Unsolved Crimes (Criminal Investigations)

Criminal

investigations

unsolved Crimes

Bank Robbery Celebrities and Crime Child Abduction and Kidnapping Cons and Frauds Crime Scene Investigation Cybercrime Drug Crime Gangs and Gang Crime Homicide Organized Crime Serial Killers Terrorism Unsolved Crimes White-Collar Crime

Criminal ww

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unsolved crimeS michael newton C o n s u lt i n g E d i t o r : John L. French, Crime Scene Supervisor, Baltimore Police Crime laboratory

Criminal Investigations: Unsolved Crimes Copyright © 2008 by Infobase Publishing All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher. For information contact: Chelsea House An imprint of Infobase Publishing 132 West 31st Street New York NY 10001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Newton, Michael, 1951Unsolved crimes / Michael Newton ; consulting editor, John L. French. p. cm. — (Criminal investigations) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-7910-9414-3 (alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-7910-9414-6 (alk. paper) 1. Murder—Investigation—Case studies. 2. Murder victims— Case studies. I. French, John L. II. Title. III. Series. HV8079.H6N47 2008 363.25’9523—dc22 2008008537 Chelsea House books are available at special discounts when purchased in bulk quantities for businesses, associations, institutions, or sales promotions. Please call our Special Sales Department in New York at (212) 967-8800 or (800) 322-8755. You can find Chelsea House on the World Wide Web at http://www.chelseahouse.com Text design by Erika K. Arroyo Cover design by Ben Peterson Cover: Newspaper report on JonBenét Ramsey murder case. Printed in the United States of America Bang EJB 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 This book is printed on acid-free paper. All links and Web addresses were checked and verified to be correct at the time of publication. Because of the dynamic nature of the Web, some addresses and links may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid.

Contents Foreword Introduction

1  Red Jack 2  Forty Whacks 3  The Black Dahlia 4  A Civil Wrong 5  The Boy in the Box 6  JFK: Case Closed? 7  Where’s Jimmy? 8  Deadly Medicine 9  The Art of Crime 10  Little Girl Lost Chronology Endnotes Bibliography Further Resources Index About the Author About the Consulting Editor

7 11 15 25 35 43 51 59 69 79 87 97 107 110 111 112 113 119 120

  child abductions and kidnappings

Foreword I

n 2000 there were 15,000 murders in the United States. During that same year about a half million people were assaulted, 1.1 million cars were stolen, 400,000 robberies took place, and more than 2 million homes and businesses were broken into. All told, in the last year of the twentieth century, there were more than 11 million crimes committed in this country.* In 2000 the population of the United States was approximately 280 million people. If each of the above crimes happened to a separate person, only 4 percent of the country would have been directly affected. Yet everyone is in some way affected by crime. Taxes pay patrolmen, detectives, and scientists to investigate it, lawyers and judges to prosecute it, and correctional officers to watch over those convicted of committing it. Crimes against businesses cause prices to rise as their owners pass on the cost of theft and security measures installed to prevent future losses. Tourism in cities, and the money it brings in, may rise and fall in part due to stories about crime in their streets. And every time someone is shot, stabbed, beaten, or assaulted, or when someone is jailed for having committed such a crime, not only they suffer but so may their friends, family, and loved ones. Crime affects everyone. It is the job of the police to investigate crime with the purpose of putting the bad guys in jail and keeping them there, hoping thereby to punish past crimes and discourage new ones. To accomplish this a police officer has to be many things: dedicated, brave, smart, honest, and imaginative. Luck helps, but it’s not required. And there’s one more virtue that should be associated with law enforcement. A good police officer is patient.



  unsolved crimes Patience is a virtue in crime fighting because police officers and detectives know something that most criminals don’t. It’s not a secret, but most lawbreakers don’t learn it until it is too late. Criminals who make money robbing people, breaking into houses, or stealing cars; who live by dealing drugs or committing murder; who spend their days on the wrong side of the law, or commit any other crimes, must remember this: a criminal has to get away with every crime he or she commits. However, to get criminals off the street and put them behind bars, the police only have to catch a criminal once. The methods by which police catch criminals are varied. Some are as old as recorded history and others are so new that they have yet to be tested in court. One of the first stories in the Bible is of murder, when Cain killed his brother Abel (Genesis 4:1–16). With few suspects to consider and an omniscient detective, this was an easy crime to solve. However, much later in that same work, a young man named Daniel steps in when a woman is accused of an immoral act by two elders (Daniel 13:1–63). By using the standard police practice of separating the witnesses before questioning them, he is able to arrive at the truth of the matter. From the time of the Bible to almost present day, police investigations did not progress much further than questioning witnesses and searching the crime scene for obvious clues as to a criminal’s identity. It was not until the late 1800s that science began to be employed. In 1879 the French began to use physical measurements and later photography to identify repeat offenders. In the same year a Scottish missionary in Japan used a handprint found on a wall to exonerate a man accused of theft. In 1892 a bloody fingerprint led Argentine police to charge and convict a mother of killing her children, and by 1905 Scotland Yard had convicted several criminals thanks to this new science. Progress continued. By the 1920s scientists were using blood analysis to determine if recovered stains were from the victim or suspect, and the new field of firearms examination helped link bullets to the guns that fired them. Nowadays, things are even harder on criminals, when by leaving behind a speck of blood, dropping a sweat-stained hat, or even taking a sip from a can of soda, they can give the police everything they need to identify and arrest them. In the first decade of the twenty-first century the main tools used by the police include

Foreword    n questioning

witnesses and suspects n searching the crime scene for physical evidence n employing informants and undercover agents n investigating the whereabouts of previous offenders when a crime they’ve been known to commit has occurred n using computer databases to match evidence found on one crime scene to that found on others or to previously arrested suspects n sharing information with other law enforcement agencies via the Internet n using modern communications to keep the public informed and enlist their aid in ongoing investigations But just as they have many different tools with which to solve crime, so too do they have many different kinds of crime and criminals to investigate. There is murder, kidnapping, and bank robbery. There are financial crimes committed by con men who gain their victim’s trust or computer experts who hack into computers. There are criminals who have formed themselves into gangs and those who are organized into national syndicates. And there are those who would kill as many people as possible, either for the thrill of taking a human life or in the horribly misguided belief that it will advance their cause. The Criminal Investigations series looks at all of the above and more. Each book in the series takes one type of crime and gives the reader an overview of the history of the crime, the methods and motives behind it, the people who have committed it, and the means by which these people are caught and punished. In this series celebrity crimes will be discussed and exposed. Mysteries that have yet to be solved will be presented. Readers will discover the truth about murderers, serial killers, and bank robbers whose stories have become myths and legends. These books will explain how criminals can separate a person from his hard-earned cash, how they prey on the weak and helpless, what is being done to stop them, and what one can do to help prevent becoming a victim. John L. French, Crime Scene Supervisor, Baltimore Police Crime Laboratory * Federal Bureau of Investigation. “Uniform Crime Reports, Crime in the United States 2000.” Available online. URL: http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/ 00cius.htm. Accessed January 11, 2008.

Introduction It is not true, as some suggest, that everyone loves mysteries. Police, for instance, are not fond of unsolved cases. Scientists devote their lives to solving riddles, not prolonging them. Still, most people enjoy a mystery if it does not have any negative impact upon their lives. Even a gruesome unsolved crime may fascinate or entertain those members of the public who are not its victims or direct observers. People enjoy a puzzle all the more if time has placed it at a nice, safe distance from us, which would explain the popularity of historical mysteries. How many crimes go unsolved in America each year? The startling answer: No one knows. Twenty-five years ago, in his Encyclopedia of American Crime (1982), author Carl Sifakis suggested that America’s murder rate could be double the figure reported each year by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Sifakis raised the possibility that many deaths listed as accidents or suicides may actually be cleverly disguised murders. And history has proved him right. Consider Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS), the unexplained ailment that kills 6,000 American babies each year, on average. Before the 1980s, many doctors closed the book on SIDS cases without investigating. That was a mistake. Today, it is recognized that some SIDS deaths are murders. Martha Woods killed seven children whose deaths were wrongly attributed to SIDS between 1946 and 1969, before police finally stopped her. Marybeth Tinning killed eight between 1972 and 1985. Debra Tuggle murdered five between 1974 and 1982. Diana Lumbrera killed seven between 1976 and 1990.

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12  unsolved crimes Four killers with 27 victims. All were finally arrested, but they were not stopped in time. As a result of these cases, authorities now take greater measures to accurately determine the cause of death in cases of infant mortality. Consider also the peculiar state of missing persons in America. No one keeps track of vanishing adults, unless they are fugitives or police have evidence that they were kidnapped. In most cases, adults have the right to disappear, but children do not. And even there, despite endless Amber Alerts against child abductors, record keeping in America is poor at best. In 1984, for instance, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Resources in Washington, D.C., reported that 1.8 million children vanish from home each year. Ninety-five percent were listed as runaways, and 90 percent of those (1.5 million) returned within two weeks, leaving 171,000 unaccounted for. Five percent of the missing (90,000) were labeled kidnap victims, with 72,000 snatched by parents in custody disputes.1 The other 18,000 kids were simply gone. Their cases are unsolved, a haunting mystery for grieving parents, possibly a 30second item on the local TV news. But what became of them? Where are they? In 1973, Texas police found the bodies of 27 boys killed and buried by Dean Arnold Corll over the previous two years. Most of the victims were reported missing by their families, but officers called them runaways and never looked for them. The same was true of 32 victims killed by John Wayne Gacy Jr. in the 1970s, and the 17 murdered by Jeffrey Dahmer before his arrest in 1992. The list of mysteries goes on. Unsolved Crimes will examine certain famous, unresolved cases from the past 120 years to find out what police and experts in forensic science did (or failed to do) while trying to resolve each crime. Technology is much improved since 1888, when the first case occurred, but even now some crimes defy the best equipment and the best scientists. And yet, it may not be too late to solve these riddles, even now. Chapter 1 tracks a vicious serial killer through the foggy streets of nineteenth-century London. Chapter 2 reviews a double murder that inspired a famous children’s rhyme.

Introduction   13 Chapter 3 looks to Los Angeles, where a gruesome killing produced 50 confessions—all from innocent persons. Chapter 4 probes America’s first civil rights murder, unsolved despite investigations spanning half a century. Chapter 5 introduces a murdered boy whose name, like that of his killer, remains unknown after 50 years. Chapter 6 reviews evidence in a presidential murder twice investigated, with radically different results. Chapter 7 investigates the disappearance of America’s most controversial labor leader. Chapter 8 examines clues in a series of murders that revolutionized consumer product packaging. Chapter 9 puts the spotlight on a multimillion-dollar art theft, still puzzling detectives 18 years after the fact. Chapter 10 explores the haunting mystery of a faked kidnapping and all-too-real murder that still has America guessing. There may be no solutions to these riddles by the time the final page is turned, but who knows? The pursuit makes it worthwhile.

1 Red Jack Charles Cross and Robert Paul were on their way to early jobs in London’s Whitechapel district when they passed through Buck’s Row at 3:40 a.m. on August 31, 1888. Despite the early morning darkness, both men saw a woman lying on the nearby pavement with her skirt pushed up. Frightened, they hurried on to nearby Hanbury Street, where they found a police constable and reported their discovery. Officers rushed to the scene and confirmed that the woman was dead, her throat slashed. Further examination at the local morgue revealed multiple stabs and slashes to her lower body. Detectives soon identified the victim as Mary Ann Nichols, a 43-year-old prostitute whose record included eight terms of confinement to public workhouses since 1880. Friends knew her as “Polly,” a down-and-out dweller of London’s East End who somehow maintained her good humor despite heavy drinking and chronic poverty. The murder of a prostitute was nothing new to London journalists or the police at Scotland Yard. Whitechapel was a filthy, overcrowded slum where life was cheap and violent crime an everyday event. In fact, detectives already had two unsolved streetwalker slayings on file for 1888. Emma Smith had been stabbed by a gang of four or five men on April 2, living long enough to describe her attackers, while Martha Tabram suffered 39 knife wounds from an unknown killer on August 7. Although Tabram was able to tell police she had been attacked by multiple assailants before she died, some authors and researchers debate to this day whether or not she was a victim of Jack the Ripper. Neither crime resembled the Nichols murder, however, and police had to wait for further slayings to reveal a pattern.

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“I Love My Work” The next came at 6:00 a.m. on September 8, when officers found 47year-old Annie Chapman murdered on Hanbury Street, half a mile from Buck’s Row. This time, the vicious mutilations were more obvious, as if the killer hoped to shock authorities and passers-by. The murderer removed two rings from Chapman’s hand but left her other belongings—some coins and two combs—at her feet. On September 28, London’s Central News Agency received a letter written in red ink, dated three days earlier. Its author referred to his hatred of prostitutes, declaring, “I love my work and want to start again.” Next time, he wrote, “I shall clip the lady’s ears off and sent [sic] to the police.” The letter was signed “Jack the Ripper.” During the months and years to come, police and reporters received more than 600 letters supposedly written by London’s elusive stalker. Experts still cannot agree on how many—if any—of those letters came from the actual killer. Clearly, the letters were written by many different hands and some were clumsy fakes, while others seem to offer “inside” knowledge of the crimes. Several police officers named a London reporter, Tom Bulling, as their prime suspect behind the original Ripper letters, while other notes sent hoaxers to jail. In any case, the killer’s nickname and the brutal nature of his crimes guaranteed sensational headlines worldwide.

“From Hell” Jack struck again on September 30, killing 45-year-old Elizabeth Stride around 1:00 a.m., off Berner Street. The wagon driver who found Stride’s body believed he had frightened the killer away, and her wounds seemed to confirm it. Jack had cut Stride’s throat, as usual, but left no other marks. Forty-five minutes later, police found 46-year-old Catherine Eddowes murdered at Mitre Square. Unlike Stride, the morning’s second victim had suffered mutilations to her face and lower abdomen. Autopsy reports disclosed that one of her kidneys was missing. Later that morning, while police searched Whitechapel for evidence and witnesses, the Central News Agency received a postcard signed by Jack the Ripper, briefly describing the “double event.”

Red Jack   17 Jack had failed to collect any ears, he explained, because “Number one squealed a bit. Couldn’t finish straight off.” On October 16, 1888, a package reached the desk of George Lusk, head of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee. It contained half of a kidney, with an unsigned note addressed “From Hell,”

The “From Hell” letter written to George Lusk from Jack the Ripper. Enclosed with the letter was half of a human kidney preserved in wine. Alen MacWeeney/Corbis

18   Unsolved Crimes reporting that the author “fried and ate” the other half. Police surgeons identified the kidney as belonging to an alcoholic woman, infected (like Eddowes) with Bright’s disease, a condition similar to cirrhosis, but affecting the kidneys. But some critics believe the specimen came from a medical school, mailed by hoaxers as a practical joke. October passed without another Ripper killing, while the residents of London gradually relaxed. By November 9, as the city celebrated Lord Mayor’s Day, most Londoners hoped that Jack had given up his hunt for women of the streets. But those hopes were in vain. At 10:45 a.m. on November 9, Thomas Bowron visited a small flat on Miller’s Court to collect rent from tenant Mary Jane Kelly. No one answered his knock at the door, so Bowron peered inside through a broken window pane—and then ran calling for police. Mary Kelly was the Ripper’s youngest victim, at age 25, and she suffered the worst mutilation. Jack’s first indoor murder allowed him to take time with Kelly, dissecting her body from head to foot, inflicting shocking injuries and taking various internal organs with him as he fled. The outcry over Kelly’s murder generated fresh investigations, but in vain. No matter how many suspects and witnesses police questioned, the Ripper’s trail was cold. In time, the taunting letters stopped and Red Jack faded into history. Or did he? Some authors credit other victims to the Ripper. One source claims that he killed 20 women, most of them unnamed. Two most often added to the list are Alice McKenzie (killed on July 16, 1889) and Frances Coles (murdered February 13, 1891). However, Sir Melville Macnaghten, superintendent of London’s police force, insisted that Jack claimed only five victims.

