or other objects that could confuse the case.

GRS can detect irregularities in the soil, but can’t identify the source.

Jim Doolittle, a soil scientist with the USDA-Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) Doolittle said in an interview, reported by the Soil Science Society of America, that he was once asked by law enforcement to locate crushed cars that could contain a murder victim’s remains. He found irregularities in the soil, he said, but was stressed because unearthing them would involve digging in a “backyard was right out of Better Homes and Gardens magazine,” he says, “with lush plantings and elegant walkways and fountains.” In the end, the police dug up the yard and found the cars — but not the victim’s remains.

In the Kristin Smart case, a contractor named Gary Mann performed a GPR search in the backyard of the home owned by suspect Paul Flores’s mother Susan Flores in Arroyo Grande, and The Daily Beast reported that the results were “inconclusive.”

But they can still provide key facts. Mann “said he felt there was an older man-made type excavation below the second step on the east side of the house” that “did not not look like a natural geographic feature and is about six feet long and five and one half feet deep,” according to a transcript of the FBI search warrant submitted by FBI Agent Jack Schaefer in 2000, provided by KristinSmart.com.

He later performed additional testing on the house next door, and said he had concluded that the excavation did not continue under the fence to the adjacent yard.

Experts say that most operators can learn the basics of the technology in just a few days — but experience matters. In the Smart case, Mann explained that he was “less sure of his findings because he did not have the right equipment for GPR testing for bodies” and he “lacked experience in that this was the first time he conducted a GPR search for a grave site.”

When it comes to the condition of the soil, it’s all about the (pH) numbers.

Soil scientists now know that under certain conditions the radar energy gets absorbed by the chemical properties of the soil rather than reflecting back, according to Mary Collins, a retired University of Florida professor and GPR expert.

GPR can’t “see” anything, in other words, under high pH, high salt, or high clay conditions. In a 2012 report for the Department of Justice, PhD John J. Schultz concluded that “dry soil or low soil moisture resulted in reduced demarkation of the grave.”

Since there are so many factors involved, it may make sense to revisit the scene of the crime. Like DNA or any other technology, GPR equipment gets better every year — so in some cold cases, it may make sense to dig again.

Soil Science Society of America

Wired

KristinSmart.com

The Daily Beast

The Blade

Main image: Using GPR. [The Official CTBTO Photostream via Wikimedia Commons]

Rodney Alcala has been described as one of the most prolific serial killers to terrorize California. His first known crime was the brutal rape and beating of eight-year-old Tali Shapiro in 1968. Shapiro was found in Alcala’s apartment after someone who saw him pick up the child in his car had called authorities. Unfortunately, Alcala had vanished, fleeing to New York City, where he lived for four years and attended film school until the law caught up with him on the Shapiro case.

Shapiro’s family had relocated to Mexico by then, and didn’t want Tali to testify in the trial, so Alcala was charged with only assault and was out on parole after 34 months. He then began a five-year murder spree almost immediately, and was able to slay an absolutely unknown number before he was finally stopped in 1979. Thanks to a series of trials, convictions, appeals, and retrials, Alcala has basically spent the years since 1979 behind bars. His third trial, alleging the rape and murder of 31-year-old Charlotte Lamb, 27-year-old Georgia Wixted, 21-year-old Jill Parenteau, 18-year-old Jill Barcomb, and 12-year-old Robin Samsoe, began in 2005. During the decades he was jailed, DNA evidence processing had advanced to the point where law enforcement was able to use what they still had to build an even better case against him. In 2010, Alcala was sentenced to death for the third time.

Rodney Alcala via Wikimedia Commons

Authorities have always been sure of one thing: these weren’t the only women and girls that Alcala had killed. Alcala is believed to possibly have killed as many as 130 people across the country, but authorities are still trying to get the evidence to connect him. In Alcala’s possessions when he was arrested was a large collection of photographs he’d taken of young women and men — some of whom were his victims, while most remained unidentified. It’s always been suspected that in those unidentified models were some additional victims, cold cases waiting to be solved. This week, those photos helped authorities add another name to his list: Christine Ruth Thornton of of San Antonio.

Those photos got into the hands of Thornton’s family in 2013, and Thornton’s sister recognized her sitting on a motorcycle in one photo. When authorities confronted Alcala about the photo, he admitted to being the photographer, but refused to admit to her murder. Dan Erramouspe, an attorney from Wyoming connected to the Thornton case, told reporters that some of the things Alcala had said when they tried to confront him did potentially help tie him to Thornton’s murder. Compounding the tragedy of Thornton’s murder was the fact that she was six months pregnant when she died.

