Folk memory and contact with famous crimes

[Brenda]

.

I had contact once with murderess Christa Pike (u.s.). She was the daughter of my former boss at work. She and her boyfriend lured a girl she felt to be a rival for boyfriend's affections out to a lonely section of woods where they beat and tortured her. So horrific.

The contact I had was at a party for the office people. She was maybe 10 or 11 years old at that time. She was 18 or 19 when she committed the murder. She is on death row in Tennessee.

[Mrs. E. Nigma]

I've never had any sort of connection to a famous crime, but when I was in high school there was a terrible murder(or officially "an assisted suicide") in the small town that I lived in. The man says that he helped her kill herself, but I just can't believe it. They found the victim with a plastic bag taped over her head, her feet were bound, and remnants of adhesive from her wrist all the way up to her elbow. There was also a lot of other weird things found as well. If I remember right, the police found a drawing of a woman bound and hanging while a man stood and watched in the other room. Which is weird enough on it's own, but found at a scene where a woman had been bound, and her boyfriend fell asleep on the couch while she died...It's a little more creepy. The killer got 8 years for man slaughter.

Two friends of mine from high school are actually what connects me to the crime though. The victim had a younger brother who I was friends with while I was in school. Another friend of mine actually dated the killer's son, and lived with them for a while.

[kensei]

Oops- just realized I have posted the same information to this thread twice. Was very late last night when I was here and I failed to notice this had been revived from 2 1/2 years ago. Sorry.

[Rubyretro]

A local murder, so not a famous one...

Last autumn a middle aged woman was walking through a short footpath from a large Avignon carpark to her flat in a quiet residential area, mid-morning on a Sunday, when someone took her head and smashed her face in against a block of stone and brutally rammed a screwdriver through her jaw, and then dragged her body behind a hut housing electricity cables.

The murder left the Police perplexed since she hadn't been robbed (she had 50 euros in her bag), hadn't been sexually molested, and lived a quiet blameless life with her daughter and grandchild.

The Police at first thought that the culprit was a mental patient who had been let out for the weekend and gone missing, but they soon discovered the real murderer from his DNA and bloody thumb print on the screwdriver -he was a man who had been in prison for 'flashing' and sexually molesting women (unspecified before the trial, but not rape), and who had completely vanished
without trace.

The Police staked out the house of his 'ex' at Christmas, rightly thinking that he would would arrive with presents for his two little girls, and arrested him.

It turns out that he was a neighbour of mine, and never anyone that I would ever have guessed to be a violent murderer. He appeared to be a devoted father, often with his children, and always friendly and polite. He intervened
when another neighbour started drunkenly hitting his girlfriend, and stood in the road tutting at the violence, as the Police arrived.

It turned out though, that he had put his flat and car in someone else's name, worked 'on the black', didn't claim any 'allocations' and had generally made sure that he had 'disappeared' from any computer records.

He ferociously denied anything to do with the murder, and it is clear that
before finger print testing or DNA tests, no one would have linked him to this apparently motiveless murder, it didn't 'fit' his profile, and any of his neighbours (including myself) would have been obliged to give him a good character witness , if questioned.

Someone on Casebook once claimed that he could see through someone to their true character within 5 minutes of meeting them (!) -but I'm equally certain that you can't !

[Magpie]

One other one I remembered. I used to work with a guy who moonlighted as a teacher in the local prison (P4W, now closed) and for a short time (a very short time) he was teaching Karla Holmolka (half of the infamous "Ken and Barbie" killers). He quit after about two sessions because according to him she kept trying to feel him up under the table and it made him feel sick. He said she was pure evil.

[The Bounder]

Working in the criminal justice system you tend to find that a lot of people who live in the communities were crimes are committed know more about the crimes than the police, or before the police. Fear of reprisals and other factors stop people from telling the police and or giving them the evidence they need. I think people also have a deep desire to create modern folklores. There was a murder in the 1980's in Birkenhead, Diane Sindall, she worked in my brothers local, at the time of the murder there was a real belief that there was a 'wolf-man' on the loose because of rumors that circulated as to what the killer had done to the poor woman. My old law mentor also had taught the man responsible.