Suspects Macnaghten’s private notes named three prime suspects in the murders. They included: Montague John Druitt, a London lawyer who apparently drowned himself in the River Thames on December 1, 1888, leaving a note that suggested he feared he was losing his mind. It made

Red Jack   19 no reference to any murders. Macnaghten’s claim in his notes that Druitt was a doctor is mistaken. Aaron Kosminski, a Polish hairdresser, committed to a mental hospital in February 1891. He died there in 1919. Michael Ostrog, a convicted thief and swindler whom Macnaghten described as “a mad Russian doctor” and “unquestionably a homicidal maniac.” In fact, Ostrog was not a doctor, though he sometimes posed as one. No physical evidence linked any of Macnaghten’s trio to the Ripper slayings—indeed, forensic science was virtually unknown in 1888, before widespread use of fingerprints or discovery of DNA— and many other suspects have been named over the past 120 years. Those suggested by various authors include, alphabetically: Joseph Barnett, a fish porter who lived with victim Mary Kelly until two weeks before her murder. Police cleared him as a suspect in 1888. William Henry Bury, hanged in Scotland for fatally stabbing his wife five months after the last Ripper murder. Police dismissed him as a suspect in 1889. Dr. Thomas Neill Cream, hanged in 1892 for poisoning several London prostitutes. On the gallows, he supposedly cried out, “I am Jack the--” as he died. Cream was jailed in the United States during the London murders. Frederick Deeming, a con man and serial killer who claimed at least six victims in England and Australia—where he was hanged in 1892 for murdering his second wife. Prince Albert Victor Christian Edward, grandson of Queen Victoria and Heir Presumptive to the British throne. Various “Royal Ripper” theories claim that Albert was the killer, or that others committed the murders to hide some scandal that might have stopped him from becoming king. Sir William Gull, physician in ordinary to Queen Victoria, who counted Prince Albert Victor among his royal patients. Several authors (and Hollywood movies) accuse Gull of leading a conspiracy to silence witnesses with knowledge of Prince Albert’s illegal marriage to a Catholic commoner. George Hutchinson, a witness at Mary Kelly’s inquest who described a man he saw with Kelly on the night she died. Some modern students of the case believe his description was

20   Unsolved Crimes “too detailed,” thus suggesting a lie to protect Hutchinson himself. “Jill the Ripper,” an unnamed female killer, possibly a midwifeturned-abortionist who mutilated women to mask evidence of her failed illegal operations. Severin Klosovski, alias “George Chapman,” a London barbersurgeon hanged in 1895 for poisoning three of his wives. James Maybrick, a Liverpool cotton broker and alleged author of the controversial “Ripper diary” published in 1993. Many forensic experts dismiss the diary as a fake.

LCase Closed? Author Patricia Cornwell is famous for her 19 best-selling mystery novels, published since 1990. In 2001 she spent $6 million in a private bid to solve the Ripper case, concluding that artist Walter Sickert was Red Jack. Cornwell detailed her evidence in Portrait of a Killer (2002), and while that book bears the subtitle Case Closed, many questions remain. Cornwell begins by claiming that Sickert placed clues to his guilt in various paintings, but many critics disagree. To prove her case, Cornwell compared Sickert’s paintings and correspondence to supposed Ripper letters, seeking common fingerprints or DNA. Cornwell says police found fingerprints on “at least two Ripper letters”—one from as late as 1896—but none of them matched Sickert’s. Likewise, testing of various stamps and envelopes revealed no nuclear DNA linking Sickert to any supposed Ripper letters. Cornwell then searched for “secondary” (mitochondrial) DNA, claiming that several envelopes bore DNA strains “similar” to Sickert’s. In fact, however, those tests only narrowed the field of suspects to 1 percent of London’s population—some 400,000 persons in 1888. Many researchers think all the letters are fakes, and as Cornwell herself admits, “We can’t prove the source of any of the DNA.”1 Given the number of people who have handled the letters over the years, contamination is inevitable. In short, the Ripper case is far from closed.

Red Jack   21 Dr. Alexander Pedachenko, a Russian doctor and alleged secret agent, suspected by some of committing the murders to embarrass British police. “Sailor X,” an unidentified merchant seaman whose travels removed him from London between Ripper crimes. Author Trevor Marriott blames the unknown sailor for a similar murder in Flensburg, Germany, committed in October 1889. Walter Sickert, a major British artist, named by various authors since 1976 as either the lone Ripper or a participant in Dr. Gull’s conspiracy (see sidebar).

A criminalist prepares DNA samples for analysis. AP Photo/ Matt York

22   Unsolved Crimes James Kenneth Stephen, a tutor (some say lover) of Prince Albert Victor, named in some accounts as the Ripper, in others as an accomplice to Prince Albert’s crimes. Ronald Donston Stephenson, alias “Dr. Roslyn D’Onston,” accused of committing the Ripper crimes as part of a black magic ritual. Francis Thompson, a British poet and drug addict whose verse and private conversations allegedly included boasts of being Jack the Ripper. Francis Tumblety, an Irish-American “herb doctor,” jailed for assaulting four men in London on November 7, 1888. Released on bail, he fled to the United States before trial. Tumblety’s 1903 obituary named him as a Ripper suspect. Sir John Williams, another London physician whose patients included members of the royal family, accused of using streetwalkers as human guinea pigs for surgical experiments.

LQuestioned Documents Modern investigators have many tools at their disposal for identifying authors of anonymous letters, which either did not exist in 1888 or were not commonly used. Fingerprints do not identify a document’s author per se, but they can identify various people who handle a letter and its envelope. A suspect’s DNA may be obtained from saliva traces if he or she licks an envelope’s flap or postage stamp. Handwriting analysis comes closest to identification of a letter’s actual author, though expert witnesses called by the prosecution and defense may disagree on details of a suspect’s penmanship. Errors in grammar, spelling, and punctuation found in other writings by a suspect may link that person to the anonymous letter, even if his handwriting is consciously disguised. Mechanical defects in a typewriter or printer may also trace documents to a particular machine, but not necessarily to the person who typed or printed the message. Distinctive or expensive stationery (paper, cards, and envelopes) can often be traced by means of watermarks or other physical traits to the factory that produced it, and sometimes to the store where it was sold.

Red Jack   23 While the theories debated by “Ripperologists” are often fascinating and sometimes frightening, all share one common problem: No conclusive evidence links any suspect to the Ripper’s crimes. In fact some researchers have suggested that there was no Ripper, and that police mistakenly linked crimes committed by separate individuals and attributed them to the Ripper. One thing is certain: The case remains a haunting, gruesome mystery.

2 Forty Whacks August 4, 1892, was a hot day in Fall River, Massachusetts. By midmorning, members of the Borden family were busy with chores at their home on Second Street. Abby Borden was dusting, while maid Bridget Sullivan washed windows. Lizzie Borden, Abby’s stepdaughter, later said that she was in the barn, looking for fishing sinkers. Andrew Borden, master of the house, came home from his office at 10:30 a.m. as usual. He spoke briefly to Lizzie, and then laid down for a nap on the couch. An overnight guest, Andrew’s brotherin-law John Morse, had left to visit other relatives. At 11:10 a.m., Lizzie called to Bridget, “Father is dead! Somebody got in and murdered him!” Sullivan found Andrew Borden still on the couch, his face and skull crushed by blows from some sharp, heavy object. Lizzie sent Bridget to fetch Seabury Bowen, the family doctor, but he was not at home. Bridget told Bowen’s wife of the murder, returned to the Borden house, then left again to alert family friend Alice Russell. Meanwhile, Lizzie informed neighbor Adelaide Churchill of the slaying. Lizzie told Churchill that Abby had gone out to visit a sick friend. Churchill sent her handyman to summon police at 11:15, but officers inexplicably took 30 minutes to travel 400 yards from their station to the crime scene. Dr. Bowen arrived first, and asked if Abby was home. This time, Lizzie said, “I don’t know but what she’s been killed, too.” Sullivan and Mrs. Churchill found Abby upstairs, lying in a guestroom with her head nearly severed. Police arrived at 11:45 with Dr. William Dolan, Fall River’s medical examiner, to start their investigation of the shocking crime.

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Drawing of the vicinity of the Borden house, the site of Andrew and Abby Borden’s murder. Bettmann/Corbis

Forty Whacks   27

A Troubled Family The Borden clan was well known in Fall River. Andrew was a native, born in 1822, who worked as an undertaker before prospering as a bank and mill owner. He was notoriously stingy. Andrew married Sarah Morse in 1845, and they had three daughters: Emma, born in 1851; Alice, in 1856; and Lizzie, in 1860. Alice died in 1858, and Sarah followed in March 1863, while Lizzie was still a toddler. Lizzie remained close to her father and did not object when he married Abby Gray in 1865. In later years, however, Lizzie quarreled with Abby over her stinginess and refused to call her Mother for the last five years of Abby’s life. The Borden sisters never married, preferring to live with Andrew and Abby. Bridget Sullivan joined the family in 1889, six years after her arrival in America from Ireland. She served as the live-in maid, though Abby, Emma, and Lizzie shared in the household chores. On June 24, 1891, cash and jewelry vanished from the Borden house, presumably stolen by a burglar. Andrew and Abby suspected Lizzie, who was once accused of shoplifting, but they started a routine of locking all doors, both outside and inside the house. Police received another theft report in April 1892. Trouble was brewing in the Borden house by then. In April 1892, Lizzie described her stepmother to Hannah Gifford as “a mean old thing.” A few weeks later, Andrew slaughtered Lizzie’s pigeons in the barn. After another quarrel in July, Emma and Lizzie went to stay for a time with friends in New Bedford. On August 2, Andrew and Abby woke with stomachaches. Abby told Dr. Bowen that she suspected poison, but Bowen dismissed the idea. Lizzie complained of illness the following day. That same morning, August 3, druggist D.R. Smith said Lizzie tried to buy poison, but he refused to sell it. Later that day, Lizzie told friends that she had seen strangers lurking around the house, perhaps enemies of her father. “I’m afraid,” she said, “that someone will do something.” John Morse spent that night with the Bordens and noticed nothing wrong. He left the next morning at 8:45, and so missed all the gruesome events.

28   Unsolved Crimes

The Investigation Dr. Dolan examined both victims at the scene, counting 11 wounds in Andrew’s head and 19 in Abby’s. Police ordered Bridget Sullivan to show them any potential murder weapons owned by the Bordens. She produced several hatchets, including one stained with cow’s blood, but none matched the victims’ wounds. By modern standards, Fall River police bungled the search. Officers, doctors, and neighbors roamed through the house at will, perhaps disturbing or removing vital clues. Police also noted that despite the day’s heat, a fire was blazing in the kitchen stove, suggesting destruction of evidence. Suspicion focused on Lizzie because of her strained relationship with Abby and her conflicting statements. Lizzie said a messenger had brought Abby a note, calling her away from home, but the messenger and note were never found. Lizzie also claimed that she was in the barn for 20 minutes, during Andrew’s murder, but police believed the barn was too hot for anyone to stay inside that long. On the other hand, all agreed that the killer must have been spattered with blood, but no one reported seeing blood on Lizzie or her clothes. Police believed they had solved that riddle on August 7, when Alice Russell saw Lizzie burning a dress. Lizzie said it was stained with paint. Police, too late, claimed it was bloodstained. A private inquest examined the facts of the case on August 9–11. Based on the evidence presented, Lizzie was charged with the murders. A formal murder indictment followed on November 31, 1892.

The Trial Lizzie’s trial began in New Bedford on June 5, 1893. Prosecutors Hosea Knowlton and William Moody presented the state’s case, while lawyers George Robinson and Andrew Jennings defended Lizzie. Knowlton and Moody based their case on Lizzie’s missing dress, a hatchet head without a handle, and Lizzie’s conflicting statements to police. Their case hit its first snag when prosecution witness Thomas Kieran, an engineer, disagreed with Moody’s description of the crime scene. A forensic expert also testified that he found no blood on the supposed murder weapon.

Forty Whacks   29

LA Modern Perspective Today, the scene of the Borden murders and the investigation would be handled very differently. Police would close the scene to anyone but investigators. Lizzie, Emma, and Bridget would all be considered suspects because they lived in the house and because this kind of crime is not one usually committed by a stranger. The bloodstains would have been photographed and subjected to pattern analysis, which might have revealed details about the killer or his or her position during the attacks. Presumptive blood tests (tests to identify blood and other substances) would have been done on the hands of the three women. The scene would have been processed for fingerprints. Whether or not modern investigative techniques would have helped police to solve the case conclusively, however, can never be known.

An attorney, left, holds a pair of blood-stained shorts as a State Bureau of Investigation blood pattern expert gives his conclusion about the blood pattern evidence to the jury. A similar analysis might have been useful in the Borden case. AP Photo/Chuck Liddy, POOL

30   Unsolved Crimes Dr. Bowen hurt the prosecution when he admitted giving morphine to Lizzie after the murders, perhaps accounting for her contradictory remarks. Her actual statements were excluded on grounds that officers had not provided Lizzie with a lawyer when they questioned her. The defense called witnesses who reported seeing unknown men around the Borden house on August 2, 1892. Others said that they had seen no blood on Lizzie or her clothes after the crime.

LHatchet Men Twenty years after jurors acquitted Lizzie Borden, America suffered a plague of axe murders, claiming 80 lives in seven states between 1910 and 1919. Most of those crimes remain unsolved today. The first attacks occurred in New Orleans, Louisiana, in August 1910. By October 1919, an unknown serial killer nicknamed “the Axeman” had raided 11 homes, killing six victims and wounding seven more. According to the story, the Axeman once threatened to roam the city one night and kill everyone at home in houses not playing jazz music. One survivor accused two neighbors and testified at the trial where they were convicted of murder, but she later recanted and they were freed. Meanwhile, police in Louisiana and Texas investigated a separate series of axe murders, occurring between January 1911 and April 1912. In those crimes killers invaded 11 homes occupied by African-American families, each with at least one mulatto (mixedrace) member. Those raids killed 49 victims, leaving only one alive and wounded. Police jailed a suspect who blamed a cult for the murders she was accused of, but they later released her. Between September 1911 and June 1912, yet another series of six home invasions left 25 victims hacked to death in Colorado, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, and Missouri. Police charged drifter Henry Moore with two Missouri murders involving his mother and grandmother. Moore received a life sentence, while Iowa jurors acquitted a man who confessed to killing seven victims in Villisca. No one was punished for those crimes, or for the other 71 slayings in America’s reign of terror.

Forty Whacks   31

An 1890 photo of Lizzie Borden. Borden was accused of killing her father and stepmother, but a jury found her innocent. AP Photo/fls Emma Borden explained that she encouraged Lizzie to burn an old, paint-stained dress three days after the killings. Lizzie did not testify, but she won sympathy from the all-male jury by fainting when prosecutors produced the crushed skulls of Andrew and Abby in court. On June 20, 1893, those jurors found her innocent of murder.

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The Aftermath Even though Lizzie was acquitted, many neighbors still thought she was guilty. The Borden sisters inherited Andrew’s fortune and bought a new house in Fall River five weeks after the trial. Despite the whispered accusations, Lizzie never left Fall River. She died on June 1, 1927, of complications from gall bladder surgery. The same day, Emma fell and broke her hip. She died 12 days later. The sisters were buried together, in the family plot with Andrew and Abby.