Thornton’s body was found by a local rancher in rural Wyoming in 1978, but remained unidentified until two siblings of Thornton sent DNA samples to be checked against the national missing-person’s database in 2015. It took some time, but they finally connected the DNA from Thornton’s still-unidentified remains to that of her siblings. Thornton’s body has been recovered, and police are attempting to get as many viable DNA samples as they can obtain sent to the FBI to see if any of them connect to Alcala. Still, they have accumulated enough evidence on the Thornton murder to file first-degree murder charges against Alcala.

The question is whether or not he will even be extradited to Wyoming to stand trial. In 2012, Alcala was convicted of two murders in New York State and sentenced to a long jail term. Still, he remains jailed in California’s Corcoran State Prison.

For the curious, here is vintage video of Alcala’s 1978 appearance on “The Dating Game”, which earned him his nickname:

CBS News
LA Weekly
KABC
LA Weekly (2)
KABC (2)
The Mercury News
Los Angeles Times
Wyoming Tribune Eagle

Main photo: Rodney Alcala on the Dating Game [screenshot]

These are the crime stories making headlines today, September 26, 2016 …

Making a Murderer star Steven Avery is set to tie the knot with Lynn Hartman, a legal secretary. Avery has been dating Hartman for approximately eight months, but most of the couple’s courtship has unfolded via letters and phone calls. They have reportedly met only once in person, when Hartman secretly traveled to visit Avery in Waupun Correctional Institute in Wisconsin. Their romance has been kept under wraps due to the fact that Hartman has suffered online abuse and threats, and been accused of seeking money and fame by some of Avery’s supporters. Speaking from his prison cell, Avery, who has been engaged twice and married once before, has reportedly asked the public to respect his relationship. “She’s going to be my future wife, we’ll be laughing forever,” he said. [Daily Mail Online]
The California man who went missing in 2004 and and was discovered in a New York marina on Monday may have been in a wooden crate for over 10 years, his brother said. James Michael Brannon, 60, was fatally shot in the head and packed into a black trash bag before being dropped at the Locust Point Marina, NYPD officials say. But the motive for his death — and how he got across the country in the first place — remain a mystery. “I’m not surprised he died, but the bizarre way he died and how he got to New York, I can’t figure out,” said James’s older brother, Thomas Brannon, 80. The elder Brannon had been trying to track down his missing brother for more than a decade. So far, there have been no arrests in the strange case. [DNA Info]

James Schmitt mugshot [Photo: Mugshots.com]

James Schmitt’s mug shot [Mugshots.com]

A Ventura County Probation Agency officer was arrested Thursday on two felony charges of possessing child pornography. James Richard Schmitt, 52, of Oxnard, has been on paid administrative leave since February when the FBI served a search warrant at his home and seized computers on which child pornography allegedly was found. Schmitt’s arrest resulted from a joint investigation by the FBI and the Ventura County District Attorney’s Office, officials say. Schmitt was arrested by officers who had been following him, and is currently behind bars at the Ventura County jail in lieu of $50,000 bail. If convicted, he could be sentenced to up to three years and eight months in state prison. [Mugshots.com]
Ex-actor Daniel Wozniak has been sentenced to death to following a murder and cover-up. An Orange County Superior Court judge on Friday sentenced the former Costa Mesa community actor, 32, to death for killing Irvine resident Juri “Julie” Kibuishi, 23, and her Army veteran friend Samuel Herr, 26. In 2010, Wozniak was desperate for money to cover his rent and fund his upcoming wedding and honeymoon. So he came up with a plan to kill Herr, who was his neighbor, in order to steal the $62,000 that Herr had saved from his military service in Afghanistan. However, the convicted double murderer was only able to acquire $2,000 before his arrest. [Los Angeles Times]
Graz Airport in Austria [Wikimedia Commons]
A Moroccan woman traveling through Graz airport in Austria has been detailed by customs officials for carrying two containers of entrails into the country that are believed to belong to her late husband. The woman suspected that her husband, who died during an operation in the couple’s home country, had been poisoned, according to Kleine Zeitung newspaper. Customs officials stopped the woman due to the fact that she was behaving “suspiciously,” and she reportedly told them that she wanted to have tests done on her husband’s remains to determine if he had been murdered. But a doctor who came to the scene said that an investigation could not be carried out without the full cadaver. [The Independent]
A suspect has been arrested in the Washington mall shooting that claimed five lives. Police said Arcan Cetin, 20, was arrested in Oak Harbor, which is around 30 miles away from where he allegedly opened fire at Burlington’s Cascade Mall. Following the shooting, police released surveillance videos of the suspect, which paid off when an investigator spotted him walking down the street, and witnesses described his demeanor as “zombie-like.” Early reports said that an ex-girlfriend of Turkish-born Cheten may have worked at Macy’s in the past, but other outlets have reported that the woman in question worked at a different location. Officials have said that the shootings did not appear to be related to terrorism. The investigation continues. [NBC News]

