Centenaries - whole and half

[Mayerling]

Interesting article in the Sunday New York Times Magazine two weeks ago about Oswald and his Russian wife in the year before the assassination in Texas. It was written by a Russian-American who knew them. Oswald looks like he was a real nightmare to live with from the perspective of his wife (he may have assaulted her on occasion).

Jeff

[sdreid]

50 years ago - 1963 November 23 - Joann Graff, 23, is sexually attacked and murdered in her residence. She is the penultimate victim in the still officially unsolved Boston Strangler serial killer case.

50 years ago - 1963 November 23 - The Moors Murderers, Ian Brady and Myra Hindley abduct 12-year-old John Kilbride. Brady sexually assaulted the youth then, after cutting his throat and strangling him with a cord, the killers buried his body on Saddleworth Moor in Northern England. Since this was their second slaying, it was the murder that would have made the serial killers eligible for the death penalty had they been captured within the year. After a total of 5 murders, Hindley and Brady were sent to prison for life. She died there in 2002 and he is still incarcerated in a secure mental facility at age 75.

[sdreid]

50 years ago - 1963 November 24 - Jack Ruby, a Dallas nightclub owner, guns down Lee Harvey Oswald, the presumed killer of President John Kennedy and officer J D Tippit, in the basement of police headquarters. Ruby went to prison for the murder and died there in January of 1967.

[sdreid]

50 years ago - 1963 November 28 - Aspiring actress Karyn Kupcinet, daughter of Chicago media personality Irv Kupcinet, dies in her West Hollywood apartment. The coroner later ruled that, since her hyoid bone was fractured, she had been strangled and left nude on her couch. Several of her male acquaintances, including a fellow resident in the building, were investigated but police could not tie any of them to the murder. The case is still unsolved. There was a later rumor that she was killed because she had some knowledge about the Kennedy Assassination but this was never substantiated.

[Paddy]

Boston Strangler

Stan, Wasn't it stated recently that DNA had proved that De Silva? was the Boston Strangler? I am sure I heard or read it recently....

Pat

[Mayerling]

Belated 164th Anniversary

Nov. 23, 1849 - Dr. George Parkman of Boston is last seen walking hurredly to the Harvard Medical School Building. He is going to confront a debtor, Dr. John White Webster, Harvard's Chemistry Professor, who has an office in that building. Parkman does not return home, and his family contact the Boston Police. They visit Webster, who tells them he paid off his debt, and Parkman left the building. Webster, a notorious skinflint, suddenly turns generous and presents a large turkey for Thanksgiving to the Medical School's janitor Ephraim Littlefield. This surprises Littlefield and his wife as both know how tight-fisted Webster is, and how frequently he complains about Littlefield's work in his rooms at the college. Both notice the continunous sound of running water in Webster's office and that he is locking his door even when he is inside. When Webster leaves for his home that weekend, Littlefield has his wife stand guard, and he proceeds to break down the bricks of the wall between his quarters and Webster's office. When he does he finds skeletal remains of a human being. Littlefield gets the police who go and arrest Webster (who tries to commit suicide but fails). The trial is a national sensation (possibly the first really big homicide story in the United States). The remains of the skull's jaw are proven to be those of Dr. Parkman (by no less than Dr. William Morton, the dentist who helped invent anesthesia). Webster's trial is still somewhat criticized by some students of the case, but he is found guilty. He makes a partial confession that he killed Parkman in a fit of anger when they argued about the debt, but never planned to kill him. In 1850 Webster is hanged for Parkman's murder.

[sdreid]

Stan, Wasn't it stated recently that DNA had proved that De Silva? was the Boston Strangler? I am sure I heard or read it recently....

Pat

There was a recent DNA finding that connected DeSalvo with the last Strangler murder but an earlier test had excluded him so take your pick. I guess we need an unbiased tiebreaker.

[sdreid]

100 years ago - 1913 December 10 - A 40-year-old spinster named Christina Bradfield is beaten to death by George Ball. Miss Bradfield was Ball's supervisor at the tarpaulin factory where they worked. After the murder, Ball sewed the victim's body into a bag made of the company's product and tossed the remains in a Liverpool canal. He thought that the body would float out to sea but the sack became hung up on a lock in the waterway. Ball was convicted of the murder and hanged in early 1914. The motive for the killing was somewhat vague but a simple minded accessory after-the-fact hinted that Ball murdered Christina during a rape.

[sdreid]

100 years ago - 1913 December 12 - In Blackpool, England, George Joseph Smith drowns his wife of five weeks, the former Alice Burnham, in their bathtub. The local corner found that the death was accidental. Smith got 640 pounds (140 from inheritance and 500 from life insurance) as a result of the murder, an amount that would roughly equal $60,000 now. He'd murdered another wife in a similar fashion in 1912 and will likewise kill another in 1914 but then authorities finally caught on that they had a serial kill at work. Smith, aka "The Brides in the Bath Killer", will pay for his crimes on the gallows in 1915. Some of his more fortunate "wives" were only bilked of their funds and not slain. Through a four year period, from graft, inheritance, and life insurance, Smith profited to an amount that would equal about half a million dollars today.

[sdreid]

50 years ago - Dennis Whitty and Russell Pascoe are executed for the murder of William Rowe, a Cornish farmer. Mr. Rowe had been beaten and stabbed during a robbery. Queen Elizabeth refused to halt the hanging with clemency.

[sdreid]

50 years ago - 1963 December 17 - Dennis Whitty and Russell Pascoe are executed for the murder of William Rowe, a Cornish farmer. Mr. Rowe had been beaten and stabbed during a robbery. Queen Elizabeth refused to halt the hanging with clemency.

[Mayerling]

I noted that on another thread you mentioned that Sunday, Dec. 29, 2013 is the anniversary of the murder of Johnny Gill in 1891. Guy Logan mentions this murder in a chapter on the murders of children (especially those that were unsolved such as Johnny's) in his "Guilty, or Not Guilty?" (Duffield & Co., 1929), chapter VII (centered on the murder of Willie Starchfield in 1914). Logan suggests that Johnny (killed in Bradford) may have been the victim of chld killer Walter Lewis Turner (executed in 1891 for another murder).

[sdreid]

50 years ago - 1964 January 4 - Mary Sullivan, 19, is the final and youngest victim in the still officially unsolved Boston Strangler serial killer crimes. After about 40 years, she was exhumed along with Strangler suspect Albert DeSalvo. An initial DNA test indicated that DeSalvo was not the killer but a second came to an opposite conclusion.

[sdreid]

150 years ago - 1864 January 8 - David Dodd, 17, is hanged by Union troops in Arkansas. He had been judged a Confederate spy.

[sdreid]

100 years ago - 1914 January 9 - Five-year-old Willie Starchfield is found strangled in a compartment aboard a London train. A signalman said that he'd actually seen a man standing over a boy as the train passed him. The little boy's mother and father were separated and he had vanished while running an errand for his babysitter. A, later less certain, witness claimed to have seen Willie with a man who they identified as his father John. Another individual claimed to have seen Willie being reluctantly led away by an unidentified woman. John Starchfield was charged with the murder but the charges were later dismissed for lack of evidence. To this day, it is a mystery as to how Willie got on the train and who killed him.