Alternate Suspects If Lizzie Borden did not kill her father and stepmother, who did? As in the Ripper case, there are many suspects. They include: Emma Borden, suggested by author Frank Spiering in his book Lizzie (1984). Bridget Sullivan, named as the killer by authors Edward Radin (1961) and Muriel Arnold (1999). Dr. Bowen, accused by witness claims that he looked “wild” on the day of the murder. William Borden, a hypothetical illegitimate son of Andrew’s, suggested by author Arnold Brown in 1991. John Morse, accused of killing the Bordens to cover up a love affair with Lizzie. William Davis, a friend of Morse, accused of killing the Bordens on Lizzie’s behalf. Hiram Harrington, named at the August 1892 inquest as an enemy of the Bordens. David Anthony, accused in 1985 by Ruby Cameron of Maine, who claimed that Lizzie named him as the slayer. Jose Correiro, jailed for a similar axe murder in Boston in June 1893. Henry Carter, who quarreled with Andrew over a debt on August 1, 1892. Sam Robinsky, a peddler who allegedly wrote to Emma Borden on August 17, describing a man in bloodstained clothes seen near the Borden home. Charles Peckham, who confessed to the murders on August 18. Police dismissed his confession as false.

Forty Whacks   33 Joseph Silvia, a local butcher accused by neighbors who saw a bloody axe at his home. Alfred Smith, who claimed he found a bloody axe and gloves on the Borden property, then hid them. He was later unable to produce the evidence.

Lizzie Borden in Popular Culture The Borden case is best remembered for a jump-rope rhyme that says: Lizzie Borden took an axe And gave her mother forty whacks. When she saw what she had done She gave her father forty-one. Over the past 115 years, the Borden murders have inspired 35 nonfiction books, hundreds of articles, six stage plays, three movies, two operas, one book of poetry, and a 1993 episode of The

LThe Right to Silence Since 1966, American police have been required to advise all persons placed under arrest of their basic legal rights, including the Fifth Amendment right to keep silent when questioned by authorities. That ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court was made in the Arizona case of defendant Ernesto Miranda—hence the frequent reference to police reading a suspect his “Miranda rights.” Prior to 1966, some officers—in fact, some entire police departments—routinely engaged in marathon interrogations of suspects without lawyers present, sometimes including brutal “third-degree” tactics to obtain confessions. While some such cases were later reversed on appeal, researchers can only speculate what number of innocent men and women were convicted by means of false confessions during the centuries prior to Miranda. Following proper Miranda procedure helps police ensure that whatever information a suspect provides can be used in prosecution, unlike the statements of Lizzie Borden, which were thrown out of court.

34   Unsolved Crimes Simpsons. A Virtual Museum and Library is found online at http:// www.lizzieandrewborden.com. Those really interested in the crimes may also sleep at the murder scene, now a stylish bed-and-breakfast. Guests pay $225 to $250 per night for rooms originally occupied by Lizzie, Emma, and the victims.

3 The Black Dahlia The Los Angeles sky threatened rain on January 15, 1947, as Betty Bersinger led her three-year-old daughter toward a shoe-repair shop in the Leimert Park district. At 39th and Norton Street, she saw something odd in the weeds of a vacant lot. At first, Bersinger thought it was a broken mannequin. A closer look revealed a woman’s naked body, severed at the waist, with gaping slashes on her face and chest. Bersinger turned and rushed home to call for help. Police dispatchers received their first call at 10:35 a.m., reporting “a drunk man lying in the weeds.” Patrolmen soon discovered the mistake and called for homicide detectives. It was obvious to all who saw the body that the crime was extraordinarily horrific.

Black Dahlia Investigators noted that the woman had been murdered elsewhere, washed and drained of blood before she was discarded on the vacant lot. Rope marks were visible around her ankles, wrists and neck, suggesting torture—though, in fact, most of her wounds had been inflicted after death. No clothes or other items were recovered with the body, and the victim’s fingerprints were not on file at any local agency. A newspaper sent the prints to FBI headquarters, using its new Soundphoto equipment (an early sort of fax machine) for the first time in a criminal case. Soon, using fingerprints, federal agents identified the victim as 22-year-old Elizabeth Ann Short, a Massachusetts native whose fingerprints were taken prior to working at a California army base

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Actress Elizabeth Short, known as the Black Dahlia, in an undated photo. Short died at age 22, her slain body found in a vacant lot in Los Angeles on January 15, 1947. AP Photo

during World War II. She had also been arrested once, for underage drinking, in September 1943 (see sidebar on fingerprints). Detectives soon contacted Short’s family and began reconstructing her movements. They discovered her friends, a former fiancé, and a married man who spent time with Short before she

The Black Dahlia   37 was murdered. Acquaintances from a Long Beach café recalled that Short often dressed in black, prompting them to call her the Black Dahlia (after a 1946 mystery film, The Blue Dahlia). Police learned that Robert Manley, a traveling salesman with a history of mental problems, drove Short to San Diego on December 15, then met her at the L.A. bus station when she returned on January 9. He took her to a local hotel and left her there. The hotel doorman saw her leave alone, at 10 p.m. No one but the killer knew where Short had been during the last six days of her life.

Star Struck Beth Short had come a long way from her mother’s home in Medford, Massachusetts. At age 19, she went to live with her father in California, but he had little time for her, and no patience with her busy social life. She had worked in a store at Camp Cooke in 1943, and was arrested in Santa Barbara that September, before juvenile authorities sent her back to her mother in Medford. Over the next two years Short traveled back and forth to Florida, preferring the warm climate for her asthma. On one trip she met Major Matthew Gordon Jr., an army pilot training for combat in Asia. Short told friends they were engaged, but Gordon’s plane crashed in August 1945. His army friends confirmed the engagement; his parents denied it. Short’s claims of pregnancy proved false. July 1946 brought Short back to California, visiting another soldier she met during wartime, but he punctured her dreams of a storybook marriage. Over the next five months she drifted, living in more than a dozen hotels and apartments, until she met her killer. Hollywood had been her last great dream. If she could not marry a hero, Short would be a movie star. As with so many other pretty girls before her, though, Short’s dream would not be realized. Her only starring role was as the victim in her own murder. After the crime, police were swamped with useless tips from kooks and amateur detectives, nosy neighbors and psychics, wellmeaning “witnesses,” and malicious liars who accused their enemies. Strangest of all, at least 60 persons confessed to the murder, but none could supply correct details of Short’s mutilations. Police reportedly held back some details of the crime in order to weed out

38   Unsolved Crimes false confessions, although exactly what information they retained is not known for sure. All were innocent, except in their own minds.

The Avenger On January 22, newspaper editor James Richardson received a phone call from a man claiming to be Short’s slayer. The caller promised to send proof before the week was out. Two days later, postal inspectors intercepted a package addressed to Richardson. It had been swabbed with gasoline, perhaps to erase

LFalse Witness False confessions to crimes are so common that police usually keep certain details secret from the public to trick compulsive liars. Still, experts themselves are sometimes fooled, as in the case of the Boston Strangler. From 1962 to 1964, an unknown killer raped and strangled 11 women in their Boston homes, leaving each victim with a ligature (a cord or other binding) around her neck, tied with a distinctive knot. In November 1964, rapist Albert DeSalvo confessed to the crimes in persuasive detail, adding two more victims to the list whom officers had overlooked. Most homicide detectives believed DeSalvo, but he never stood trial for murder. Instead, his lawyer arranged a plea bargain, sending DeSalvo to prison for life on rape and burglary charges. Another inmate murdered DeSalvo in November 1973. Case closed? Not quite. DeSalvo’s relatives and those of victim Mary Sullivan believed that he was innocent. In October 2001, they exhumed DeSalvo’s remains for a comparison of his DNA with evidence found at the Sullivan crime scene in 1964. A report issued in December 2001 found DNA traces from two individuals present on Sullivan’s body—neither matching DeSalvo. The perfect case collapsed. The Boston Strangler’s crimes are once again unsolved.

The Black Dahlia   39 fingerprints. The crude label read: “Here is Dahlia’s belongings. Letter to follow.” Inside, police found Short’s birth certificate and Social Security card, photographs, a claim ticket for a trunk left at the local bus station, and Short’s diary. The book was filled with names and phone numbers, but one page was missing. Despite the gasoline treatment, newspapers reported that police lifted a dozen clear fingerprints from the parcel. Unfortunately, they matched none on file with the police or FBI. On January 27, Richardson got a postcard that read: “Here it is. Turning in Wed., Jan. 29, 10 a.m. Had my fun at police. Black Dahlia Avenger.” Instead of a surrender, though, police received another note on Wednesday. This one read: “Have changed my mind. You would not give me a square deal. Dahlia killing was justified.” They never heard from the killer again.

Suspects Suspects abound in the Black Dahlia case. The L.A. District Attorney’s office kept files on 22 persons, all of whom were eventually cleared. Their names and stories may be found online at http:// www.blackdahlia.info/modules/news2/article.php?storyid=4/. Others named in various books and articles include: Robert Manley, the next-to-last person who saw Short before she vanished. Police cleared Manley after he passed two polygraph tests, but his problems continued. In 1954 his wife committed Manley to a mental hospital. Gangster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, boss of organized crime in southern California from 1936 until his murder in June 1947. Author Don Wolfe claims that Siegel ordered Short’s murder, either as a favor to her wealthy secret lover or as a “warning” to rival mobster Jack Dragna. Dr. Walter Bayley, a surgeon who lived near the spot where Short’s body was found. At his death in 1948, an autopsy revealed evidence of advanced brain disease. Bayley’s widow later claimed that his mistress knew “a terrible secret” about Bayley.

40   Unsolved Crimes The “Cleveland Butcher,” an unknown serial killer who claimed at least 16 Ohio victims from 1934 to 1939. Some students of the case, including a Cleveland homicide detective, believe the Butcher fled west in the 1940s, but no evidence links him to Short’s slaying. Unlike Short, all of the Butcher’s victims were beheaded. George Knowlton, a violent alcoholic who died in a 1962 car crash. In 1991 Knowlton’s daughter Janice named him as Short’s killer and implicated him in various other murders spanning the country, from Massachusetts to California. Police sought a suspect named George for Short’s murder in 1947, but never found him. Janice recovered memories of witnessing various crimes, and of suffering her father’s sexual abuse, while under psychiatric counseling. Some critics dismiss repressed memories as false or distorted, but research into George Knowlton’s movements places him near the sites of many still-unsolved murders during 1941 to 1958. Dr. George Hodel, accused (but acquitted) of molesting his teenage daughter in 1949. Police investigated Hodel as a Dahlia suspect in 1950 and 1951, but a grand jury failed to indict him. In 2003, son Steve Hodel—a former LAPD homicide detective—published a book accusing his father of Short’s murder and many others. Curiously, most of those crimes were murders linked to George Knowlton by his daughter Janice, 10 years earlier. Detective Brian Carr, the officer now in charge of Short’s case, dismissed Hodel’s claims in television interviews. Jack Anderson Wilson, named as the killer by author John Gilmore in Severed (1998). Gilmore described Wilson as an alcoholic career criminal who almost confessed when Gilmore spoke to him in 1981. The following year, Wilson died in a fire. Gilmore’s book appeared 16 years later, to mixed reviews. Dahlia researcher Larry Harnisch described Severed on Amazon.com as “25% mistakes, 50% fiction, full of people who do not exist and things that never happened.” Gilmore’s slips include misplacing the murder scene and references to a nonexistent “Hollywood police chief.” Other reviewers note that one of Gilmore’s primary sources, Detective Herman Willis, is untraceable as a real-life Los Angeles police officer.

The Black Dahlia   41

LTrue-Life CSI: Fingerprints While fingerprint comparison in 1947 was a slow, painstaking process involving visual examination, the same work is done by computers today at high speed. The FBI’s Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS) database permits investigators nationwide to check an unknown subject’s prints against those (continues)

An FBI specialist examines a soda can for fingerprint evidence. Mark Peterson/Corbis

42   Unsolved Crimes

(continued) collected from thousands of known felons, government employees, military personnel, and other donors nationwide. In broad terms, fingerprints are classified by their patterns of loops, whorls, and arches. Two-thirds of all humans have fingerprint ridge patterns forming loops. Those, in turn, are classified as radial loops (from the radius bone of the forearm) if they open toward the little finger, or as ulnar loops (from the ulna bone) if they open toward the thumb. Various other patterns and individual scars ensure that no two individuals on Earth—so far, at least—have the same identical fingerprints.

Too Late a Star While Beth Short never made it into films, her name lives on in Hollywood. Actress Luci Arnaz portrayed Short in a 1975 TV movie, Who is the Black Dahlia? That feature left the case unsolved, but others have identified and punished fictional killers. In 1977 author John Gregory Dunne retold Short’s story and solved the case in his novel True Confessions. A movie version of the novel, released in 1981, starred Robert De Niro and Robert Duval. Ten years later, novelist James Ellroy exposed a different fictional killer in The Black Dahlia (1987). A film version of that story, released in 2006, cast Mia Kirshner as Beth Short. In 1988 detectives on the TV series Hunter caught Short’s killer after construction work revealed a second victim’s body. Ten years later an interactive computer game (Black Dahlia, 1998) linked Short’s murder to Nazis and religious cults. Author Max Alan Collins merged Short’s case with the Cleveland torso murders in his novel Angel in Black (2002). That same year, rock star Marilyn Manson produced a series of paintings inspired by the crime. The band Black Dahlia Murder also takes its name from Short’s case.

4 A Civil Wrong December 25, 1951, was a doubly special day for Harry Moore and his wife, Harriette. It was both Christmas and the happy couple’s 25th wedding anniversary. They spent most of the day with family and friends, then left the holiday gathering at 7:30 p.m., driving home in the small town of Mims, Florida. By 10:00 p.m. the Moores, their youngest daughter, and Harry’s mother were all tucked into bed. At 10:20 p.m., a powerful bomb exploded beneath the master bedroom, ripping the house from its foundation. The blast was heard in Titusville, four miles away. Its force slammed Harry Moore against the bedroom ceiling, where his skull punched a hole through pine rafters. Neighbors rushed to the house through thick fog, loading Harry and Harriette into separate cars for a race to the hospital in Sanford, 35 miles away. Titusville’s hospital was closer, but it only accepted white patients. The Moores were African American, and Florida was strictly segregated from cradle to grave in 1951. Harry Moore died on the way to Sanford. His wife lasted nine days before dying on January 3, from a concussion and other internal injuries. Moore’s daughter and mother survived. By that time, most investigators guessed that the killers would never be punished.

The Crusader Harry Tyson Moore was born in 1905, in Houston, Florida, a black child in a state where whites believed themselves to be the master race, passing dozens of laws to keep African Americans “in their

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Juanita Evangeline Moore stands by a picture of her parents, civil rights pioneer Harry T. Moore and his wife Harriette, as she fields questions at a press conference in Orlando, Florida, in August 2005. AP Photo/Peter Cosgrove

A Civil Wrong   45 place.” Blacks who sought equal rights were arrested and often beaten by police, murdered by lynch mobs, and terrorized by nightriding members of the Ku Klux Klan (KKK). Harry Moore first tried to help his people through education. In 1925 he graduated from college and found a teaching job in Brevard County, where he soon married Harriette Simms. After the birth of their second daughter in 1934, Moore founded a local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), which fought discrimination in court. His first action was an unsuccessful lawsuit to equalize pay for teachers, regardless of race. In 1941 Moore became chairman of Florida’s statewide NAACP organization. He complained about police brutality and demanded investigations of the state’s frequent lynchings. In 1944 one of his lawsuits reached the U.S. Supreme Court, which banned the Democratic Party’s practice of barring black voters from primary elections. That victory prompted Moore to create a new organization, the Progressive Voters League (PVL), which launched campaigns to register black voters. Soon, in a state where few blacks had voted since 1876, Moore’s PVL had registered nearly one-third of all AfricanAmerican adults. That news worried white politicians who built their careers on segregating and insulting blacks. In 1946 Moore and his wife were fired from their Brevard County teaching jobs. That move was meant to drive Moore out of Florida, seeking a job, but it backfired. Instead of leaving, he began to work full time for the PVL and the NAACP. Three years later, he found a cause that made headlines worldwide.

