Folk memory and contact with famous crimes

[miss marple]

Hi All
I want to start a thread for anyone who has had contact, gossip or connection with notorious crimes or criminals. I think a record of this would be interesting. Also any memories from childhood of crimes and how these be were perceived by the adults around.
For example when I was growing up in London in the fifties, I was aware of Jack the Ripper before I was 10, he had taken on a mythical status.
My jewish grandfather[ with his east end background] was very upset by the conviction of Steinie Morrison for the murder of Leon Beron 1911 and always said he had been 'set up'
His brother was a friend of Tony Mancini,the Brighton trunk murderer. Mancini who was acquitted for the murder of Violette Kaye, due to one of Spilsbury's rare mistakes ,later confessed to the News of the World had he was guilty. But he had told my great uncle and other friends, it was common knowledge.
How much of this common knowledge and hearsay is around?
Miss Marple

[Mike Covell]

I don't know where to start...

My next door neighbour some years ago seemed like a decent kid, he was employed in the construction of the Deep in Hull. I awoke one morning to find my mother (when I was living at home) had allowed the Police into our house, so they could get over our wall.
He was arrested and is in prison for the murder of a local man. He stabbed him for just £5!

On the other side of the property, some 7 or 8 houses away lived a tall, spectacle wearing chap who was always on a bike, he went to the local curry house about five minutes away and stabbed a young man in an argument. He too is in prison, but before the crime was a nice bloke!

When my wife and I got our own place, the first friday night I came home from work I had some tea and went to the bathroom. The room was filled with blue flashing lights and as I went to the bedroom and looked out I saw a middle aged man at the foot of the garden.
Between me getting in, and going to toilet he had been murdered. He was stabbed after getting in between a man and woman fighting!

My best friends mother worked at a community centre in West Hull and one evening she was closing up when a bearded chap entered. He asked for hot food and feeling sorry for him, she re-lit the stoves and made soup, a mug of tea, ad got some bread. He sat and finished the food, chatted to her and complimented her on her hard work, good food and pleasant company. He payed over the price and bid her farewell. Weeks later she saw him on TV and recognised "The Yorkshire Ripper" as the young man!

Finally, a close friend has family links to the Krays. She informed me about this and I did the genealogy research and it all came out. She is a good friend and keeps it pretty quite!

[kensei]

Growing up, my high school class had a number of kids who moved away before the year I graduated. Of these, one (a kid I was friends with at one time) is now in prison for killing his estranged wife's new boyfriend with a rifle, and another has been listed as a missing person for years now and is presumed murdered because of the type of crowd he hung out with. A guy who was in the class below me was shot in his house by burglars (I think with his own gun), but he survived.

As for famous cases, the kidnapping and murder of a college girl near where I live in 2003 was the biggest crime story my local area had seen in years. It was featured on national t.v. and magazines, the case of Dru Sjodin, who was missing for about five months as her body lay beneath snow. Alfonso Rodriguez Jr., a sex offender who'd been out of prison for 6 months after serving a 23 year sentence for rape, is now on death row in a federal prison in Indiana (the same place where Timothy McVeigh was executed), because he transported her over a state line after kidnapping her and made it a federal offense. My connection- I was one of many, many people who went out searching for Dru, and as it turned out a friend of mine and I passed by 70 yards from the spot where she was later found.

[Steve S]

My grandparents remembered the Tottenham Anarchist outrage....And,in an example of inaccurate oral memory,were convinced that Ethel LeNeve had lived 3 streets down....In fact,her sister had lived there
Steve

[KatBradshaw]

When I lived in Manchester and in Leeds I happened to live very close to where Yorkshire Ripper Victims were found.
Also when I lived in Manchester I was trying to convince a former boyfriend to come to a club he wasn't sure about. It was the first night I met him. I said 'trust me I'm a doctor', silly phrase one uses. He looked a bit disturbed and said 'I don't trust doctors anymore'. Turned out his Grandma and probably his Granddad were murdered by Harold Shipman.

[claire]

When I lived in Manchester and in Leeds I happened to live very close to where Yorkshire Ripper Victims were found.
Also when I lived in Manchester I was trying to convince a former boyfriend to come to a club he wasn't sure about. It was the first night I met him. I said 'trust me I'm a doctor', silly phrase one uses. He looked a bit disturbed and said 'I don't trust doctors anymore'. Turned out his Grandma and probably his Granddad were murdered by Harold Shipman.

I noted the 'former' in that boyfriend statement

Don't think I've managed much...used to live close by to Dennis Nielsen's house of horrors...the drains in that area were bad enough as it was And, for the legions of unnamed dead in Iraq, I spent a few months in Iraq in 2004. Famous crimes, for sure, although the jury's still out on what the crimes actually were and who were the perpetrators.