A severed head and other body parts have been found in Chicago’s McKinley Park Lagoon, officials said. Police say that they were called to the lagoon after a worker found what appeared to be human remains in the water. Area Central detectives are conducting a death investigation, and though they have not issued final confirmation, sources say that the parts are believed to be a person’s head in a bag. This discovery led to more human remains being found in the lagoon, Chicago police say. Investigators have revealed that the person was believed to be black, but have not been able to determine if they were a man or a woman. [Chicago Tribune]
Surveillance footage that shows the moment a Georgia woman opened fire at three armed men who broke into her house, killing one, has been released. The surveillance footage, released by the Gwinnett County Police Department, shows the intruders — all of whom are carrying guns — bursting through the front door in the middle of the night and rummaging through the house on September 16. Seconds after entering the home, the woman is seen coming out of her bedroom in pajamas with a handgun, and fires several shots at the armed suspects, according to WSB TV. The residence was packed with boxes full of restaurant supplies, and the woman was reportedly staying there for work-related reasons. [Daily Mail Online]Main photo: Steven Avery and Lynn Hartman [Steven Avery Project/Facebook]

Last August, Cape Coral police arrested Joe Zieler, 54, for shooting his son with a pellet gun. Subsequent DNA discoveries have now positively linked the Florida resident to the unsolved 1990 rape and murder of an 11-year-old Robin Cornell and her babysitter Lisa Story, 32.

“It was like winning the lottery of justice,” Jan Cornell, Lisa’s mother, said at a press to announce the discovery. “Every prayer, every word, everything, came full circle.”

Reports say on May 9, 1990, Cornell spent the night at her boyfriend’s house. She reportedly fell asleep and when she woke up and came back the next morning, Cornell made the horrifying discovery.

As for the motive for the killings, it’s unclear. Cornell said she does not know who Zieler is and she’s never had a connection to him in the past.

Cape Coral Chief Investigator Christy Jo Ellis said, “To tell you the system works is the best thing ever. I’m over the moon. It was so surreal when I got the phone call. I said ‘Are you kidding me?’”

Zieler is now facing additional charges of two counts of first-degree murder, two counts of sexual battery and one count of burglary.

Although Zieler has been charged, authorities say there’s still a lot of work to do and ground to cover on the case. Supervisor of the Major Crimes Unit Barrett Walker said Zieler has not confessed to the crime. They still need to process other evidence and collect information.

Read more:
Cape Cops
News-Press
AJC
USA Today

These are the crime stories making headlines today, October 13, 2016 …

LAPD Detective Nadine Hernandez, lead detective in the criminal investigation into rape claims against New York Knicks guard Derrick Rose (above), has died in what police say is apparently a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Hernandez, 44, was found around 2:45 P.M. at a Los Angeles residence after police responded to reports of a shooting. Investigators recovered a firearm at the scene. Paramedics transported Hernandez to a hospital where she later died. Lawyers for Rose and the woman gave conflicting accounts as to what Hernandez, 44, has told them about the investigation. The civil trial continues. [New York Post]
Golden Corral restaurant [Wikimedia Commons]
A Golden Corral employee was doused with fluid and set on fire while working inside the Jacksonville location. Police say that an acquaintance of the woman came into the restaurant early Wednesday evening, spilled flammable liquid on her, and set her alight. The unidentified woman was airlifted to a hospital in Gainesville, and a police spokesman told reporters that the suspect, whose identity has not yet been released, was taken into custody and is being charged with attempted murder. [WPTV]
A Colorado man has pleaded guilty to second-degree felony murder in the 1970 cold-case rape and slaying of a woman in Utah. Prosecutors say that Thomas Edward Egley, 76, was taken into custody in Colorado in August on a warrant for the slaying of Loretta Jones. Egley, who was living in Rocky Ford at the time of his arrest, faces a penalty of between 10 years and life behind bars. According to The Associated Press, Egley was an original suspect in the 23-year-old woman’s death, but a judge found there wasn’t enough evidence against him. Egley allegedly confessed details of his crime to a neighbor in June, saying he raped and stabbed Jones after she rejected his advances, prosecutors say. [Denver Post]