The Groveland Case On July 16, 1949, a white teenage girl in Groveland, Florida, accused four young black men of rape. Sheriff Willis McCall jailed suspects Charles Greenlee, Walter Irvin, and Sam Shepherd, while a posse (led by McCall) killed Ernest Thomas, the fourth man accused. Today, most researchers believe the Groveland girl was actually beaten by her white boyfriend and lied about the rape to keep

46   Unsolved Crimes him out of trouble with her family. In any case, a lynch mob led by Klansmen came to get the three surviving prisoners on July 17, but Sheriff McCall had removed them from jail. Frustrated, the mob attacked a nearby black community, burning homes and stores until National Guard troops arrived to suppress the violence two days later.

LTrue Life CSI While the Moore investigation seems to be a hopeless case after 56 years, forensic science has made great strides in bombing investigations. After a bomb detonates, experts may identify the explosives in either of two ways. First, explosive residue consists of any trace materials from an explosive compound found at the scene of a bombing. Common forms of explosive residue include propellants (which cause the explosion), stabilizers (which make explosives safe to handle before detonation), and plasticizers (which allow some explosives to be shaped and molded). Chemical analysis of explosive residue identifies the type of explosive used in a bomb and may match it to samples found in a suspect’s possession.

A chemical criminalist displays ball bearings found at the scene of a recent bombing. Alan Porritt/epa/Corbis

A Civil Wrong   47 Harry Moore conducted his own investigation of the Groveland case, proving that the prisoners were beaten in jail before they confessed to the crime. McCall’s deputies also confiscated shoes from the suspects and faked footprints at the supposed crime scene. (In 1962 one of the lawmen was fired for faking footprints in another case.) Based on false testimony and evidence, a grand jury indicted

Second, most modern explosives include detection taggants, tiny particles designed to survive an explosion and help identify the explosive compound. Taggants vary in shape, color, and chemical composition, so that forensic scientists may trace them to their manufacturer and users. Switzerland pioneered mandatory use of taggants in 1980, with a law requiring that taggant codes must be changed every six months, thus revealing both where and when explosives were made. In the United States, the Institute of Makers of Explosives has long supported taggant use to assist in criminal investigations. Reconstruction of a bomb from its surviving fragments is also very useful to forensic investigators. Few bombs destroy all traces of themselves when they explode. Surviving fragments tell investigators if an explosive device was homemade or professionally manufactured (like military mines and grenades). Remains of a fuse or timing device tell how the bomb was detonated. In rare cases, bomb fragments may even retain a bomber’s fingerprints. Reconstruction of a bomb allows comparison with databases maintained by the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. That, in turn, may reveal if similar bombs have been used by persons or groups already known to law enforcement. Such knowledge allows police to focus their attention on specific targets and may aid in obtaining search warrants. When all else fails, authorities rely on informants inside criminal or terrorist groups to betray deadly bombers. Several southern racist bombings have been solved in that manner, long after the fact—though none after so long a time as the Harry Moore bombing.

48   Unsolved Crimes the three defendants for rape—a crime punishable by death in 1940s Florida. At trial, in August 1949, an all-white jury ignored the evidence of perjury and police torture to convict all three defendants. Judge Truman Futch sentenced Irvin and Shepherd to die. Greenlee received a life sentence because he was only 16 years old. After the trial, Klansmen tried to kill NAACP attorney Franklin Williams, but he outran them and escaped in a high-speed car chase. Harry Moore continued to support the Groveland defendants while fighting for civil rights on other fronts. In April 1950 the St. Petersburg Times revealed that Charles Greenlee was already in jail when the alleged rape occurred. Nonetheless, Florida’s Supreme Court upheld the convictions in May 1950. Eleven months later, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered a new trial for Irvin and Shepherd to revisit their capital cases. Sheriff McCall collected them from state prison on November 6, 1951, but stopped his car on a lonely road and shot both men at close range. Shepherd died at the scene, but Irvin survived, disputing McCall’s story that the unarmed, handcuffed prisoners had attacked him. A local grand jury cleared McCall of any wrongdoing, and Walter Irvin’s second trial resulted in another death sentence. Harry Moore protested, demanding that Florida’s governor remove McCall from office. The governor ignored him. Six weeks later, Moore was dead.

Justice Denied State police and FBI agents conducted separate investigations of the Moore bombing. Blacks questioned the state’s commitment to justice because Governor Fuller Warren and his chief investigator were both former Klan members. Still, local agents did their best, identifying several Klansmen who had threatened Moore and displayed floor plans of his house at KKK meetings before the bombing. Suspect Joseph Cox killed himself in March 1952, after agents questioned him. Two other suspects died within a year of Cox’s suicide, apparently of natural causes. In 1953, a federal grand jury investigating Moore’s death charged six Klansmen with lying under oath, but the charges were later dismissed.

A Civil Wrong   49 In January 1978, an ex-Klansman dying of cancer told police that Joseph Cox killed the Moores without Klan approval as part of a murder contract from persons unknown. Six weeks later, Raymond Henry Jr. claimed the Klan hired him to bomb Moore’s home in 1951. He named two policemen as accomplices, but his story kept changing. In November 1979, Henry added Sheriff McCall to the list of conspirators. McCall denied involvement in the crime, and FBI agents soon cleared the other policemen. One had lived in Texas during 1951, while the other was still a teenager. Finally, in 1991, Henry admitted lying out of spite, to punish officers who had arrested him. Meanwhile, in August 1991, Florida resident Dottie Harrington named her husband Frank as the bomber. Frank Harrington denied it to state police investigators, and his wife later withdrew the accusation, saying that while Frank was “quite a talker” when drunk, she would “never believe that he could be involved in any type of violent crime.”1 Justice of a sort caught up with Sheriff McCall in April 1972, after he beat a black prisoner to death in the Lake County jail. Governor Reubin Askew removed McCall from office, and then jurors

LAnti-Civil Rights Violence During the peak years of America’s civil rights movement, between 1954 and 1968, members of the KKK and allied racist groups bombed more than 250 homes, churches, cars, and businesses owned by African Americans. One Klan spin-off group called Nacirema (“American” spelled backwards) specialized in contract bombings-for-hire. Few bombers were arrested, and fewer still convicted by racist juries, but history has turned a page in that respect. In 1980, informant testimony convicted Klan leader Jesse Stoner of bombing a black church in 1957. Decades later, in 2001, similar evidence jailed two more Klansmen for another church bombing that killed four young girls in 1963. Because there is no statute of limitations on murder, hope remains—however faint—that the slayings of Harry and Harriette Moore may one day be punished in court.

50   Unsolved Crimes acquitted him of manslaughter at trial. It seemed to be another victory, but voters had finally tired of McCall’s brutal tactics. They rejected McCall’s bid for reelection in 1973, choosing an ex-Detroit policeman to replace him. McCall died in April 1994, at his home on a street that bore his name. In 2005 the Florida Department of Law Enforcement announced yet another investigation of the Moore bombing. This time, spokesmen said, they would excavate the home site, seeking any forensic evidence overlooked in 1951. At press time for this book, no new discoveries had been announced.

5 The Boy in the Box In February 1957, Susquehanna Road was a half-mile rural track in Philadelphia’s Fox Chase district. There were no houses yet, but a religious home for “wayward” girls stood on the road’s north side, facing woods. Muskrats, rabbits, and other small game sometimes lured trappers to the area. At 10 a.m. on February 26, college student Frederick Benonis telephoned police to report a startling discovery. He had been driving on Susquehanna Road around 3:15 p.m. the previous day, Benonis said, when a rabbit crossed the road opposite the girls’ facility. Benonis stopped to chase it, then found several muskrat traps, and finally a large cardboard box. Inside the box he found the naked body of a small child, partly covered by a blanket. Why had he waited 19 hours to alert police? Benonis claimed he thought the body was a doll, until he heard a radio report the next morning that a child had disappeared from neighboring New Jersey. Later, Benonis admitted the truth: he liked to watch the girls across the street whenever possible, and feared that by contacting police he would give himself away. Police considered Benonis their first suspect, until he passed a polygraph test.

The Boy in the Box Officers at the scene found a boy, not a doll. He lay in a box that had once held a baby’s bassinet sold by J.C. Penney. A flannel blanket, cut in half, swaddled his form. Bruises covered his body, the worst

51

52   Unsolved Crimes around his face and head. From their consistent color, all had been inflicted during one attack. Officers also noted that the boy’s hair, fingernails, and toenails had been cut recently. Small clumps of hair clung to his body everywhere, proving that he had been undressed— and maybe killed—before the haircut. Medical examiner Joseph Spelman and anthropologist Wilton Krogman examined the body. The boy was 3 feet, 4 1/2 inches tall, weighing only 30 pounds. He had a full set of 20 primary (baby) teeth, marking his age around six years or younger. Based on his blond hair, blue eyes, and facial features, Dr. Krogman guessed that his ancestors came from northwestern Europe. Cold weather had retarded decomposition, placing time of death somewhere between two days and three weeks. Seven scars, three of which were from surgery, marked the boy’s body. Wrinkles on his right palm and the soles of both feet indicated submersion in water. Ultraviolet light made his left eye shine metallic blue, as if from a medical dye. An unidentified dark substance coated the inside of his throat. Detectives obtained the boy’s fingerprints and footprints and compared them to hospital birth records and files kept by various doctors, without a match. The boy in the box had no name. Police had little better luck with other evidence. The J.C. Penney bassinet was one of 12 sold in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, between December 3, 1956, and February 16, 1957. Officers traced the other 11 to their buyers. No fingerprints were found on the box. The blanket had been cleaned and mended shortly before it was discarded. Authorities tracked it to one of two woolen mills, but they never learned where the blanket was purchased. Police traced a blue cap, found 17 feet from the body, to a Philadelphia hat shop. The owner remembered its buyer, because he asked her to sew a small strap on the back, but her description of an average-sized blond man in his 20s led officers nowhere. Philadelphia’s police commissioner ordered a wider search, spanning 12 square miles around the dump site. A total of 320 officers joined in the sweep, recovering a child-sized scarf, a shirt that would have fit the dead boy, and a pair of children’s shoes that were too large for the victim. The searchers also found a man’s handkerchief with the monogram “G,” another torn piece of blanket that seemed to match the samples found earlier, and a dead cat wrapped

The Boy in the Box   53 in a man’s gray sweater. Chemical tests on the various objects revealed no clues. Welfare workers joined police in trying to identify the boy. They confirmed that all 464 of Philadelphia’s foster children were still living, as were all occupants of local orphans’ homes. Federal immigration agents also checked 11,200 passport photos in case the boy was an immigrant, but none matched. Photos of the boy appeared in newspapers and on police posters, but no one claimed him. Five months after his body was found, the child was buried without a name.

Dead Ends Publicity surrounding the case produced numerous tips for police, but none proved useful. First came the grieving people who had lost a child. Those cases included: Harold Sanders, a Delaware man who reported his wife and three children missing. Their son matched the box boy’s description, but police learned that the missing woman had simply left her husband, taking the children with her. A similar report of a woman and child missing from Rhode Island brought the same result. Terry Speece, an eight-year-old missing from New Jersey since January 1957, who was later found alive and well with his father. Cora Thompson, of Oklahoma, who thought the boy might be her missing son. Photos proved her wrong. A similar call came from a Pennsylvania couple who had placed their son in an orphanage seven months earlier. Police found him there, alive and well. George Broomall, a marine who thought the box boy might be one of his 17 siblings. A viewing at the morgue encouraged that belief, but officers later found his “missing” brother alive, in California. Next came “helpful” witnesses who told police that they had seen the boy with unidentified adults. However vague or strange each story seemed, police had to investigate.

54   Unsolved Crimes A local barber was “almost positive” he had cut the boy’s hair a week before the murder. The child had six siblings, he said, and lived in the Strawberry Mansion neighborhood. A motorist saw a woman and a child parked near the crime scene on February 24, “groping” inside their car’s trunk. When he stopped to offer help, believing they had a flat tire, the strangers turned their backs without speaking and stood mute until he left. A New Jersey waitress said she saw the boy twice during February 1957, dining with a red-faced man. Once, the man let him phone “Mommy” in Baltimore. An artist claimed she saw the dead boy sleeping beside a man on a bus ride from Philadelphia to southern New Jersey. A Delaware witness thought she saw the boy walk past her workplace, holding hands with a man who spoke of catching a train to Philadelphia. Police followed each of those leads and many more, all in vain. The boy in the box remained nameless.

Round Two Four decades after the crime, in February 1998, Detective Tom Augustine reopened the dormant investigation. His first move was to follow up a lead abandoned nearly 40 years before. In 1960 investigator Remington Bristow had asked psychic Florence Sternfeld for help on the case. Sternfeld visited the crime scene, then led Bristow to the nearby house of Arthur and Catherine Nicoletti, who ran a busy foster home. Catherine’s daughter from a previous marriage had also given birth to four children, but they all died young. Questioned by Bristow, the Nicolettis denied any knowledge of the murdered boy. Soon afterward, in 1961, the Nicolettis gave up foster care and sold their home. At the auction, Bristow saw a J.C. Penney bassinet and several blankets cut in half to fit children’s cots. Police questioned the Nicolettis again in 1984, but they refused to take polygraph tests. Bristow traced their family doctor in 1988, but he was deceased and his records were lost. Tom Augustine questioned the Nicolettis again in February 1998, convincing himself that they were innocent. That path of investigation was closed—but the case remained open, a haunting mystery.

The Boy in the Box   55 In October 1998, America’s Most Wanted featured the case on a TV broadcast. Afterward, producers and police received 160 tips from eight states and two Canadian provinces. None of the leads panned out, but they kept interest in the case alive. A month after the Most Wanted broadcast, police and FBI agents exhumed the box boy, extracting DNA samples from his bones and teeth. DNA technology did not exist in 1957, but now experts used it to learn if the child might be Steven Damman, a three-year-old

LThe Vidocq Society The Vidocq Society is a private group of forensic experts, formed in 1990 to investigate “cold” cases on a nonprofit basis. It is named for Eugène Vidocq, who founded the Sûreté (French version of the FBI) in 1811. By early 1998 its membership included two Philadelphia investigators who had worked the box boy’s case. In March 1998 the society’s 82 members voted to reopen that case. Detective Augustine presented the details, aided by a reporter who covered the original investigation. Society members got their first lead eight months later when an Internet chat group organized to discuss the murder. One participant wrote about a friend called Dianne who supposedly lived near the Nicoletti home and had attended school with some of their foster children. Dianne claimed that the Nicolettis had relatives on the Philadelphia police force who helped cover up their crime. Unfortunately, Dianne’s husband hated police and would not let her speak to them directly. Vidocq Society members tried several times to meet Dianne, but her Internet friend always made some excuse. First, Dianne and her husband were traveling, then her husband suffered a stroke. Finally, when the friend declared that Dianne was moving away, chat group moderators expelled her for plotting a hoax. In August 2000 Vidocq Society investigators found a note in police files from March 1957 describing the hasty flight of a Philadelphia family sought for questioning in the case. They were never found, but the society traced their former babysitter, learning that the family’s son bore no resemblance to the Boy in the Box. It was another frustrating dead end.

56   Unsolved Crimes kidnapped from Long Island, New York, in October 1955. Examiners also X-rayed the victim, seeking a fracture to match Steven Damman’s left leg. The results were negative. Next, forensic sculptor Frank Bender—whose work helped police capture fugitive mass-murderer John List in 1989, after 18 years in hiding—prepared a bust of what he believed the dead boy’s father might look like. It produced no leads. Still, calls concerning the case continue. In May 2002 an Ohio psychiatrist told Tom Augustine that one of his patients had witnessed the murder. The patient, identified only as Martha, claimed that her mother purchased a boy named Jonathan in 1955, viciously abusing him over the next two years, until he died in February 1957. Martha said that she had driven with her mother to discard the corpse in Philadelphia. She even described a motorist who had stopped to offer help, as they removed the dead boy from their car trunk. Augustine called Martha’s story the best lead yet, but no physical evidence remained, and Martha’s history of mental illness raised questions. Martha’s neighbors from the 1950s dismissed her tale as fantasy. In 2004 police investigated two more leads from persons who claimed they were related to the boy in the box. DNA proved them wrong in both cases.

