Centenaries - whole and half

[sdreid]

100 years ago - 1916 June 30 - Gangster Oresto Shillintoni is executed in New York for the murders of two policemen and a rival mobster.

[Ginger]

100 years ago - 1916 June 30 - Gangster Oresto Shillintoni is executed in New York for the murders of two policemen and a rival mobster.

https://hatchingcatnyc.com/2013/09/2...lberry-street/ recounts Shillintoni's deeply impressive resume of villainy.

[GUT]

https://hatchingcatnyc.com/2013/09/2...lberry-street/ recounts Shillintoni's deeply impressive resume of villainy.

Wow what a lovely bloke.

[Mayerling]

Wow what a lovely bloke.

One of those you cannot really feel tears for when they end up in the hotseat.

[sdreid]

250 years ago - 1766 July 1 - Twenty-year-old religious dissident Francis-Jean de la Barre is tortured and beheaded in France. The nobleman was executed after he was found guilty of blasphemy and sacrilege.

[sdreid]

50 years ago - 1966 July 2 - At Indiana Dunes State Park, three young women named Renee Bruhl, Ann Miller and Patty Blough vanish. Personnel noticed their blanket and belongings on the beach when the park was being closed for the evening and their car was still in the parking lot. It's assumed that the women were taken and murdered but they have not been found. Several suspects have been mentioned but the case is still unsolved today.

[sdreid]

50 years ago - 1966 July 5 - Helen Hansen, a 35-year-old mother, is found dead in her Massachusetts apartment. Several years later, Edmund Lopes, a Baptist minister, admitted to killing her. Lopes eventually went to prison in Illinois for the 1970 murder of his wife. He died in 2013.

[sdreid]

50 years ago - 1966 July 6 - In Kent, Washington, Judith Haga and her infant daughter Peri, seven months, are strangled in their home. Eric Haga, the husband and father, claimed that an intruder had committed the murders which he had slept through. He was later convicted and sent to prison for life.

[sdreid]

150 years ago - 1866 July 12 - Dr. Alfred Warder takes his own life by drinking prussic acid. His suicide was to avoid being charged in an English court with the murders of three of his wives by poison.

[Mayerling]

150 years ago - 1866 July 12 - Dr. Alfred Warder takes his own life by drinking prussic acid. His suicide was to avoid being charged in an English court with the murders of three of his wives by poison.

Dr. Warder had appeared as an expert witness in several poisoning cases (including as a defense expert in the case of Dr. William Palmer in 1856). Due to his suicide (which prevented any trial on the merits of the suspicions against him regarding his three wives) the case against Dr. Warder is not recalled, unlike Palmer's, Smethurst's, Pritchard's, and Lamson's.

Jeff

[sdreid]

Dr. Warder had appeared as an expert witness in several poisoning cases (including as a defense expert in the case of Dr. William Palmer in 1856). Due to his suicide (which prevented any trial on the merits of the suspicions against him regarding his three wives) the case against Dr. Warder is not recalled, unlike Palmer's, Smethurst's, Pritchard's, and Lamson's.

Jeff

Thanks Jeff-you can't get a much more "expert" witness than that!

[sdreid]

50 years ago - 1966 July 13 - In the late evening, Richard Speck forces his way into a Chicago townhouse and by the following morning has raped, tortured and murdered eight student nurses who lived there. The sole survivor was a nurse who hid under a bed and she later identified Speck as the murderer. Speck, who had almost certainly murdered another woman in April of this year, was eventually sent to prison for a life term and died there in 1991.

[sdreid]

50 years ago - 1966 July 17 - In North Carolina, Vernon Shipman, Charles Glass and Louise Shumate disappear. Five days later, the beaten and stabbed bodies of all three were found in an isolated area. Shipman and Glass were gay partners but neither man had any known connection to Ms. Shumate. The murders are still unsolved although an escaped criminal, now deceased, named Edward Thompson Jr. has been mentioned as a possible suspect.

[sdreid]

100 years ago - 1916 July 22 - A suitcase bomb explodes at the Preparedness Day parade in San Francisco killing 10 and wounding 40. Two labor leaders were convicted of the murders but later evidence of perjury at their trials led to them being pardoned. There were never any other convictions in the case.

[Mayerling]

100 years ago - 1916 July 22 - A suitcase bomb explodes at the Preparedness Day parade in San Francisco killing 10 and wounding 40. Two labor leaders were convicted of the murders but later evidence of perjury at their trials led to them being pardoned. There were never any other convictions in the case.

The conviction of Billings and Moody for the Preparedness Day bombing took years of fighting in the courts to undue - they weren't pardoned until 1939. The only book on the case I know of ("The Mooney Case" by Richard H. Frost) suggests that the bomb might have been the plant of a West Coast German saboteur (that same year a German saboteur had planted a bomb that destroyed arms and ammunition at a depot on "Black Tom Island" in New Jersey, behind the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbor).

Jeff