Jemarr Smith [Jamestown Police and the State Division of Parole]
A New York man was arrested and charged with possessing 95 bags of heroin — in his pants. Police officers and the New York State Division of Parole were conducting visits to the homes of parolees on Tuesday night and found Jemarr Smith, 31, at a residence on McKinley Avenue smoking marijuana. After taking the Rochester man into custody, officers say they noticed him take something out of his pants — and discovered that it was heroin. Smith was charged with false personation, unlawful marijuana possession, criminal controlled substance possession, and tampering with physical evidence. [WIBV]
Three boys were arrested Friday for an alleged sexual assault on a 12-year-old student at a Brooklyn middle school. The alleged attackers, two of whom are 12 and another 14, pulled down the victim’s pants and forcibly touched her in a basement stairwell at Ocean Hill middle school at around 4:30 P.M. on Thursday, according to police. Officials say that the boys were charged with rape, robbery, grand larceny, and unlawful imprisonment, among other charges, according to officials. [DNAInfo]
John Felix [Riverside County Sheriff’s Department]
The Riverside County district attorney has announced the filing of capital murder charges against the man accused of shooting and killing two Palm Springs police officers. John Felix, 26, faces two counts of murder with the special circumstances of multiple murders, murder of a police officer in the line of duty, and lying in wait. The DA’s office alleges that Felix set a trap for the officers and was “deliberate in his actions,” and “attacked the officers for no reason other than they were officers coming to a call.” [Los Angeles Times]
Austin Haughwout, 19, of Clinton, Connecticut, has been charged with enticing a minor, fourth-degree attempted sexual assault, and risk of injury to a minor. The teenager had been previously known for posting online videos of flying drones shooting a gun and a flamethrower in his backyard. He made headlines when he built a drone with a semi-automatic gun attached and posted a video of it on YouTube last year with the title “flying gun.” The video shows a gun affixed to a drone discharging several times while hovering several feet off the ground in a wooded area. [NBC Connecticut/YouTube]

A man was subjected to eight hours of harassment, physical attacks, and injury by another inmate at a detention center in Richwood, Louisiana, before ultimately being stomped to death, according to a complaint filed by his family. Following his arrest for an unpaid traffic ticket, Vernon Ramone White, 28, was taken to the isolation cell of the Richwood Correctional Center in Richwood, Louisiana. On October 13, 2015, he was sharing the cell with Erie Moore, 57, who was about 75 pounds heavier than White. Over the next several hours White’s family says that video surveillance captured the men having several physical altercations and Moore threatening White — then kicking and stomping him — before his lifeless body was dragged from the cell. Paramedics were called, and White was taken to a nearby hospital where he was pronounced dead. [Courthouse News]

Main image: Derrick Rose [Photo: Wikimedia Commons]

The Zodiac Killer, a serial slaughterer who struck repeatedly in northern California during the late 1960s and early 1970s, has never been apprehended. His terror spree remains one of the most notorious and fascinating cold cases in U.S. history — as well as one of the most cinematic.

In mysterious, intricately complex letters to police and the media loaded with pictograms, map coordinates, and encoded clues, the killer, who called himself “Zodiac,” claimed to have committed 37 murders. However, authorities have only been able to definitively pin seven attacks on the same perpetrator.

Two of Zodiac’s victims survived, and another is believed to have escaped physically unharmed. One survivor described the killer as wearing a black executioner’s hood, black wraparound sunglasses, and a black smock bearing a white cross-within-a-circle on the chest — the same symbol Zodiac used to sign his letters. Truly, this seemed the stuff of horror movies.

The movie business certainly picked up on the ticket-selling potential of the case, as well.

Whether Zodiac is dead, behind bars for a different crime, or still at large, his legacy as movie subject has generated cheap exploitation flicks, acclaimed thrillers, and one bona fide detective film classic. Here’s a handy guide.

The Zodiac Killer (1971)

A grimy grindhouse nugget ripped from the headlines decades before Law and Order, The Zodiac Killer sticks close to the facts of the case that was still terrifying the public.

Paul Avery, the actual San Francisco Chronicle reporter to whom Zodiac sent his bizarre missives, opens the movie by stating: “[The film’s] goal is not to win commercial awards, but to create an awareness of a present danger… if some of the scenes, dialogue, and letters seem strange and unreal, remember — they happened.”

Don’t let that apparent stamp of authenticity carry too much weight, though. The Zodiac Killer eventually offers up its own theories as to the murderer’s motives (his father is a psycho caged in a mental hospital) and even his identity (he may be a bunny-loving postal worker who wonders, “Why are evil people allowed to live, but innocent rabbits must die?”).

Dirty Harry (1973)

Set in San Francisco, one of the Zodiac’s hunting grounds, Dirty Harry introduces Clint Eastwood’s iconic rogue cop anti-hero by pitting him against “Scorpio” (Andy Robinson), a mysterious sniper, kidnapper, and psycho terrorist whose crimes were modeled directly after the real-life Zodiac murders.