Suspects While the victim in this case remains unknown, the murder is not without suspects. New Jersey police grilled a man who claimed he had visions of killing the boy; they then released him when they learned he was a mental patient. Six months later, in September 1957, officers raided a Pennsylvania farm and questioned six tenants, but all were soon released. Suspects identified by name include: John Powroznik, an 18-year-old who claimed he found the body three days before Frederick Benonis did, but failed to report it. Police dismissed Powroznik as an innocent muskrat trapper. Edward Posivak, a soldier from Philadelphia whom police questioned about the disappearance of a girlfriend in Tennessee. Posivak passed a polygraph test in both cases.

The Boy in the Box   57

LRebuilding Vanished Faces Forensic anthropologists reconstruct faces from skeletal remains in two basic ways. Two-dimensional reconstructions are hand-drawn portraits of an unknown subject’s face based on X-rays and the (continues)

This computer rendering shows a reconstruction made from the skull of a woman whose body was found dumped near a trucking corridor in New Orleans in February 2004. AP Photo/New Orleans Police Department

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(continued) subject’s skull itself, assisted in most modern cases by computer software programs designed for that specific purpose. Threedimensional reconstruction may use modeling clay or similar material placed over a cast of the unknown subject’s skull, or use of high-resolution, three-dimensional computer images. While the basic techniques of facial reconstruction were pioneered by European scientists in the 1880s, anthropologist Wilton Krogman popularized the technique in the early 1960s and is widely regarded as the father of modern reconstruction techniques. While a complete skull permits forensic scientists to specify a subject’s race, many other details of facial reconstruction—skin tone; hair color, length, and style; eye color; depth of facial tissue; size and shape of eyebrows, lips, nose and ears; presence of scars, birthmarks, tattoos or other marks—remain subjective and may not be accurate.

Margaret Martinez, arrested in Colorado during 1960 after leaving her three-year-old daughter’s corpse in a trash can. She confessed to that offense, but was cleared in the Philadelphia case. Kenneth and Irene Dudley, traveling carnival workers jailed in Virginia in 1961 for starving their daughter to death. The Dudleys admitted letting six of their 10 children die from abuse and neglect, dumping their bodies in various states. They served time for those crimes, but police could not link them to Philadelphia’s victim. The murder of a child—especially an unsolved slaying— ranks among the most traumatic of crimes for any community. In a case like this one, where even the victim remains unidentified, tragedy is sometimes transformed into legend.

6 JFK: Case Closed? While modern public opinion polls rank John Fitzgerald Kennedy (JFK) as one of America’s most popular presidents, his administration was very controversial. During his 1,036 days in office (19611963), Kennedy invaded Cuba, brought America to the brink of nuclear war with Russia, conducted secret bombing raids in Southeast Asia, threatened the profits of powerful oil companies, supported black civil rights in the face of violent white resistance, and launched sweeping investigations of organized crime. In short, he made enemies. But did they kill him? JFK’s assassination on November 22, 1963, was the fourth public murder of an American president. Today, while government spokesmen insist he was killed by a lone assassin, more than 80 percent of all Americans suspect a conspiracy. Is the JFK case solved . . . or not?

Death in Dallas All sides in the debate agree on certain basic facts. John Fitzgerald Kennedy visited Dallas, Texas, in November 1963 on political business. At 12:30 p.m. on November 22, shots were fired at his motorcade in Dealey Plaza. JFK suffered fatal wounds, while Texas Governor John Connally and a spectator, James Tague, were also hit. Doctors at Parkland Hospital pronounced JFK dead at 1 p.m. An hour later, federal agents removed his corpse for transport to Maryland’s Bethesda Naval Hospital, where an autopsy was performed. Meanwhile, police found a rifle in a building overlooking Dealey Plaza. They later learned that Dallas resident Lee Harvey Oswald

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Aerial view of Dealey Plaze, site of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Corbis had purchased the weapon under a false name. Oswald worked in the building but was not present when officers found the rifle. At 1:15 p.m., a gunman killed Officer J.D. Tippit in Oak Cliff, a Dallas suburb. At 1:50, police arrested Oswald in a nearby theater, confiscated a pistol, and charged him with Tippit’s murder. Later that night, he was also charged with killing JFK. Oswald denied both crimes and called himself a patsy (someone blamed for another’s actions).

JFK: Case Closed?  61 At 12:21 p.m. on November 24, during his transfer from police headquarters to the county jail, Oswald was murdered by Jack Ruby, a local nightclub owner. On September 27, 1964, a special panel of investigators reported that Oswald and Ruby both acted alone, for personal reasons. Case closed? Hardly.

Mystery Wounds and Magic Bullets Problems began at Parkland Hospital, where doctors noted an entrance wound in JFK’s throat and a shallow wound in his back, with no bullet present. Death resulted from a massive head wound, suggesting three hits on JFK alone. At Bethesda, everything changed, with reports that a bullet entered JFK’s back, came out through his throat, then inflicted multiple wounds on Governor Connally before winding up in Connally’s leg. A second shot struck JFK’s skull, while one more missed his car and grazed James Tague at streetside. The two accounts were clearly incompatible. The mystery was compounded when JFK’s autopsy surgeon burned his notes and other crucial evidence (including Kennedy’s brain) was “lost.” Federal investigators claimed that one bullet—found undamaged on a stretcher at Parkland Hospital—caused all of the nonfatal wounds suffered by JFK and Connally, but that theory raised further problems. Critics noted that the “magic bullet” must have radically changed course in midair after striking JFK, then pierced Connally’s torso, wrist, and leg, all without suffering any significant damage before it conveniently dropped on an emergency room stretcher for FBI agents to find. Strangely, there was less metal missing from the bullet found at Parkland than Connally’s surgeons found in his torso and wrist.

Oswald and Ruby The alleged “lone-nut” assassins were also quite strange. Lee Oswald (1939–63) joined the Marine Corps after high school and monitored spy flights over Soviet Russia, then defected to Russia in 1959, renounced his U.S. citizenship, and married the daughter

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A photo of the bullet that was found at Parkland Hospital, seen June 13, 1967. Tests showed that the bullet came from Oswald’s rifle. AP Photo/Warren Commission

of a communist spy. In 1961 he changed his mind and returned to America with his wife and daughter, while the United States government raised no objections. In New Orleans he passed out leaflets supporting Cuba’s communist regime while operating from an office he shared with violent anticommunists. Federal agents claimed that Oswald went to Mexico City two months before JFK’s murder to visit the Russian embassy. Oddly, photos snapped on that occasion by agents of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) show a man bearing no resemblance to Oswald. Others who saw “Oswald” during autumn 1963 also could not identify his photograph. Was someone else impersonating him? And if so, why? Jack Ruby (1911–67) was equally strange. Born in Chicago, he spent most of his life involved with powerful members of organized crime. From 1959 to 1960, he was active in CIA campaigns against Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. After moving to Dallas in 1947, he

JFK: Case Closed?  63 ran a nightclub popular with local police and gangsters alike. Ruby first claimed that he shot Oswald to spare JFK’s wife from the pain of appearing at Oswald’s trial. Later, Ruby offered to identify conspirators in return for protective custody in Washington, D.C., but investigators would not listen. He died in prison, in 1967.

The Warren Report Seven days after JFK’s death, President Lyndon B. Johnson (LBJ) appointed a special commission to investigate the case. Chief Justice Earl Warren of the U.S. Supreme Court led the panel, which also included two senators, two congressmen, a former CIA chief, and an ex-chief of the World Bank. Before the commission held its first meeting, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover announced that Oswald had acted alone. The final Warren Report, published in September 1964, supported that verdict. Critics called the Warren Report a whitewash, or cover-up, complaining that much evidence and many witnesses were either ignored completely or wrongly dismissed as unimportant. Today, from various critical studies, reports by the Church Committee and the House Select Committee on Assassinations, documents released under the Freedom of Information Act, and the statements of participants involved in the events, it is known that n Both

the CIA and FBI withheld many files from the Warren Commission, including evidence that both agencies had contact with Oswald and Ruby before November 1963. n More than 50 witnesses in Dealey Plaza, including at least one policeman, believed shots were fired at JFK’s motorcade from a second location (a now-famous “grassy knoll” in front of Kennedy’s limousine). n FBI experts tested Oswald’s rifle and found it incapable of firing the shots that killed JFK. Its bolt-action was too slow, and the telescopic sight could not focus until they repaired it. n The Warren Commission altered a film shot by witness Abraham Zapruder, rearranging frames to change the movement of JFK’s body at impact of the fatal shot. n Prior to his 1964 election, LBJ sealed most assassination records until 2039 (an act overturned by Congress in 1992). Some files still remain sealed until 2017.

64   Unsolved Crimes It is small wonder, then, that scores of books, hundreds of articles, and several films have criticized the Warren Report. But if conspirators killed Kennedy, who were they?

Suspects and Theories Dozens of theories claim to solve the troubling mysteries of JFK’s assassination. They include: “Friendly Fire.” Author Bonar Menninger claims that a clumsy Secret Service agent accidentally fired the fatal shot after Oswald wounded JFK. The agent sued Menninger in 1995, but a judge dismissed the case. LBJ. JFK reluctantly chose Johnson as his vice president in 1960. Johnson disliked JFK and hated his brother, Attorney General Robert Kennedy, whom Johnson fired after JFK’s murder promoted Johnson to president. Four criminal investigations of LBJ into allegations of fraud and corruption ended when he became president. The CIA. Kennedy blamed the CIA for bungling its 1961 Cuban invasion and hiring gangsters to kill Castro. Some insiders claim that JFK planned to dismantle the agency—a plan canceled by his murder. Fidel Castro. Cuba’s dictator knew of the plots to kill him in 1961–62. Several authors view JFK’s murder as payback. Soviet Russia. JFK embarrassed Russia during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis by forcing the USSR to remove nuclear missiles from Cuba, allegedly prompting some hard-line communists to retaliate. A Soviet defector supported this theory but had no evidence to prove it. Cuban Exiles. Thousands of Cubans fled Castro’s regime in the 1950s and helped the CIA oppose him. Some exile leaders predicted JFK’s death in advance. The Mafia. American gangsters lost millions when Castro closed their Cuban casinos. They used their money and connections to help elect JFK in 1960, as a favor to his father (a 1920s bootlegger), who promised Cuban liberation. Instead, JFK and his brother prosecuted mob leaders nationwide, prompting several to threaten his life.

JFK: Case Closed?  65 Jimmy Hoffa. The Kennedys prosecuted union leader Jimmy Hoffa on corruption charges. Hoffa hated them both, threatened their lives, and allegedly purchased weapons for the assassination. Military-Industrial Complex. Billionaire arms dealers hoped for escalation in Vietnam, but JFK threatened the withdrawal of American troops if reelected in 1964. LBJ committed thousands of troops and billions of dollars to the war during 1964 to 1968. White Racists. Terrorist groups like the Ku Klux Klan hated JFK for supporting black civil rights. Many racists threatened his life, and at least one predicted the murder a week in advance. Oil companies. JFK threatened to wipe out huge tax breaks for U.S. oil companies in his second term. Dallas billionaire oilman H.L. Hunt’s son printed posters in November 1963, claiming JFK was “Wanted for Treason.” J. Edgar Hoover. The FBI director hated JFK and Robert Kennedy, fearing they would fire him after 1964’s election. He was also friendly with leaders of organized crime. Most conspiracy theories blame him for a cover-up, rather than the murder itself. Israel. Israeli leaders resented JFK’s pressure to drop their nuclear weapons program and his peace talks with Arab nations. Israel makes no secret of its willingness to kill enemies, though most are labeled terrorists.

Investigation Renewed By 1976, conspiracy theories were so widespread that Congress voted to conduct a new investigation of JFK’s murder and the 1968 slaying of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) held hearings from 1977 to 1979, finally reporting that both murders were probably the result of separate conspiracies. That judgment placed the U.S. government in a strange position, since many officials still supported the Warren Report’s loneassassin verdict. In effect, Washington now wanted it both ways. According to the HSCA’s final report:

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LEchoes of Conspiracy The HSCA’s conspiracy verdict in JFK’s murder rests on scientific analysis of an audio recording made at the assassination scene. Dallas police motorcycles had radio transmitters attached for communication with headquarters, and one microphone was reportedly jammed “open” when the fatal shots were fired. As a result, a Dictabelt (a recording device attached either to police motorcycles or recording from the officer’s open microphone) recording of the gunshots was preserved, studied by both the Warren Commission and the later House committee. In 1964 FBI analysts reported that the tape contained no sounds of gunfire. In 1978, experts hired by the HSCA reached a very different conclusion, reporting that the tape includes echoes of four gunshots—one more than Oswald’s rifle could have fired within the time frame of the shooting. While that evidence appeared to prove a second gunman fired at Kennedy in 1963, it did not tell investigators where the extra shot came from, or who pulled the trigger. Supporters of the Warren Report struck back in 1981, with their own interpretation of the Dallas recording. According to analysts at the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), the “fourth shot” was simply random noise, perhaps radio static, and may have been recorded a full minute after JFK was shot, while his motorcade raced toward Parkland Hospital. That conclusion, in turn, was challenged in 2001 by D.B. Thomas, a government scientist and longtime assassination researcher. Thomas concluded that the HSCA’s findings were correct, while the NAS study was wrong. Thomas repeated that finding at a conference in 2005, presenting what he claimed was further scientific evidence of a fourth shot from a second gunman. Meanwhile, in 2003, an ABC News investigation matched the audio recordings against computer-generated diagrams of the assassination and concluded that the tape was not made in Dealey Plaza at all.

JFK: Case Closed?  67 n Oswald

killed JFK, while a second unknown gunman fired from in front of the president’s car. n Neither the Cuban nor the Russian government plotted to kill JFK. n Neither the Mafia nor anti-Castro Cubans plotted the murder as groups, but unnamed individuals may have participated. n The Secret Service was not involved in JFK’s death. n The CIA and FBI both failed to fully investigate JFK’s death and withheld information from the Warren Commission. Those judgments, vague as they are, cleared every suspect named in published critiques of the Warren Report, including known leaders of organized crime and extremist groups who had threatened JFK’s life or predicted his murder in front of witnesses. Oswald alone took full blame for the fatal shooting, while the Warren Report’s “magic bullet” theory passed largely unchallenged. The HSCA did not attempt to name its hypothetical second gunman, basing his existence on analysis of audio recordings from Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963. That compromise verdict satisfied few critics of the Warren Report, and none of its supporters. Curiously, while the HSCA denied any organized Mafia plot to kill JFK, committee chief counsel Robert Blakey later published a book titled The Plot to Kill the President (1981), which detailed a Mafia conspiracy against JFK. That book was reissued in 1993 as Fatal Hour: The Assassination of President Kennedy by Organized Crime. The conspiracy debate continues.

7 Where’s Jimmy? Jimmy Hoffa had problems on July 30, 1975. He was an ex-convict, having served four years of a 15-year federal sentence for jurytampering, and his world had collapsed while he was inside. While grateful to be free, he raged against the conditions placed on his freedom—specifically, a ban on holding office in the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT), the labor union that had been his life’s work for 43 years. That afternoon, he had a lunch date with two men who might be able to resolve his problem. Should they refuse, he knew enough about them to give them trouble if he started talking to the FBI. Hoffa waited for his guests outside the Machus Red Fox Restaurant in Bloomfield Hills, a suburb of Detroit, Michigan. At 2:15 p.m. he called his wife to say that the others were late. It was the last time Josephine Hoffa heard her husband’s voice. When Hoffa failed to return home for dinner, his wife was alarmed. Jimmy’s lunch guests were dangerous men. On July 31, relatives found Hoffa’s car outside the Red Fox and filed a missing person report. The Federal Bureau of Investigation and the police are still looking for Hoffa. But no one expects to find him alive.