[KatBradshaw]

Has anyone else noticed how much the lead singer of Franz Ferdinand (Alex Kapranos I think) looks like Denis Nilsen!

[miss marple]

An actor I knew years ago,was interviewed by Nilson at the job centre where Nilson worked.
I know cranley gardens lived in Muswell hill, before Nilson moved there
I 'm quite freaked out by the fact Nilson read The Guardian!
Miss Marple

[anna]

Hi all,
I also remember tales of the Krays,from my huge East End family when I was young.....and,

I got a lift from Peter Sutcliffe from the back of Batley Variety Club into the centre of Leeds late one Friday night.We had a long chat...also,

A girl who lived opposite me accross the common was killed by the guy now charged with murdering Rachel Nickel.I was off to my boyfriends birthday celebrations in Surrey,and while rushing because I was late,nearly bumped into him arriving to sit in wait and murder her and her daughter...and,

Steve Wright had a pub in our High Street.Never went in on way to station,but looked in,as he never had any curtains at the windows.

[vbede]

My former best friend is awaiting trial for murdering his wife. She went missing in 1995 and still no body has been found. He used to talk to me about how she just up and left one day and etc. I had no idea she was a "missing person" until he was arrested 6 years ago after a traffic stop. Turned out he was not who he said he was...I knew him as his alias only. Once I found out his real name it was quite easy to find out more about his missing wife.

I used to carpool with the guy to work. I lived right across the street from him and almost every day I was either at his place with him and his family or they were over at mine.

I still cannot fathom that he is guilty. I know he said some untruths to police when the investigation began 13 years ago, but I just cannot imagine him doing this. He always seemed to me to be a very good father (he had sole custody of a daughter born to him and his missing wife). He is also accused of "taking liberties with children." This is even more unbelievable than murder.

I'm very interested in seeing what the evidence is for all the charges against him. The trial was supposed to begin in September but has now been postponed until February.

I moved shortly after he was arrested the first time and due to his use of an alias and his missing wife I have never contacted him or anyone associated with him since. He was sent to prison for a time on a parole violation which was discovered after his arrest. I suspect, and so did he (wrote me a letter) that they were trying to put pressure on him/buy time while they tried to pin him with murder. It didn't work and he went free after about one year in prison. He was out for roughly 4 years after that until now.

Ahhh, well, this is a rather rambling account but it is a very convoluted case.

[stevenb]

A friend of my mother was adamant that her auntie had been an attempted pick up by Neville Heath - on a bus AFAIR....

[ChrisGeorge]

Hi All
I want to start a thread for anyone who has had contact, gossip or connection with notorious crimes or criminals. I think a record of this would be interesting. Also any memories from childhood of crimes and how these be were perceived by the adults around.
For example when I was growing up in London in the fifties, I was aware of Jack the Ripper before I was 10, he had taken on a mythical status.
My jewish grandfather[ with his east end background] was very upset by the conviction of Steinie Morrison for the murder of Leon Beron 1911 and always said he had been 'set up'
His brother was a friend of Tony Mancini,the Brighton trunk murderer. Mancini who was acquitted for the murder of Violette Kaye, due to one of Spilsbury's rare mistakes ,later confessed to the News of the World had he was guilty. But he had told my great uncle and other friends, it was common knowledge.
How much of this common knowledge and hearsay is around?
Miss Marple

Whether the nickname arose with him or not, in one of his writings about Liverpool, veteran Ripperologist and true crime historian Richard Whittington Egan called executed Liverpool alleged gunman George Kelly the "Little Caesar of Lime Street." Whittington Egan said he had met Kelly. The name for Kelly, Little Caesar of Lime Street," seems to have been bandied about widely.

Kelly and another man, Charles Connolly, were found guilty in 1950 of the gunshot slayings of a cinema manager and his assistant in the Cameo Cinema, Wavertree, Liverpool in March 1949. Kelly was executed by hanging whild Connolly pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of robbery and criminal conspiracy and was sentenced to 10 years.

Some people feel that Kelly and Connolly, known to be small time crooks but perhaps not gunmen, were "fitted up" for the crimes by Detective Inspector Herbert Balmer who was intent on ridding Liverpool of any American-style gangland violence. In 2003, the convictions of Kelly and Connolly were quashed by Britain's high court as being "unsafe." See this story in The Independent from 2003. George Skelly, who wrote a book called The Cameo Conspiracy, and who spoke at the 2003 UK Jack the Ripper conference at the Britannia Adelpi in Liverpool is now at work on another book concerning Burns and Devlin, two other small-time crooks executed for the murder of a Wavertree, Liverpool woman a couple of years later but that Skelly feels was another case of "fitting up" innocent men on the part of Balmer. See this Liverpool Echo article for more on that case.

