Centenaries - whole and half

[Mayerling]

Small Freudian slip. WARATAH was a "Blue Anchor Line" ship, not "Blue Star". Obviously I was thinking of TITANIC being a "White Star" liner.

Jeff

[ChrisGeorge]

Small Freudian slip. WARATAH was a "Blue Anchor Line" ship, not "Blue Star". Obviously I was thinking of TITANIC being a "White Star" liner.

Jeff

Thanks, Jeff. There appears to an interesting discussion of the disappearance of the Waratah on Mike Dash's blog, "Waratah: a fresh look at the legend of the bloody swordsman."

Chris

[Mayerling]

Thanks for the blogsite Chris. It is a wonderful example of digging out informations and sources carefully. Most accounts I have read about S.S. Waratah tend to be in collections concerning shipwrecks or sea mysteries. One is POSTED MISSING by Alan Villers. Mr. Sawyer and his dream is always mentioned (although I got the idea that the figure with the sword was like a "Colossus of Rhodes" type rising from the sea). I hope Mr. Dash finds more information on the missing ship.

By the way, I had heard about the life preserver from Waratah turning up in New Zealand. Things like that happen frequently. In 1860 the U.S.S. Levant,
returning from a diplomatic visit to the Kingdom of Hawaii, disappeared in a typhoon. A piece of wreckage later turned up on the island of Hiho. If you read the WIKIPEDIA article on the Levant the wreckage was even analyzed to see if it suggested what happened to the crew. Similarly, after his plane disappeared in 1928 while he was trying to rescue Umberto Nobile and the survivors of the semi-rigid airship ITALIA, part of Roald Amundson's plane showed up - and it looked like there was an attempt to make a raft out of it.

Best wishes,

Jeff

[sdreid]

A little tardy

100 years ago - 1909 March 8 - Herman Cohen is hacked to death in his Sunderland, England office. The murder was never solved.

I guess 100 years ago today would have been more like the date of his interment.

[sdreid]

50 years ago - 1959 March 21 - The bodies of Mildred Jackson and her 4 year-old daughter, Susan, are found in Maryland. They were victims of Melvin Rees, aka "The Sex Beast". Her husband and baby were also killed. Rees was suspected of additional slayings and got a life sentence.

[Mayerling]

It's not quite a total mystery that we get involved in, but by accident I noticed the centennial date is approaching.

All Arctic Exploration Fans: APRIL 6, 1909

DID ROBERT PEARY AND MATTHEW HENSON ACTUALLY REACH 90 DEGREES NORTH ON THAT DATE THUS REACHING THE NORTH POLE, OR (AS MANY SUSPECT) DID PEARY (IN DESPERATION) "FUDGE" HIS DATA?

SUBSIDIARY POINT: ONE YEAR EARLIER, POLAR EXPLORER DR. FREDERICK COOK, RETURNED FROM THE ARCTIC CLAIMING HE REACHED THE POLE FIRST!
DID HE LIE? (MOST EXPERTS SAY HE DID - BUT THERE IS A STRONG GROUP OF COOK FANS WHO INSIST PEARY AND HIS BACKERS SMEARED THE DOCTOR AND STOLE THE CREDIT FOR THE EXPLORATION VICTORY).

Not quite the vanishing of the Warahtah or the various homicides of 1909-1910, but it is a problem that lingers to this date.

Jeff

[sdreid]

100 years ago - 1909 April 19 - Gunfighter and hired killer, James Miller is lynched in Oklahoma. It was asserted that during his life he'd slain between 40 and 50 men. He was 48 years old.

[sdreid]

50 years ago - 1959 April 29 - Career criminal William Witherspoon shoots and kills Chicago policeman Mitchell Stone. Witherspoon was convicted but paroled after only 20 years.

[sdreid]

150 years ago - 1859 May 3 - Isabella Bankes dies from an apparent poisoning. London physician, Dr. Thomas Smethurst, a man who'd married her bigamously, was charged with murder, convicted and sentenced to death. There was however some doubt that the test for the arsenic had been compromised and the conviction was overturned. Despite the fact that he was not legally married to Miss Bankes, Smethurst was allowed to inherit her estate. Guilty or not, he proved to be a poor manager of the windfall and died in squalor.