A Union Man James Riddle Hoffa was born in New York City on St. Valentine’s Day 1913, but there was little romance in his early life. Hoffa lost his father, a coal miner, at age seven. Four years later, his mother moved the family to Detroit. Hoffa quit school at 14 and found

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Teamsters president Jimmy Hoffa is shown in this June 1974 photograph. AP Photo

Where’s Jimmy?  71 work in a warehouse where mistreatment of the workers by their bosses angered him. At age 19 he was active in the local union, and at 20 Hoffa led his first strike by swampers, workers who unloaded produce from delivery trucks. Strikes were often violent in those days, as management hired thugs to break unions and union members fought back the same way. Hoffa’s union—the International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT)—had a tough reputation. Founded in 1899, and led by Boston’s Daniel Tobin from 1907 to 1952, the Teamsters battled police and gangsters nationwide during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Jimmy Hoffa proved himself a brave and tireless worker for the union in those years—but he was also making shady friends around Detroit and elsewhere. Leaders of organized crime did not care which side won a labor dispute as long as the winners were willing to pay for services rendered. Hoffa soon earned a name as a man with powerful friends in the Mob, and he kept their friendship with loans of union money, by hiring mobsters for jobs with little or no work involved, and by favoring Mob businesses with favorable, “sweetheart” contracts, deals that often included illegal or unethical terms. In return, the gangsters used their guns and muscle to make sure that Hoffa’s rise to power in the union was unchallenged. By age 37 he was chairman of the IBT’s Central States Driving Council. Two years later, members elected Hoffa president of the union’s Michigan Conference. Another vote the same year (1952) made Hoffa the IBT’s vice president, second-in-command to President Dave Beck. Trouble found the IBT in 1956 and 1957 when the U.S. Senate Committee on Labor accused Teamster leaders of corruption. Future president John F. Kennedy was a member of that committee, while his brother—future Attorney General Robert Kennedy—served as chief counsel. Robert Kennedy and Hoffa argued publicly on live TV and left the hearings bitter enemies. Publicity from the Senate hearings drove leaders of America’s largest union, the AFL-CIO, to expel the Teamsters in 1957. That same year, Dave Beck was convicted of tax evasion and misusing union funds. When Beck went to prison, Hoffa became the IBT’s president. The stage was set for a dramatic confrontation with the U.S. government. (continues on page 74)

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LTrue Life CSI If Hoffa’s remains are ever found, identification may depend on forensic anthropologists who examine bones. That examination first determines if the bones are human, then (if so) proceeds with various tests to identify the person’s gender, race, height, and approximate age. Skeletal remains may also reveal injuries, perhaps including those that caused a victim’s death. Race is normally determined by the shape of a skull, while gender (sex) may be determined from the pelvis. Development of the skull, and of the long bones in the arms and legs, helps forensic anthropologists calculate age. Damage to various bones determines whether injuries were caused by sharp force, blunt trauma, or gunshots. The same evidence may also tell if wounding occurred before death (antemortem), near death (perimortem), or after death (postmortem). Viewers of the television series Bones, based on novels written by real-life forensic anthropologist Kathy Reichs, have seen

Chief forensic anthropologist and novelist Kathy Reichs handles a human bone. Christopher J. Morris/Corbis

Where’s Jimmy?  73

how facial features may be reconstructed from a skull long after death. Experts begin by calculating the average depth of flesh on different parts of the skull—scalp, forehead, cheeks, jaw, and chin—then covering the skull with clay and sculpting probable features. Some reconstructions are eerily accurate, but the effort may go astray if a subject was unusually fat or thin prior to death. It also would not reflect scars, birthmarks, or tattoos. In the United States forensic anthropologists rely primarily on three facilities for research into skeletal remains. The HamannTodd Collection, assembled beginning in 1893, is located at Ohio’s Cleveland Museum of Natural History. It includes more than 3,100 human skeletons and over 900 skeletons from other primates (apes and monkeys). The Robert J. Terry Collection, located at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., is named for the professor who led Washington University Medical School’s anatomy department (in St. Louis, Missouri) from 1899 until 1941. At last count, the Terry Collection included 1,728 human skeletons, each with extensive documentation of the donor’s personal history. A smaller but more famous collection resides at the University of Tennessee’s Forensic Anthropology Facility, outside Knoxville. That facility is better known as the “Body Farm,” and lent its name to Patricia Cornwell’s mystery novel of the same title in 1995. Dr. William Bass founded the three-acre Body Farm in 1971 after discovering that America had no other site where forensic scientists could study decomposing corpses. At the Body Farm donated cadavers are exposed in various ways—buried in shallow graves, placed in car trunks, dumped in plain sight, and so forth—simulating disposal techniques used by killers. Scientists then observe the rate of decomposition and insect activity, determining how (and how quickly) corpses decompose in different circumstances. The FBI and various other law enforcement agencies train their homicide investigators and forensic experts at the Body Farm.

74   Unsolved Crimes (continued from page 71)

Hoffa vs. the Kennedys From 1956 onward Robert Kennedy made it his personal mission to jail Jimmy Hoffa. In 1960, when JFK ran for president against Richard Nixon, Hoffa’s union supported Nixon. Kennedy won the election and named his brother attorney general, launching a three-year crusade against organized crime in America. Hoffa was the new crusade’s number-one target. FBI agents followed him and tapped his telephones, collecting evidence that Hoffa had misused $9.5 million of IBT money, while signing illegal sweetheart contracts with various employers. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, who also hated the Kennedys, secretly leaked information from Bureau files to Hoffa’s defense lawyers. At Hoffa’s first trial, in October 1962, jurors voted 7-5 for acquittal, but the judge accused Hoffa of jury-tampering and declared a mistrial. A second jury convicted Hoffa on multiple charges, in January 1964, and he received a 15-year prison term. His appeals ran out in 1967, and Hoffa began serving his time. Much had changed in Washington, D.C., between Hoffa’s first and second trials. JFK was murdered in November 1963 (see Chapter 6), and some inside the Teamsters’ Union named Hoffa as a suspect, claiming that he bought weapons and hired gunmen to target the Kennedys. Lee Oswald’s murder in Texas and the Warren Report’s lone-gunman verdict discredited those claims. President Lyndon Johnson fired Robert Kennedy in 1964, but the change came too late to save Hoffa from prison.

Jimmy (Almost) Makes a Comeback Teamster members defiantly reelected Hoffa as their president, despite his felony conviction, but Hoffa chose Frank Fitzsimmons to run the union while he was in prison. In 1968 Hoffa’s friend Richard Nixon was elected president with Teamster support (including illegal donations later proved by the FBI). Hoffa hoped for early release, while Fitzsimmons maintained the IBT’s alliance with gangsters.

Where’s Jimmy?  75 In December 1971 Nixon freed Hoffa on the condition that Hoffa must abstain from any union activity for 10 years. Furious, Hoffa blamed Fitzsimmons for Nixon’s decision. He challenged the restriction in court and attacked Fitzsimmons in public statements. Privately, some sources say that Hoffa threatened to expose shady deals—including Nixon’s illegal campaign funds and CIAMafia plots to kill Fidel Castro—unless he was permitted to rejoin the IBT. Instead, he disappeared. Some sources claim that Hoffa’s scheduled lunch partners for July 30, 1975, were two Mafia leaders, Anthony Giacalone (of Detroit) and Anthony Provenzano (from New Jersey). Others report that a note left by Hoffa at home, before he left for lunch that day, read “Russ and Frank.” Author T.J. English suggests that Hoffa’s note referred to Mafia boss Russell Buffalino and Delaware Teamster official Frank Sheeran, a longtime friend of Hoffa’s.

Where’s Jimmy? Hoffa’s family and most researchers, whether private or in law enforcement, share the belief that Hoffa was murdered on July 30, 1975. While rumors of sightings persist to this day, Hoffa was declared legally dead on the seventh anniversary of his disappearance. But who killed him, and where is his body? FBI agents searched Hoffa’s car on August 8, 1975. They found fingerprints from IBT officer Charles O’Brien—sometimes described as Hoffa’s foster son—on a soda bottle and on papers in the glove compartment. Two weeks later, tracking dogs allegedly found Hoffa’s scent in the backseat of a car that O’Brien borrowed from Anthony Giacalone’s son. A grand jury examined Hoffa’s case in September 1975, but failed to indict any suspects. Over the next decade 200 FBI agents worked Hoffa’s case, filing 16,000 reports. Six suspects in his disappearance were convicted on unrelated charges, including Giacalone and Provenzano (who died in prison while serving time for another murder). Meanwhile, various informants directed G-men to four different lakes and to supposed gravesites in four states. Searchers found nothing.

76   Unsolved Crimes Theories of Hoffa’s death include the following: n In

1982 hitman Charles Allen told Senate investigators that Hoffa was killed on Provenzano’s orders, then “ground up in little pieces, shipped to Florida, and thrown into a swamp.” n Another hitman, Donald Frankos, claimed, in 1989, that Hoffa was buried under Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey. Investigators disproved that story. n Later in 1989 Detroit FBI agent Kenneth Walton told reporters, “I’m comfortable I know who did it, but it’s never going to be prosecuted because we would have to divulge informants, confidential sources.” n In 1991 yet another hitman, Richard “Ice Man” Kuklinski, claimed others had told him that Hoffa’s body was crushed in a junk car and shipped overseas as scrap metal. Kuklinski denied any personal role in the murder. n In 2000 New York mobster Bill Bonanno confirmed rumors that Hoffa’s body was crushed in a car compactor. n In 2003 FBI agents searched the backyard of a Michigan home frequented by Teamster official and suspected hitman Frank Sheeran. They found nothing. A year later, author Charles Brandt published a book based on Sheeran’s deathbed confessions to numerous murders, including the Hoffa slaying. Brandt claims that Sheeran drove Hoffa to a house in Detroit and shot him there, after which others cremated Hoffa’s body. FBI agents searched the Detroit home in 2004 and found bloodstains, but DNA tests allegedly proved they did not come from Hoffa. n In February 2006 the wife of New York mobster Louie Milito claimed that, during a 1988 argument, her husband admitted killing Hoffa and dumping his corpse near New York City’s Verrazano Narrows Bridge. n In April 2006 author Philip Carlo announced that his forthcoming biography of contract killer Richard Kuklinski would name the Ice Man as one of five men who kidnapped and killed Hoffa in 1975. Kuklinski died in prison before Carlo’s announcement. n In May 2006, acting on a tip from federal prisoner Donovan Wells, FBI agents excavated tons of earth at a Michigan farm, seeking Hoffa’s remains. Nothing was found during the twoweek search.

Where’s Jimmy?  77

Workers dig near a barn at a horse farm in Milford Township, Michigan, where FBI agents were investigating Jimmy Hoffa’s 1975 disappearance. AP Photo/Paul Sancya

78   Unsolved Crimes The closest thing to prosecution in Hoffa’s case, so far, occurred more than a quarter-century after Jimmy’s disappearance. In March 2001 DNA tests matched hairs from Hoffa’s hairbrush to another hair found in the backseat of Charles O’Brien’s car. Agents passed the case to Michigan authorities, but the result was disappointing. In August 2002 Oakland County prosecutor David Gorcya declared that the evidence would not support criminal charges.

8 Deadly Medicine Nearly everyone experiences a headache or some other kind of pain from time to time. For most Americans, relief comes in the form of pain-relieving (analgesic) pills purchased without a medical prescription. Many people grumble while grappling with tamper-proof seals on their favorite painkillers—but how many remember that the small inconvenience of those seals springs from a still-unsolved mass-murder case that claimed seven lives and panicked the country 25 years ago?

The Tylenol Murders The terror began early on September 29, 1982, when 12-year-old Mary Kellerman, a resident of Elk Grove Village near Chicago, complained of a sore throat and sniffles. She took a capsule of Extra Strength Tylenol and went back to bed. At 7 a.m. Mary’s parents found her unconscious on the bathroom floor and called an ambulance. Doctors at a nearby hospital pronounced her dead at 10 a.m. Autopsy results showed that Mary had swallowed a mixture of Tylenol and deadly cyanide poison. By the time those tests were completed, however, more victims had died. Soon after Mary Kellerman’s collapse, another ambulance raced to the home of Adam Janus in Arlington Heights, another Chicago suburb. Paramedics rushed Janus to the emergency ward, but doctors could not revive him. That same evening, relatives of Janus gathered to mourn his passing and plan his funeral. Adam’s brother Stanley and his wife Theresa both complained of headaches. Each took an Extra Strength Tylenol tablet, and quickly collapsed.

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80   Unsolved Crimes Again, paramedics made their mad dash, with sirens wailing—and again, they were too late. Stanley Janus died that night, followed by Theresa on October 1. By that time, three more victims had been stricken by sudden, unexplained fatal illness. Paula Prince died in Chicago, Mary Reiner in Winfield, Illinois, and Mary McFarland in Elmhurst, Illinois. After the sudden deaths of three Janus family members, physicians suspected poison. Blood samples were tested and confirmed potassium cyanide as the cause of death in all seven cases. Police soon learned that all the victims had died after taking Extra Strength Tylenol capsules. Tylenol was relatively new in 1982, but advertising by its manufacturer, Johnson & Johnson, had increased its share of the painkiller market to 35 percent in six short years, with sales of $400 million per year. That meant millions of people were using Tylenol each day—but how many of them were flirting with death?

Hunting a Killer Announcement of the Tylenol connection caused a panic in Chicago, where TV and radio bulletins warned against taking the capsules. Police cars cruised through different residential neighborhoods, broadcasting the alarm over loudspeakers. Johnson & Johnson alerted hospitals and stores nationwide, issuing a recall of Tylenol products on October 5. Still, with some 31 million bottles on sale, and countless more in homes across America, it was impossible to get them all. Detectives soon learned that the Tylenol bottles containing poisoned capsules came from several different factories, ruling out contamination at the point of production. In time, the deadly doses were traced to six different stores in Chicago and its suburbs. Some of the bottles held fewer than five poisoned capsules, while one contained 10. Police surmised that a single killer had stolen bottles of Tylenol from various stores over a period of weeks or months, then opened the capsules and mixed cyanide with their harmless contents before returning to the stores and replacing the bottles. One store received two poisoned bottles, the other five, one bottle each. Police charted store locations on the map, noting connecting streets in hopes that they could find out where the killer lived, but

Deadly Medicine  81

Tylenol capsules laced with cyanide (right) beside a bottle of pure capsules in the medical examiner’s office in Cook County, Illinois. Bettmann/Corbis

all in vain. Strangely, the poisoner had steered clear of downtown Chicago, but police could not determine why, unless they caught their man—or woman—and asked in person. One early suspect, never publicly named, was an amateur chemist who worked at a warehouse that supplied local stores with Tylenol. Police claimed the man had boasted of experimenting with cyanide. A search of his home revealed books on poisons, together with weapons and two one-way airline tickets to Thailand. Police jailed the man on firearms charges but found no evidence linking him to the murders.