[Cogidubnus]

My (one-off) gardener and a pretty good occasional drinking-mate, an aquaintance of some twenty years, has been nicked for murder..the trial starts in August

Someone else on here knows him too (come out of the woodwork wherever you are young Simon!)

Watch this space

Dave

[Ginger]

I had my portrait done by Harry Benson, who knew Leni Riefenstahl, who knew Adolf Hitler, if that counts.

[Mayerling]

Years ago I worked a part-time job in an apartment house in Sutton Place in Manhattan. While there I got to know an elderly couple named Moe and Rosie, and Rosie told me that when she was a girl (this was in the 1970s so she was in her 80s when I knew her) she lived on the lower East Side and went to dances where she saw and danced with Gyp the Blood, Dago Frank, Whitey Lewis, and the other thug who were the ones who shot and killed the gambler and stool pigeon Herman Rosenthal outside the Hotel Metropole in June 1912. I asked her did that bother her, but she said that the boys were pretty nice when she knew them.

My brother-in-law's father knew Mr. Benjamin Siegel back in the 1930s, and may have held up by him (I'm not sure about this). Oddly enough a girlfriend of mine is a cousin of Siegel's.

Personally I knew Mr. George P. McGovern, a fellow civil servant whose last days got terribly twisted. He was suffering from diabitis, and lost his toes on both feet. The illness may have affected his mind - his mother died, and he feared the loss of her social security money. So he did not report her death, and dismembered her body and hid it in an ice box in his kitchen (putting chains on the icebox). I visited him later that year with a friend, and noticed the ice box. When I asked about it he said, "It's broken, don't touch it!" So I didn't. A neighbor of his did discover the truth and blackmailed George. George died the following year and the police discovered the remains. The blackmailer went to prison for his crime. The police did determine that George's mother died of natural causes.

Jeff

[Graham]

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

A good friend of mine in West London used to fix cars for the Kray gang. He got quite adept at sorting out Jags as a result. He claims he never met the Twins, liked their "representatives" who he dealt with, and never once had to chase them for payment. Yes, he's still around.

G

[harry]

I have known,and been connected with,a murderer and a person who attempted murder.Both crimes were planned.The murderer almost got away with it,the attempted murderer was not suspected.Both were domestics.The latter,in time,was more content in having failed to kill,not out of remorse,but in the enjoyment,to him,of seeing the victim frequently,over the ensuing years,being pushed around in a wheelchair,almost totally incapacitated.Both the murderer and the would be murderer appeared to me to be normal sane and likeable people.

[Chris]

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.

George Skelly's book on the Burns and Devlin case has now appeared:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Murderers-Martyrs-Lord-Goldsmith/dp/1904380808

[Mayerling]

I forgot to mention that when I was in John Bowne High School in Queens, my boss (when I worked on the library squad) was Mr. Bernard Titowski. He was a successful book store owner, and he had the misfortune to own the store where Kitty Genovese died (on the doorstep) of multiple stab wounds due to the attack upon her in 1965. The incident was notorious because her screams did not cause anybody to run out and try to help her in that crowded area. Winston Mosley was convicted of the killing.

Mr. Titowski met Jonathan Goodman through my auspices in 1991, and they discussed the case at length together.

Jeff

[Sox]

My Grandmother saw Myra Hindley's arrest and she was also a patient at Harold Shipman's surgery.

[Mayerling]

Again, upon thinking things over I recalled two homicides that were close.

1 knew a woman whose mother was murdered in her home in New Jersey a couple of years back. The police never made any arrest.

One of my neighbors in the apartment house I live in lost his mother to a murder in California last year.

Jeff