[sdreid]

50 years ago - 1959 May 8 - Ronald Maywood is hanged in Pentonville. He'd been convicted of the stabbing death of a North London policeman.

[sdreid]

200 years ago - 1809 May 8 - Herr Grohmann dies from arsenic. He was one of the victims of German serial killer Anna Zwanziger. She was his servant and became unset when he decided to marry another woman rather than her. Anna was beheaded for her crimes in 1811.

[Mayerling]

50 years ago - 1959 May 8 - Ronald Maywood is hanged in Pentonville. He'd been convicted of the stabbing death of a North London policeman.

Hi Stan,

I heard about Marwood's (the correct name is Ronald Henry Marwood - I wonder if he was from the same family as the 19th Century executioner William Marwood) case. There was some controversy because Marwood reacted in a kind of knee jerk reaction to the bobbies coming to break up a disturbance. On December 14, 1958, Marwood was with some friends who were "teddy boys" (the British equivalents of juvenile delinquents). They had been out drinking and Marwood had 20 half-pints of brown ale. They created a disturbance outside a dance hall in Islington, London, when confronted by a second gang, and the police came to break it up. Marwood actually was wounded (with a cleaver) on his hand, and was walking away. P.C Raymond Henry Summers was arresting one of the others involved. Marwood saw it as a friend and returned to protest. There was a claim that Summers may have punched Marwood, who suddenly pulled a knife out and stabbed Summers in the back. He claimed he thought the jack knife was not opened when he pulled it out, and he just meant to punch Summers in the back. He also claimed he was too drunk to form the intent to kill Summers. Oddly enough Marwood did not own the knife, and had not been seen with it earlier, nor had he used it before the killing. His defense team tried to get the judge to address the issue of criminal intent, and were unsuccessful (and equally unsuccessful using that as an error for the appeal). As a result he hanged. Details on the case (not one of the major ones that are constantly discussed) can be found in Belton Cobb's MURDERED ON DUTY: A Chronicle of the Killing of Policemen, and John Brophy's THE MEANING OF MURDER. Why is it such a relatively unknown case. Cobb, without explaining it, explains it. It was overshadowed by the Guenther Podola Case of 1959 in the shootind death of Detective Sergeant Raymond Purdy.

By the way, 72 years ago today another mystery occurred. The great zeppelin Hindenburg blew up at Lakehurst, New Jersey airfield. Accident or sabotage?

Best wishes,

Jeff

[sdreid]

Yes - Marwood - Thanks Jeff

Even though it was for the killing of a policeman, there was still considerable protesting of Marwood's execution.

[Mayerling]

Hi Stan,

The Marwood Case was one of that line of cases in the 1950s (with the Evans - Christie fiasco, Ruth Ellis, the Craig-Bentley fiasco, and Podola's) where the issue of execution was central to public concern. Podola actually did confess to the killing of Purdy at the end, but during the trial his defense of amnesia (and a suspicion that he was being manipulated by the police who wanted him convicted) made the case as suspect as the other four.

If yesterday was the anniversary of the explosion of the ("Oh the humanity!") Hindenburg, and it's continued fascination and mystery, today was the anniversary of the torpedoing and sinking of the R.M.S. Lusitania off the Old Head of Kinsale, Ireland, in 1915. Was it just a bit of bad luck, or was the ship set up to be sunk to entice the U.S. into the War? And why did it sink in only 18 minutes? (Less than the two and a half hours of the Titanic or the hour of the Britannic).

Jeff

[sdreid]

Hi Jeff,

WLS is doing a retrospective this weekend and they played Herbert Morrison's recording including about 3 minutes before and something like one minute after the segment we've all heard. I hadn't heard these parts anyway. They said that there is an additional 20 minutes or so that he recorded as the Hindenburg was entering the region. He had some radio communications with someone before the arrival. I doubt that it was from on-board but they didn't actually say unless I missed it. Most of the other WLS stuff were the acts they presented when they were the "Prairie Farmer Station". I guess their biggest star was Red Foley, Pat Boone's father-in-law.