82   Unsolved Crimes Next, in January 1983, FBI agents announced their search for an unknown man who had attended the Janus family funerals. Killers sometimes revisit the scenes of their crimes or spy on a victim’s

LCatching a Copycat Sue Snow, the manager of a bank in Seattle, Washington, woke with a headache at 6:00 a.m. on June 11, 1986. She swallowed two Extra Strength Excedrin capsules and began getting ready for work. Forty minutes later, Snow’s teenage daughter found her sprawled in the bathroom, barely breathing. She died soon afterward at a local hospital. Doctors suspected a drug overdose, but Hayley Snow insisted that her mother used no drugs. She did not smoke and drank no alcohol. During the autopsy, a medical examiner smelled bitter almonds, the odor of cyanide. Blood tests confirmed the diagnosis, and a new product-tampering panic ensued. Police were still searching store shelves on June 17, when 42year-old Stella Nickell called to report that her husband had died 12 days earlier, after taking Extra Strength Excedrin. Bruce Nickell was already buried, but police tested a sample of his blood, preserved because he was an organ donor, and they found more cyanide. They also found two bottles of Excedrin with contaminated capsules in the Nickell home. While local officers fanned out to search for a homicidal maniac, FBI analysts tested the poison from Seattle. Mixed with the cyanide, they found tiny flakes of Algae Destroyer, a chemical used to kill algae in fish tanks. Back in Seattle, agents noted that the Nickells had a fish tank in their home. Probing deeper, investigators learned that Stella Nickell had purchased Algae Destroyer shortly before her husband died. They also learned that she had multiple convictions for check fraud, forgery, and child abuse during 1968–1971. In the year before Bruce died, Stella had purchased life insurance policies on him valued at $176,000. Agents questioned Stella on November 18, and she lied about purchasing Algae Destroyer. Next, she failed a polygraph exam that included questions concerning her husband’s murder. Six

Deadly Medicine  83 relatives, but the Bureau never found its man. Today, a $100,000 reward offered by Johnson & Johnson for the Tylenol killer’s arrest is still unclaimed.

weeks later, Stella’s daughter told agents that Stella had plotted to murder her husband for years, flubbing one attempt to poison him and later looking for a hitman who could make his death seem accidental. Prosecutors were convinced that Stella Nickell had killed her husband—and that she had also planted bottles of poisoned Excedrin in local stores to blame his death on another random killer. In the process, she had also killed Sue Snow, a total stranger. In February 1987 a federal grand jury indicted Stella Nickell for committing murder by product tampering. She was the first defendant charged under the 1983 Tylenol Act. Nickell pled not guilty at trial 14 months later, but jurors disagreed. On May 9, 1988, they found her guilty as charged. At sentencing, Judge William Dwyer referred to Nickell’s crimes as being “of exceptional callousness and cruelty.” She received a 99-year prison sentence, with no parole for the first 30 years. Despite that judgment in court, Nickell continues to protest her innocence. In 2000 she found a pair of new attorneys who believe her, working pro bono (free of charge) to secure her release from prison. Nickell and her lawyers maintain that critical prosecution witnesses were paid for their testimony, and are therefore unreliable. The pet store manager who testified that Nickell bought Algae Destroyer (which she still denies) received a $15,000 reward after Nickell was convicted. A neighbor of Stella’s also received $7,500 from the FBI to watch Nickell and report on her movements before she was indicted. Whether those facts make a difference in regard to guilt or innocence will be a question for some future judge to answer. As of press time for this book, Nickell’s appeals have been denied.

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Extortion In the midst of the manhunt, authorities were sidetracked by a handwritten letter to Johnson & Johnson demanding $1 million to stop the product tampering. Instead of responding through the Chicago Tribune as ordered, Johnson & Johnson set FBI agents on the letter-writer’s trail. Agents soon traced the letter to James W. Lewis, a con artist already wanted for jewel robbery and murder in Kansas City, Missouri. As the law closed in, Lewis sent a letter to the Tribune, signed “Robert Richardson,” denying any part in the Tylenol slayings. Authorities recognized the Richardson name as an alias often used by Lewis. On December 13, 1982, after a nationwide chase, FBI agents caught Lewis at the New York City Public Library. His wife surrendered the following week, in Chicago. Both denied any involvement in the murders, and James denied writing the letter to Johnson & Johnson, but fingerprints and handwriting analysis proved he was lying. Further research showed that the Lewises were living in New York when the Tylenol killer prepared his deadly capsules, so no murder charges were filed. Instead, prosecutors charged James Lewis with extortion (demanding money with threats), plus six unrelated counts of fraud. Convicted on all counts at trial, Lewis received a 20-year sentence and served 13 years before he was paroled in 1995. But the Tylenol killer remained at large.

A Question of Motive When police had ruled out any link between the victims in Chicago, they were forced to ask: What makes a person poison random strangers without any hope of private gain? In 1982 FBI psychologists profiled the killer as a white male in his 20s, residing in Chicago. He had a car and was a skilled shoplifter. Analysts surmised that the killer had few friends and generally hated people. He was clever, but not overly intelligent. According to the FBI, most product-tampering cases are motivated by greed. Offenders hope to make easy money in one of three ways—by extorting it from a manufacturer, by claiming life

Deadly Medicine  85 insurance for a relative who dies, or by posing as a victim and suing the product suppliers. James Lewis tried the first method in 1982, without actually committing the murders. Relatives of the other Chicago victims sued Johnson & Johnson for some $35 million in 1983, but no survivors were linked to the crimes. The Tylenol killer, whatever his motive, gained nothing but headlines for his trouble—and, perhaps, a sick, sadistic thrill from watching strangers suffer.

Copycats and Congress A strange fact of modern life is the copycat effect, an impulse that drives some unstable persons to imitate notorious crimes. Hollywood and crime novels exaggerate the number of copycats at large in the world, but the 1982 Tylenol murders unleashed a swarm of imitators from coast to coast. Within a year of the Chicago murders, authorities reported 270 cases of suspected product tampering, including Anacin spiked with rat poison, Sinex nasal spray and Visine eye drops polluted with acid, candy bars laced with straight pins, chocolate milk contaminated with sodium hydroxide, hot dogs containing razor blades, and orange juice mixed with insecticide. More deaths resulted from contaminated Excedrin and Tylenol (in 1986), Sudafed (1991), and Goody’s Headache Powder (1992). Is the Tylenol killer still active? FBI spokesmen report 53 letters threatening product tampering, all mailed from Chicago or nearby Gary, Indiana, since the original murders. Actual cases of tampering, including some with cyanide, have occurred in Chicago, North Chicago, suburban Lombard, and other nearby cities. Tamper-proof packaging was rare in autumn 1982, but Johnson & Johnson pioneered new safety measures starting in November of that year. It also introduced caplets, solid oval pills that cannot be opened and refilled with harmful substances. Other manufacturers soon followed Johnson & Johnson’s lead. In May 1983, Congress passed the Tylenol Act, making it a federal crime to tamper with consumer products, regardless of motive. In 1989, after much debate, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration set national requirements for tamper-proof packaging on all nonprescription medicines.

9 The Art of Crime Hollywood loves thieves who rob museums. Movies portray them as athletic and adventurous, near-geniuses who have more fun outwitting clumsy cops than spending their ill-gotten gains. In most films they are also handsome and romantic, connoisseurs of gourmet food and high-priced wine. From The Jewel Thieves Run to Earth by Sexton Blake (1910) and Theft of the Crown Jewels (1914) to Entrapment (1999), The Thomas Crown Affair (1999), and The Score (2001), art and jewel thieves appear on screen as sassy rebels whom we grudgingly admire. Or, they are played for laughs. From Animal Crackers (1930) through The Happy Thieves (1962), The Pink Panther and its sequels (1963-2005), to The Fiendish Plot of Dr. Fu Manchu (1980), robbery of museums and art galleries is often presented as a hilarious hobby. The truth is rather different.

The Big Haul Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840–1920) was a renowned art collector who founded her own museum in 1903. She paid for the construction with a large inheritance received after her father died in 1891. After the building was completed, Gardner and her staff lived on the top (fourth) floor, while her collection filled the floors below. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is small by normal standards, but it includes a glass-covered garden courtyard and its galleries contain a world-famous collection of paintings, sculpture, ceramics, drawings, prints, rare books and manuscripts, jewelry, textiles, and furniture. The collections of paintings by Italian

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88   Unsolved Crimes Renaissance artists, Dutch masters, and famous nineteenth-century American artists are among the finest on Earth. In short, it makes a perfect target for art thieves. At 1:24 a.m. on March 18, 1990, soon after Boston finished its noisy celebration of St. Patrick’s Day, two men dressed as police officers knocked on the museum’s side door. When security guards answered, the “policemen” claimed they had received a call for help from someone inside the museum. Museum policy forbids admitting any strangers after nightfall, but the guards ignored that rule and welcomed the two “cops” inside. Without drawing weapons, the intruders quickly overpowered both guards, dragged them into the basement, and then handcuffed and bound them with duct tape. Neither guard had been able to reach the museum’s “panic button,” and the facility had no other alarms. During the next 85 minutes, the two thieves roamed at will through the museum, stealing 11 paintings, a bronze Chinese vase from the Shan Dynasty (1200–1100 B.C.), and a bronze eagle that topped a Napoleonic flag. They also tried to steal a twelfth painting, but failed to pry it from its frame. Before leaving, the bandits took the museum’s video surveillance tapes of the robbery in progress. The stolen paintings included the following: Tortoni, by French artist Édouard Manet (1832–1883) n Five drawings by French master Edgar Degas (July 1834–1917), including Cortege aux Environs de Florence, La Sortie du Pelage, Three Mounted Jockeys, and two different versions of Program for an Artistic Soiree mounted in a single frame n Three works by Dutch genius Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (1606–1669), including A Lady and a Gentleman in Black, The Storm on the Sea of Galilee, and a self-portrait no larger than a postage stamp n The Concert, by Dutch artist Johannes (or Jan) Vermeer (1632–1675) n Landscape with an Obelisk, by another Dutch artist, Govaert Teuniszoon Flinck (1615–1660) n Chez

While the thieves ignored some even more valuable paintings—such as Titian’s The Rape of Europa (1562)—museum curators estimated their haul at $300 million. Worse yet, the Isabella

The Art of Crime  89 Stewart Gardner Museum had no insurance against theft. A $5 million reward for return of the paintings and other objects in good condition has never been claimed. Museum guards described the two thieves as white males in their late 20s or early 30s. Both had dark eyes, black hair, and shiny

LThe Y2 Kaper Many alarmists predicted worldwide disaster in the year 2000 (Y2K), but no one expected the twenty-first century to start with another dramatic art theft. The target, this time, was England’s Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology at Oxford University. (continues)

The exterior of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Chris Andrews; Chris Andrews Publications/Corbis

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(continued) Named for collector Elias Ashmole (1617-1692), the Ashmolean is the world’s first university museum, opened in 1683. Its collection includes a wide range of artworks, antique coins, books and engravings, plus geological and zoological specimens. At midnight on December 31, 1999, while Oxford residents celebrated the arrival of a new millennium with fireworks, thieves approached the museum through a construction site next door, entering through its glass roof. They stole only a single painting— Auvers-sur-Oise, by French master Paul Cézanne (1839–1906)—but the piece was worth their effort. Auvers-sur-Oise measures 18 by 22 inches, depicting a cluster of white cottages in a wooded valley. Art historians date it from 1879–82. Museum curators valued the piece at £3 million—or $5.6 million. While museum officials appealed in vain for the painting’s return, police suggested that the thieves had been hired by some outlaw collector who admired the work and could afford to hire professional burglars. The crime remains unsolved today.

black mustaches (presumed to be fake). One was slightly taller than the other, at 6 feet versus 5 feet 10 inches. The shorter man wore gold-rimmed glasses with square lenses. That is all that is known about the largest art theft in American history—except that the thieves, if found, will never be punished. Each state has a statute of limitations that sets a deadline for prosecution of various crimes (except murder), and the Massachusetts time limit on robbery ran out in 1997. Eight years later, Hollywood produced a film about the caper, Stolen (2005), that cast actress Blythe Danner as Isabella Stewart Gardner. Hope still lingers that the stolen pieces may be recovered. A few years after the robbery, an informant told FBI agents that he had seen Rembrandt’s Lady and Gentleman in Black in Japan. Soon afterward, a Boston agent on his lunch hour saw another of the paintings in a local gallery’s window.

The Art of Crime  91 Both paintings proved to be copies. Today, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum still houses some 2,500 exhibits spanning 3,000 years of history—and 10 empty frames, from which paintings and drawings were stolen in 1990. The frames cannot be removed, since Gardner’s will dictates that nothing in the collection may ever be changed.

Theories Police and FBI agents initially suspected that art thief Myles Connor and his sometime accomplice, William Youngworth, planned the museum robbery. Connor was jailed in Rhode Island when the heist occurred, serving a 15-year sentence for trafficking stolen antiques, but authorities believed he was the mastermind in charge. Connor admitted knowledge of the robbery, but claimed it was planned and carried out by two acquaintances, Bobby Donati and David Houghton, without Connor’s help. Police found Donati murdered and stuffed in a car trunk in 1991, while Houghton died the following year. Connor told FBI agents he could find the stolen art if released from prison, but the FBI refused to bargain. Paroled in 2000, he remained under surveillance but never led his watchers to the stash. Meanwhile, William Youngworth contacted a Boston Herald reporter in August 1995, offering return of the stolen pieces in exchange for the $5 million reward, Connor’s release from prison, and immunity for both men on all charges related to the robbery. Youngworth showed the reporter a painting that resembled Rembrandt’s Storm on the Sea of Galilee and permitted the newsman to take chips of paint as proof. Laboratory tests proved them fake. Youngworth, whose criminal record includes more than 60 convictions in Massachusetts alone, soon faced another charge of auto theft. Like Connor, he was released in 2000, without leading authorities to the stolen artworks. Another theory blames the museum robbery on members of the Irish Republican Army, a terrorist group fighting to drive British authorities out of Northern Ireland. IRA gunmen staged their first art robbery in 1974, stealing 19 famous paintings from a collection in Dublin. Police recovered the pieces two days later, theorizing that the IRA planned to sell them or hold them for ransom, raising money for weapons.

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William P. Youngworth III is led to a Worcester District Criminal Court in Massachusetts in September 1997. He claimed that he could lead the FBI to the artwork stolen in the 1990 heist at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. AP Photo/Worcester Telegram, Paula B. Ferazzi

The Art of Crime  93 Yet another theory blames the theft on Boston gangster James “Whitey” Bulger, currently a fugitive on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list, with a $1 million bounty on his head. Before he fled Boston, Bulger led the notorious Winter Hill Gang, a group of IrishAmerican mobsters who worked closely with the Mafia. In 1995 federal prosecutors charged Bulger with numerous crimes, including murder and drug trafficking, but a corrupt FBI agent warned him, allowing Bulger time to escape arrest. The agent received a 10-year prison term, while Bulger remains at large. Theories linking Bulger to the museum robbery vary. Some claim that Bulger’s gang planned and executed the robbery, while others say he simply “licensed” the thieves to operate in his territory. In 2004, William Youngworth told reporters that a Winter Hill Gang member offered to return the stolen art in exchange for release of an imprisoned IRA member. Authorities and museum curators deny any knowledge of such an offer.

Tracing Stolen Treasures Where do stolen paintings, jewels, and other artworks go? If they are valuable, they are also famous—meaning they cannot be sold at public auction. Every serious art dealer in the world would recognize the pieces stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and should (at least in theory) notify police if they were offered by a customer for sale. Large jewels may be recut, of course, while gold and silver pieces may be melted down. But those procedures slash their value to a fraction of a masterpiece’s price. What is a lump of gold worth, compared to a crown worn by an ancient king? Famous paintings, meanwhile, are worthless if altered. Most art thieves are motivated by greed. They want money, not paintings to hang on a wall. Stolen artworks worth millions of dollars can only be sold to wealthy buyers—and, even then, to buyers who understand the risks involved. Stolen art can never be displayed in public or even to friends if a new owner thinks they might talk to police. A thief’s best bet, then, is a secretive collector who takes pleasure simply from owning a masterpiece, never sharing it with the outside world. Some authorities suggest that such collectors sponsor theft-for-hire, selecting thieves to steal a certain piece from a particular museum.