Director Don Siegel crafts a masterpiece of tone, taut pacing, and suspense, centered on the mesmerizing minimalism of Eastwood versus Robinson’s over-the-top hysteric of a homicidal maniac. Plus, Dirty Harry ends the way many wish the real Zodiac case could have.

The Exorcist III (1990)

A bomb when first released, The Exorcist III, directed by original Exorcist author William Peter Blatty and based on his novel 1983 Legion, has since become a cult favorite.

The film chronicles George C. Scott as Lieutenant William F. Kinderman, a D.C. detective who notices that a series of satanic murders uncannily resemble the work of the Gemini Killer, a serial slayer confirmed to be dead.

Blatty based Gemini on Zodiac, inspired in part by the real-life killer proclaiming in one of his letters that The Exorcist was the “best saterical [sic] comedy I have ever seen.”

What a creep!

Uli Lommel’s Zodiac Killer (2005)

Infamous schlock filmmaker Uli Lommel began pumping out a succession of true-crime-inspired, direct-to-video quickies with the (amusingly) pretentiously titled Ulli Lommel’s Zodiac Killer.

Shot on a nauseating handheld camera, ULZK tells the sordid saga of a nursing-home worker who worships the original Zodiac and initiates a new series of killings in the same tradition. You’ll want to shoot your TV screen.

Curse of the Zodiac (2007)

To cash in on the major Hollywood release Zodiac, writer-director Uli Lommel returns to the source material of his previous Zodiac Killer effort. Remarkably, this one is worse.

As such, it’s very much of a piece (of junk) with its predecessor, along with Lommel’s uniformly inept endurance tests B.T.K. Killer (2005), Green River Killer (2005), Black Dahlia (2006), Son of Sam (2008), D.C. Sniper (2009), and Manson Family Cult (2012).

Zodiac (2007)

Zodiac is Hollywood’s big-budget, high-prestige take on the Zodiac Killer case, directed by David Fincher (Fight Club, The Social Network), starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Mark Ruffalo, and Robert Downey, Jr.

The movie effectively recounts the saga from the point of view of the police and the San Francisco Chronicle staffers who set out to decode Zodiac’s messages.

In addition, Zodiac even implies that one real-life prime suspect, Arthur Leigh Allen (John Carroll Lynch), was not only somehow involved in the crimes, but that he died in 1992 just as investigators took a new interest in him.

Critics almost universally praised Zodiac, with the film landing on numerous best-of-the-year lists. No one knows if the actual Zodiac Killer ever got to see it.

Main photos: Zodiac Killer (1971) movie ads

These are the crime stories making headlines today, October 21, 2016 …

Jury selection has begun in the retrial of Pedro Hernandez, the man accused of murdering six-year-old Etan Patz (above), who disappeared from Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood in 1979. Hernandez, 55, was tried in Patz’s death last year, but it ended in a mistrial after the jury became deadlocked. Charges were filed against Hernandez in 2012, when he allegedly confessed that he lured Patz to the bodega where he worked before killing him in the store’s basement and disposing of his remains in a dumpster. The case continues in Manhattan Supreme Court. [People]
A Long Beach, California, police officer shot and wounded a man who had cut his own throat Thursday evening, police say. Officers were dispatched at about 9:30 P.M. following a report of an intoxicated man attempting to enter the front door of a residence in Naples, according to the Long Beach Police Department. An officer arrived at the location and confronted the man, “who was cutting his own throat with a knife,” a police statement said. The officer tried to negotiate with the man, but he advanced and the officer fired. The suspect was taken to the hospital, where he is reportedly in critical but stable condition. [ABC 7]
An Indiana judge has admitted his decision to deny a warrant request had “the most tragic result possible” after a man accused of stalking his wife allegedly stabbed her to death. Police found Anthony Russell, 51, dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound on October 7 and then found his estranged wife Laura Russell, 44, dead of multiple stab wounds in her home. A few days earlier, prosecutors requested a warrant be issued for Anthony Russell’s arrest on felony charges that he stalked the woman and violated a no-contact order. But Jefferson County Superior Court judge Michael Hensley denied the request, and instead ordered the defendant to appear in court after a three-day weekend. [CBS News]

McDonald's fast food [Photo: Wikimedia Commons]

McDonald’s fast food [Wikimedia Commons]