All the best

Chris

[Errata]

Well, as I previously stated, my Grandmother was thoroughly and constantly horrified by the Cleveland Torso Killer.

The real one though is that my aunt, a tall slim brunette, was a member (or maybe a pledge. I'm not real clear on this) of Chi Omega at Florida State University in 1978. She was not there on January 15 when Ted Bundy killed two women because she left that morning to come be with my mother, who had me the day before. My relationship with this woman is exceptionally complicated and now openly hostile, and I think this is why. I think that she felt there should be some connection with me, she was always trying to turn me into a little copy of her, and when it utterly failed she would get nasty and abusive. And I was the only person she was ever like that with. Anyway no one is really clear on what her role with the sorority was, she never talked about it. She transferred to the University of Florida. And now, when enough time has passed that she might want to talk about it, no one is willing to speak two words to her because of what happened with me.

It's very odd to think that I might be a victim of Ted Bundy.

[Magpie]

I have two I can recall offhand.

My dad was a bouncer in a nightclub in London owned by a minor associate of the Krays. The Krays would visit occasionally, but my dad didn't have any real interesting stories about them. He also went to school with a guy who ended up as a copper and was a real jerk about it, lording it over his former friends and neighbours--he was fired in the corruption scandal tangentially depicted in "The Bank Job".

When I was a kid there was a notorious crime in Canada known as the ".22 murders" where two nurses were raped and shot in there homes. In one case the young son of the victim was sent to stay with our neighbour, and I used to play with him. He used to have horrific nightmares about someone he called "The Blueman" and he used to hide when the police came to the house to check up on him--a couple of decades later a solid suspect emerged. He was a policeman. No one made the connection all those years ago, although there were rumours

[kensei]

My high school class included one eventual murderer and one eventual murder victim, both of whom moved away before graduation.

The killer was a friend of mine when I was a kid but he was always thought of as a little weird, though not at all in an ominous way. As an adult he ended up in a situation where he was getting divorced but his wife started dating another man before the divorce was final. He showed up at her house with a rifle ("just to talk," he said, but why bring a rifle?) and shot and killed the guy. When police arrived, he was sitting on the couch shaking his head going, "Is he dead? Did I kill him? I told her to wait!" He got life in prison.

The victim was, as a teenager during the year or so that I observed him, kind of a wannabe tough guy, tried to hang out with the scumbags in our class and be like them but even they rejected him as being just really annoying. I feel bad to have to say that, considering how he ended up, but it was the truth. In adulthood, I suddenly heard that he had become a missing person and he has been now for years, and there are street rumors that someone shot him and dumped him in a river just for being annoying.

A famous case- Google the name Dru Sjodin (that's pronounced shu-deen) and you will find info on one of the most dramatic murder cases in the history of North Dakota-Minnesota. She was a 22-year-old college student in Grand Forks, North Dakota who was kidnapped in November 2003 by a 50-year old sex offender named Alfonso Rodriguez who had been released from prison six months earlier after serving many years in prison for rape, 27 years I think it was. He drove her across the state line to just outside the town of Crookston, Minnesota where he was living, where he raped and killed her in a gully in an area of farmers' fields. It was his first and only murder. Rodriguez was arrested early on in the investigation because police checked up on all the listed area sex offenders and he had evidence in his car, but Dru was missing until the following spring when the winter snow melted and her body was finally found. How was I involved? Well, tons of civilians went out to search for Dru, whether in organized search parties or on their own, and as the area she was thought to be in is an hour's drive or so from my home I joined in. One day in the early spring when there was still some snow on the ground, myself and a friend did our best to do a token search. I checked out an abandoned farmsite that day which I later learned was a place where Rodriguez had lived when he was a child, and just after that we stopped on a roadside to reorganize, at a spot that would shortly turn out to be a mere 70 yards from where Dru's body lay beneath the melting snow. She was found by a retired cop who had volunteered in a big springtime search. She was face down, undressed from the waist down, her hands bound behind her back with wire, and a plastic bag tied over her head. Her throat had been not exactly slashed but picked apart by a small pocket knife, and the autopsy couldn't determine whether that or asphyxiation was the cause of death. There was rumor that said Rodriguez got so accustomed to prison that he never wanted to leave, and that when his release was impending he'd told a fellow inmate he was going to make sure that his next victim "didn't make it." I stood 70 yards from Dru in that condition. I don't think I'll ever be sure whether I'd prefer to have found her that day, or whether I'd never have been able to recover from that horrific sight.

Neither North Dakota nor Minnesota have the death penalty, but because Rodriguez crossed the state line in the commission of his crime he made it federal, and the ok to prosecute him under the death penalty was one of the last acts of attorney general John Ashcroft before his retirement. He currently resides on death row in Tera Haute, Indiana, same place they executed Timothy McVeigh.