A McDonald’s manager who pulled down a woman’s sweatpants and exposed her bottom in front of customers “for a joke” has been sentenced to 28 days behind bars. Stuart Hubbard, 26, who manages a branch of the fast food chain in Nottingham, England, admitted that he pulled down the woman’s pants in front of five members of the staff and 12 customers in the early morning hours of February 18. The unnamed victim said she was “totally humiliated” following the incident. Hubbard pleaded guilty to common assault. [DailyMail.com]
A man in Dunedin, New Zealand, has been found guilty of beating his work supervisor to death with a hammer. A jury found that James William Merritt killed Karin Ann Ross, 51, in the early morning hours of December 2, 2015 at Spotless Cleaning Services. Ross and Merritt had had several disputes that led up to the hammer attack over the fact that Merritt had been parking his car in a disabled space, and the fact that Ross had criticized his window cleaning. [New Zealand Herald]
Laura A. Fraley [Washington County Jail]
A Hartford, New York, woman faces numerous charges after she allegedly bludgeoned her husband 7 to 10 times with a wooden plaque with a picture of Jesus Christ on it, then threatened police with a tree branch. State troopers responded to the home of Laura A. Fraley, 51, on Saturday afternoon after her husband fled the scene and called 911, police say. When police arrived, they found Fraley waving an eight-foot tree branch. She refused to drop it and was shot by a Taser — but still continued to fight until police took her into custody. The argument allegedly began because Fraley wanted her husband to convert to the Mormon church. [The Post-Star]
A University of Missouri fraternity that has already been suspended for possible racial problems is under investigation for allegedly giving pledges date-rape drugs for use on female students. A Mizzou spokeswoman confirms that the Delta Upsilon fraternity is being investigated for allegedly serving alcohol to underage students, hazing pledges, and potentially using date-rape drugs, according to documents obtained by Fox 2. In a letter to the fraternity from the Office for Civil Rights and Title IX Assistant Vice Chancellor Ellen Eardley wrote, “Active members of delta upsilon fraternity allegedly provided each new member with three pills and instructed them to drug women for the purpose of incapacitating them prior to engaging in sexual activity.” [Fox 2 Now]

The FBI’s Operation Cross Country has concluded with the recovery of 82 sexually exploited juveniles and the arrests of 239 pimps. Operation Cross Country is an annual event that focuses on recovering underage victims of prostitution and highlighting the issue of sex trafficking at home and abroad. The operation has expanded to become an international event, with Canada, Cambodia, the Philippines, and Thailand joining the FBI and its local, state, and federal law enforcement partners — along with the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) — during the coordinated three-day operation that ended October 16. [FBI]

Main photo: Etan Patz photographed in 1978 [Wikimedia Commons]

In real life, authorities never captured Jack the Ripper — the infamous, even legendary, serial slasher known to have murdered prostitutes and terrorized the hardscrabble Whitechapel section of London in the late 19th century.

The movies, though, have never given up the chase.

The gruesome crimes, eerie setting, and unsolved mystery of Jack the Ripper has inspired literally dozens upon dozens of cinematic adaptations of the saga that range from documentaries and heavy dramas to gory horror and sensational exploitation.

With such a bloody bounty to choose from, here are 10 largely different but each uniquely worthwhile Jack the Ripper movies that showcase the vast hold this case continues to exert on the public’s consciousness.

Any one or various combinations of the following flicks would also make for some screamingly fine Halloween night viewing.

The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog (1927)

Director Alfred Hitchcock considered this silent stunner his first true work of suspense — and that it is.

Ivor Novello stars as the title character, a secretive figure whose landlady (Marie Ault) suspects he may be the Jack the Ripper–esque murderer soaking the streets red with blood each night. She has good reason.

The Lodger was remade using sound in 1932 with Novello reprising his lead role; in 1944 with Merle Oberon as the landlady; in 1953 as The Man in the Attic with Jack Palance as the ominous stranger; and again in 2009, updated to take place in contemporary Los Angeles.

Pandora’s Box (1929)

Pandora’s Box is German director G.W. Pabst’s silent masterpiece of shocking power about the rise and fall of Lulu, a fearless, bisexual hedonist whose disregard for consequences ultimately leads her to work as a prostitute and to an unfortunate date with Jack the Ripper.

Louise Brooks became a cinematic icon as Lulu and while numerous other versions of the story have been filmed since, they don’t all feature Jack the Ripper — and only this one has a leading lady of this supernova caliber.

Jack the Ripper (1959)

Our traditional conception of Jack the Ripper stalking the cobblestones of Whitechapel with a walking stick, black top hat, and long, black cape come from this British-made thriller that effectively imitates the then-recent horror hits from England’s Hammer Films studio.

This version of Jack the Ripper posits that the killer is a doctor of royal nobility who murders prostitutes to avenge the death of his son after junior commits suicide upon discovering his sweetheart is a streetwalker.

A Study in Terror (1965)

John Neville and Donald Houston costar in A Study in Terror, respectively, as Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson as they pursue Jack the Ripper. The case takes them from the gutters of East London’s slum districts to the heights of the British aristocracy and, as always, Sherlock Holmes gets his man.

Hands of the Ripper (1971)

With Hands of the Ripper, Hammer Films puts a gory, sexy spin on the slasher legend, and it’s weird — but it works.

Anghard Ree stars as Anna, the daughter of Jack the Ripper who, as a very young child, witnessed her father hack up her mother. Now an adult, Anna seems to occasionally get possessed by the homicidal spirit of Old Jack, just as mangled prostitutes start cropping up on London street corners.

Murder by Decree (1979)

Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, these time portrayed by Hollywood giants Christopher Plummer and James Mason, once again pursue Jack the Ripper in Murder by Decree.

It’s a thoroughly engaging, lightly comic mystery made by Bob Clark who — even more mysteriously — would later go on to direct both Porky’s (1982) and A Christmas Story (1983).

Time After Time (1979)

Time After Time is a beguiling cult favorite in which real-life science fiction author H.G. Wells (Malcolm McDowell) uses the device of his famous novel The Time Machine to beam himself from 1893 London to 1979 San Francisco. Unfortunately, Jack the Ripper (David Warner) also comes along for the ride. Virtually every moment of Time After Time is a charmer.

Jack the Ripper (1988)

In 1988, the sprawling, two-part, four-hour TV movie Jack the Ripper — which aired on the 100th anniversary of the some of the key killings — purported to “reveal,” at long the last, the actual identity of the murderer.

Michael Caine is typically top-notch as Scotland Yard’s lead inspector and Armand Assante is quite fun as an actor starring in a stage production of Jekyll and Hyde who gets caught up in the pursuit.

Ultimately, the movie claims that the Ripper was Sir William Gull (Ray McAnally), physician-in-residence to Queen Victoria. In real life, the jury is still out.

Edge of Sanity (1989)

Anthony Perkins, of course, will always be one of horror cinema’s most important figures for portraying matricidal motel keeper Norman Bates in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960).

Toward the end of his career, though, Perkins knocked out one last fright film of genuinely freaky impact: Edge of Sanity.

Perkins stars here as Dr. Henry Jekyll, the infamous scientist who, when he consumes his own dangerous elixir, transforms into the diabolical Mr. Hyde. This time, though, Mr. Hyde is also Jack the Ripper — and not only does he slash up the streets, he is also seriously obsessed with women’s posteriors.

From Hell (2001)

Adapted from the award-winning graphic novel by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, Johnny Depp stars in From Hell as an opium-addicted Whitechapel police inspector who is subject to psychic visions. Both conditions figure prominently into his hunting down of Jack the Ripper.

As in other versions of the Ripper story, From Hell proposes that royal physician Sir William Gull (Ian Holm) is behind the crimes, but his involvement here is just one small part of a massive conspiracy involving the worldwide society of Freemasons.

As such, From Hell is one take on Jack the Ripper that turns out to be a legitimate mind-ripper.

Main photo: From Hell (2001), poster artwork

On the evening of October 30, 1975, 15-year-old Martha Moxley was on her way home from a Halloween party at the home of her classmates Tommy and Michael Skakel in the exclusive Belle Haven neighborhood in Greenwich, Connecticut.

She was found viciously bludgeoned to death on a nearby lawn, and the mystery of who killed Martha Moxley would haunt the city for decades. Michael Skakel, also 15 at the time, was convicted in 2002 of murdering Moxley and sentenced to 20 years to life. In 2013, he was granted a new trial by a Connecticut judge and released on $1.2 million bail; the decision is now being appealed by the prosecution.

The Skakels had serious money and connections: Rushton Skakel is a nephew of Ethel Skakel Kennedy, the widow of Senator Robert F. Kennedy.

Martha’s final hours

According to friends, Moxley began flirting with and eventually kissed Thomas Skakel, Michael’s brother. Moxley was last seen going behind a fence with Thomas Skakel near the pool in the Skakel backyard at around 9:30 P.M.

The next day, Moxley’s body was found underneath a tree in her family’s backyard. Her trousers and underwear were pulled down, but she had not been sexually assaulted. Pieces of a broken six-iron golf club were found near the body. An autopsy indicated she had been both bludgeoned and stabbed with the club, which was traced back to the Skakel home.

The suspects

Due to his weak alibi, Thomas Skakel became the prime suspect, but his father forbade access to his school and mental health records. Kenneth Littleton, who had started working as a live-in tutor for the Skakel family only hours before the murder, also became a prime suspect. However, no one was charged, and the case languished for decades. In the meantime, several books were published about the murder, including Timothy Dumas’s A Wealth of Evil; A Season In Purgatory by Dominick Dunne; and Murder in Greenwich by Mark Fuhrman.

Over the years, both Thomas and Michael Skakel changed their stories. Michael had originally claimed that he was watching a Monty Python movie with a cousin, but later told detectives that he had climbed a tree outside Martha’s bedroom window and masturbated.

At the time of Michael’s sentencing in 2002, many people, including Mark Fuhrman, said that they believed that other members of the Skakel family had assisted in covering up for Michael and should faces charges.

The Sutton report

The Skakel family hired a private investigation firm, The Sutton Agency, to conduct its own investigation. The Sutton report, which Rushton Skakel had ordered destroyed, was later leaked to the media — and reportedly concluded that Tommy was the most likely killer.

Two patients at a treatment center testified that they heard Michael Skakel confess to killing Moxley with a golf club. Gregory Coleman testified that Skakel was given special privileges, saying Skakel bragged, “I’m going to get away with murder. I’m a Kennedy.”

Michael Skakel’s Trial

During Michael’s 2002 trial, the jury heard part of a taped book proposal, which included Michael Skakel speaking about masturbating in a tree on the night of the murder — possibly the same tree under which Moxley’s body was found the next morning.

On June 7, 2002, Michael Skakel was found guilty of murdering Martha Moxley, and was sentenced to 20 years to life in prison.

Michael Skakel’s Trial: Part II and Aftermath

On October 23, 2013, Skakel was granted a new trial by a Connecticut judge, Judge Thomas A. Bishop, who ruled that his attorney failed to adequately represent him when he was convicted in 2002.

Skakel was released in 2013, and must be monitored with a GPS device, cannot have contact with Moxley’s family, must periodically check in over the phone if required, and is not allowed to leave the state of Connecticut unless granted permission.

Alternate suspects?

In July 2016, Robert Kennedy released a book entitled Framed: Why Michael Skakel Spent Over a Decade in Prison for a Murder He Didn’t Commit. In the book, Kennedy made the case that two young black men, friends of the cousin of Kobe Bryant, who had been visiting New York City killed Moxley. Prosecutors say that Kennedy’s claims were thoroughly vetted and found to be “baseless” before Skakel’s first trial.

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Main photo: Martha Moxley [Wikimedia Commons]

Someone in upstate New York holds the key to a 1982 Halloween murder mystery about which theories continue to run rampant. Now, more than 30 years later, the victim’s brother is sharing more details about the incident, hoping that someone who knows anything that might help close the case will come forward.

On October 30, 1982, 18-year-old James Adamski went to an all-you-can-drink Halloween party at a bar in the village of Depew (the drinking age in New York state was 18 at the time). He was last seen alive after leaving the bar to walk home at 3:30 A.M. The Adamskis lived approximately two miles from the bar.

After James never made it home, an intensive search led nowhere until rabbit hunters finally turned up James’s dead, severely beaten body in the woods just before Christmas. He was still wearing his flashy “American Gigolo” Halloween costume.

Local police detective Lieutenant James N. Robinson said, “[He] was beaten to death with some kind of blunt instrument. It could have been a two-by-four, a baseball bat. Maybe a car jack from somebody’s trunk. We don’t know. He had numerous wounds from blows to his forehead.”

Andy Adamski, James’s brother, was just eight years old at the time. His last memory of his brother is seeing him in his Halloween costume, giving him a kiss and telling him, “Have a good time trick-or-treating, kid.”

Now 41, Andy spoke to the Buffalo News about the case, saying: “We don’t know if someone picked him up as a hitchhiker, if someone who knew him invited them into their car, or if someone somehow forced him into a car. It was a gruesome crime, and after all these years, we would really like to find out who did it.”

State Police Bureau of Criminal Investigation’s Joseph Gill also told the Buffalo News, “From everything we can determine, he had no known enemies. That’s part of the mystery of this case. This was a good kid, not a troublemaker or trouble starter in any way.”

Although Gill said James got along with everyone, he admits that night James may have gotten into an argument with others at the party and the argument may have been sparked by alcohol.

Police confirm in recent weeks they’ve sent the victim’s clothing to a laboratory for DNA analysis.

Andy says although both of their parents died years ago, Andy said, “My mother was never the same person for the rest of her life. She over-protected me after that. She always told me she was worried that they would kill me, too.”

Investigator Joseph Gill added, “I wish the parents were still alive, just so we could tell them that we’re still working on this.”

Many people attended the party that night. If you remember this case or you hold the key to solving it, or know someone who does, please contact: (716) 683-2800 and ask for extension 137.

Main photo: James Adamski [Lancaster Police Department]

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