94   Unsolved Crimes Still, investigators note that thieves and dealers in stolen property often get sloppy as time passes. Roughly half of all recovered stolen art is found through sales catalogues, advertised by careless crooks or ignorant third parties who do not know the pieces are stolen. In other cases, personal disputes lead to a thief’s exposure. Feuds with spouses, lovers, or ex-friends sometimes bring tips to law enforcement. Black market collectors are also mortal. When they die, the content of their secret collections may be revealed to outsiders. Even when the statute of limitations blocks prosecution of art thieves, authorities keep trying to recover stolen treasures. In 1991

LMasterpiece or Forgery? The answer to that question may mean the difference between a multimillion-dollar sale and prison for a vendor who deals in famous works of art. Throughout the world, thousands of artists spend untold time and energy copying the works of famous masters, both dead and alive. Such copies may have a legitimate

Italian law enforcement officials show some of the 1,258 fake works of art seized in Milan in June 2005. AP Photo/Fabrizio Cusa

The Art of Crime  95 a group of leading auction houses joined insurance companies and the International Foundation of Art Research to create the Art Loss Register (ALR), which maintains a list of artworks stolen worldwide. Today, the ALR’s list includes some 120,000 items, with an average of 1,200 new pieces added each month. Another group devoted to preventing art thefts and recovering stolen works is the International Council of Museums (ICOM). The ICOM’s Red List operates differently than the ALR’s catalog, listing archaeological objects at risk of theft before they are stolen. In the United States, the Los Angeles Police Department’s Art Theft Detail has recovered pieces worth $45 million in the past 15 years. The FBI has separate units for stolen art and jewels,

purpose—sold at low prices as copies, or used as “stand-ins” by museums while priceless paintings rest secure in vaults—but others are used to swindle vast sums from gullible buyers. Forensic art experts test the authenticity of paintings in various ways. Microscopic examination and X-rays can determine the age of a painting, even when hoaxers use various methods, i.e., rapid heating and cooling, rolling their canvas, etc., to give new paint a cracked, “old” appearance. Ultraviolet light produces a blue-green fluorescent effect from varnish used on paintings in the nineteenth century. Chemical testing of paint also dates paintings, since various colors (like Prussian blue, invented in 1704) were not available to artists in the 15th and 16th centuries. The weave composition of canvas used for a painting provides further clues to its age, though some forgers clean and paint over ancient canvases. Likewise, measurement of tree rings found in wooden frames may determine when the frame itself was made. Aside from paintings, similar techniques are applied to determine the dates of artworks made from metal and ceramics. Ceramic is dated by a process called thermo luminescence, which unfortunately requires extraction of 30 grams of clay for laboratory analysis and thus can damage the artifact under examination. Metal sculptures are dated less destructively, with measurement of X-rays emitted by the original metal.

96   Unsolved Crimes reporting that, in the United States, yearly losses in artwork alone average $6 billion, while thefts of jewelry average $100 million. Fifty-four percent of all U.S. art thefts target private homes, while 12 percent involve museums or galleries, and 10 percent involve churches.

10 Little Girl Lost Each year in the United States, some 16,000 persons are murdered. Nearly 500 of those are victims below the age of 12. While that statistic may be shocking, few child murders capture media attention worldwide. One such case began the morning after Christmas 1996. It remains unsolved today.

Gone in the Night John and Patsy Ramsey put their daughter, six-year-old JonBenét, to bed around 9:30 p.m. on December 25. Within an hour, they and nine-year-old son Burke were also in bed—or so they later told police. Christmas had been a hectic season for the wealthy Boulder, Colorado, family, including a large party at their home on December 22. They were getting up early on December 26 for a trip to their holiday home in Michigan. By her later account, Patsy woke at 5 a.m. and went to the kitchen. On the staircase, she found a handwritten note explaining that JonBenét had been kidnapped. The note demanded $118,000 ransom and promised a phone call by 10 a.m. to arrange delivery. It also warned the Ramseys to tell no one of the kidnapping. Patsy ignored the warning. After waking John and checking JonBenét’s empty room, she called police at 5:25 a.m. The first officers arrived seven minutes later.

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A copy of the first page of the original ransom note found in the home of John and Patsy Ramsey. AP Photo/Boulder District Attorney

Police briefly searched the house and found no signs of forced entry. By the time detectives arrived at 8 a.m., five friends had joined the Ramseys, trampling over potential evidence. Steady foot

Little Girl Lost  99 traffic continued while 10 o’clock passed without a call. Three hours later, detectives asked John Ramsey and two friends to search the house for anything unusual. The crime scene, which should have been cleared and secured by police according to basic procedure, was not intact.

A Grim Discovery The searchers saw a broken window in the basement, but Ramsey said he had broken it months earlier. At 1:05, Ramsey found JonBenét dead in a basement wine cellar, lying on her back beneath a white blanket, arms raised above her head. A cord was tied around her right wrist, and another piece around her neck, with the broken handle of a paintbrush inserted beneath it. Duct tape covered her mouth. Someone had drawn a red heart on the palm of her left hand. Sobbing, Ramsey lifted JonBenét and carried her upstairs, placing her beside a Christmas tree. He told Detective Linda Arndt, “It has to be an inside job.”1 Boulder police agreed. Autopsy tests revealed that JonBenét died from strangulation and a fractured skull. Boulder police never identified the bludgeon, but a medical examiner from Michigan later claimed that a flashlight found in the Ramseys’ kitchen perfectly fit the head wound. Other evidence included two small marks on JonBenét’s body resembling burns from the electrodes of a stun gun, and two spots of blood on her underwear. Police waited seven years before passing the blood to FBI experts for DNA testing. Those tests proved the blood did not come from a member of the Ramsey family, nor did it match any samples stored in the FBI’s database of 1.6 million DNA profiles. Some evidence seemed to confirm the notion of an inside job. The ransom note was written on a pad and with a pen belonging to the family. Its odd demand for $118,000 matched John’s Christmas bonus from his software company. One of Patsy’s paintbrushes was used to tighten the cord around JonBenét’s neck. And yet, on the wine cellar’s dusty floor, police found two footprints that did not match each other, or any shoes owned by the Ramseys. A piece of rope left on a guestroom bed matched none

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A specialist examines casts of the footprints found in the wine cellar of the Ramsey house. Koester Axel/Corbis Sygma

owned by the family. John and Patsy claimed they did not recognize the flashlight. Batteries inside it were clean of fingerprints.

Media Circus Within two days of JonBenét’s murder, local reporters declared that police viewed John and Patsy as prime suspects. Some 44 percent of American murder victims are killed by relatives or “friends”; only 13 percent die at a stranger’s hands. That figure increases to 92 percent for children found slain in their own homes.2 JonBenét’s relatives thus were natural suspects, a feeling increased by some of the evidence found in their home. Unfortunately, many official spokesmen ignored the other evidence suggesting a possible intruder. Some went so far as to falsely deny that any unidentified footprints were found in the house.

Little Girl Lost   101 Other false stories spread by the media included claims that the Ramseys refused to speak with police or cooperate in other ways. In fact, they were interviewed repeatedly, while providing fingerprints, hair, blood, and handwriting samples for testing. Forensic experts reported that no family member wrote the three-page ransom note. In February 1997 police returned to search the Ramsey home for child pornography. They found none, but leaked their suspicions to the media. TV’s Hard Copy ran a story lifted from British tabloids, claiming that Patsy beat JonBenét to death for wetting her bed. Next, Kimberly Ballard proclaimed herself John Ramsey’s mistress, telling TV reporters that John was “definitely involved” in the murder. Ramsey denied the affair, and Ballard offered no proof. In October 1997 a Vanity Fair reporter claimed Boulder police were about to jail John and Patsy, but no arrests followed. Through it all, reporters criticized the Ramseys for hiring lawyers. John and Patsy replied that they had no choice, since police blamed them for the murder and sought no other suspects. The Ramseys hired private investigators and former FBI profiler John Douglas to investigate. Douglas declared the Ramseys innocent and guessed that the case would remain unsolved.

Theories and Questions There are only two options in JonBenét’s death: Either a member of her family is guilty, or a prowler invaded the home. There is no third choice, since no friends spent the night in the house. John Ramsey himself raised the subject of an inside job moments after finding his daughter’s body. Other evidence suggesting a family murder includes the use of household objects to prepare the ransom note and kill JonBenét. Likewise, the ransom note was clearly written by someone with knowledge of John’s yearly bonus. American crime statistics suggest that JonBenét was probably but not necessarily killed by someone who shared her home. In 1998 pathologist Cyril Wecht reviewed JonBenét’s autopsy report and claimed to find proof of sexual abuse, announcing his opinion that JonBenét “died in a sex game that went fatally wrong.”3 Again, the implied suspects were JonBenét’s relatives or a family friend. If the intruder theory is correct, the prowler may not have been a stranger. The Ramseys often entertained at home, inviting hundreds of guests to their parties. They also claimed that various employees

102   Unsolved Crimes

LTrue Life CSI Examination of questioned documents played a key role in the Ramsey murder case. Forensic tests proved that the strange ransom note was written with one of the family’s pens, on pages from one of their kitchen notepads. That much is indisputable, but arguments continue over who wrote the long, rambling message. Handwriting experts hired by the Boulder Police Department concluded that neither John nor Patsy Ramsey wrote the ransom note. Later, ex-detective Steve Thomas claimed that Patsy wrote it, using her left hand to disguise her handwriting. Unfortunately, that opinion came from an analyst who first approached the Ramseys for a job, declaring his belief in their innocence, then switched sides when they refused to hire him. Questioned document examination involves comparison of known standards to a suspect document, using the naked eye and various magnifying devices to see if separate documents came from the same source. Tests may also determine if the contents of a document have been forged (faked), changed, or erased. While handwriting examination is a major part of questioned document testing, experts also deal with documents produced by other manual or mechanical means (typewriters, printers, even rubber stamps). Physical matching occurs when analysts find identical flaws or characteristics in multiple documents, linking them to a common source. Ransom notes are rare in modern America. Questioned documents more often include forged checks, wills, and contracts used in various frauds and white-collar crimes.

had keys to the house. Police questioned at least two neighbors, including one dubbed “a wild man and a lunatic” by Patsy’s mother, but detectives cleared both. By 1999, Boulder police had questioned 590 persons and cleared more than 100 suspects. They collected 1,058 pieces of evidence, submitting more than 500 items for laboratory testing. Detectives chased leads in 17 states and two foreign countries, building a file 30,000 pages long. Still, they arrested no one. What was the motive for JonBenét’s murder? If ransom, why did the kidnapper come without a prepared note, then kill JonBenét

Little Girl Lost   103 and leave her body behind? Was her death accidental? If so, why not carry the body away and collect the money? Was the kidnapping staged as a cover for murder? Again, if so, why leave JonBenét at the house? If JonBenét’s death was a sex crime, the ransom note may have been written after she died, to confuse police. Medical examiners found no conclusive evidence of sexual assault, but blood on JonBenét’s clothing belonged to some person still unknown. Accusers of the Ramseys say that John and Patsy did not take the ransom note seriously. Though warned that JonBenét would die if they told anyone about the kidnapping, they called police and several friends. Does that mean they knew the note was a fake?

War of Words Arguments over JonBenét’s murder continue to the present day. In May 1999 the Star tabloid accused Burke Ramsey of killing his sister. Six months later, Colorado Governor Bill Owens told reporters he considered John Ramsey a prime murder suspect who refused to help police solve the crime. Ramsey’s attorney Lin Wood called Owens a liar and threatened to sue. While that case never proceeded, John and Patsy did sue the Star for $25 million. A tabloid photographer’s lawsuit against John Ramsey was thrown out of court. In January 2000, with a TV miniseries about the murder in production, former Colorado homicide detective Lou Smit declared his belief that the Ramseys were innocent. Boulder police condemned Smit for his statements. A month later, marriage counselor Mary Bienkowski claimed that one of her clients could name JonBenét’s killer and several witnesses to sexual abuse. Police described the unnamed woman as a mental case who often gave false statements to authorities. In March 2000 the Ramseys published a book, The Death of Innocence, giving their side of the story. It listed four suspects who knew the family, then offered a profile of an unknown childmolester who allegedly patterned his crime on the movie Ransom (1996). The book also claimed that police refused offers from John and Patsy to take lie-detector (polygraph) tests. Boulder’s police chief called the book “a smokescreen.”

104   Unsolved Crimes More books followed. Ex-Boulder detective Steve Thomas published one accusing the Ramseys of murder, including the opinion of handwriting analyst Donald Foster that Patsy wrote the ransom note. Critics answered that Thomas had never worked a murder case and that Foster accused Patsy only after the Ramseys refused to hire him as an expert for their side. Finally, in May 2000, John and Patsy took polygraph tests from Edward Gelb, a world-famous operator who conducted more than 30,000 tests in his 30-year career. Gelb judged their answers truthful. Boulder police refused to accept those results because FBI agents had not given the tests. In June 2000 the Ramseys challenged Steve Thomas to face them on CNN’s Larry King Show. Thomas agreed, but the program turned into an angry shouting match. Boulder police then demanded more interviews. The Ramseys first refused, then agreed. Detectives questioned Patsy again in August 2000, but ignored her public demands that they either file charges or stop referring to her as a suspect.

Visions and Confessions As if the case was not strange enough, the Ramseys next produced a sketch of JonBenét’s suspected killer, prepared by psychic Dorothy Allen from visions, before her death in 1999. Boulder police had no comment, but a public opinion poll claimed that 87 percent of Colorado’s citizens believed the Ramseys were guilty. On August 8, 2001, informant Susan Bennett sent an e-mail to Boulder police saying that an Internet chat room subscriber claimed to have witnessed JonBenét’s murder. Detectives traced the writer through America Online and identified her as a teenage hoaxer from Ohio. As for Bennett, police said she had previously sent them DNA samples from two innocent “suspects.” Results of the long-delayed DNA tests seemed to clear the Ramseys in 2003, but controversy continues. John and Patsy filed a $12 million libel suit against Fox News in December 2003, but that case was still ongoing when Patsy died of cancer in January 2006. In August 2006 police were alerted to e-mails exchanged between ex-schoolteacher John Mark Karr and one of his friends in which Karr claimed he was present at JonBenét Ramsey’s murder. Authorities traced Karr to Bangkok, Thailand, where he was

Little Girl Lost   105 arrested on August 16 and soon returned to the United States. While Karr initially confessed to JonBenét’s murder, a DNA test and incorrect details in his statements convinced police that his confession was false. On September 12, 2006, Karr was moved to California for trial on child-pornography charges, but police in that case lost the computer that supposedly contained the illegal pictures. Karr was released from custody on October 5, 2006, legally cleared of all charges.

Chronology

1888 Autumn  London: Jack the Ripper kills five women.



1892 August  Fall River, Mass.: Lizzie Borden faces charges of murdering her parents. Jurors later acquit her.



1911–1912 Louisiana/Texas: Night-prowling axe murderers kill 49 African American victims in their homes.



1911–1912 Atlanta: Georgia’s “Jack the Ripper” kills 20 women.



1916 July  San Francisco: A parade bombing kills 10 persons and wounds over 40. Police frame two innocent suspects.

1918–1919 New Orleans: An elusive “Axeman” terrorizes local grocers with lethal home invasions.



1920 September  New York City: A bombing on Wall Street kills 40 victims, wounding over 300.



1922 September  New Jersey: Rev. Edward Hall and Eleanor Mills are murdered by persons unknown.



1929 February  Chicago: The St. Valentine’s Day massacre claims seven lives.



1930 August  New York City: Judge Joseph Crater leaves his office and vanishes forever.



1932 March  Hopewell, N.J.: Kidnappers abduct Charles Lindbergh Jr.

1934–1938 Cleveland: A “mad butcher” dissects 16 victims, including 11 whose heads are never found.



1943 July  Bahamas: Sir Harry Oakes is murdered at his home. Jurors acquit the prime suspect in November 1943.



1946 Summer  Texarkana: The Moonlight Murderer inspires panic with nocturnal slayings of young couples.

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108   Unsolved Crimes

1947 January  Los Angeles: The Black Dahlia murder creates a media sensation.



1947 June  Beverly Hills: A sniper kills mob boss Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel at his girlfriend’s home.



1951 December  Mims, Fla.: Racist bombers kill Harry Moore and his wife.



1955 May  Belzoni, Miss.: Unknown gunman kill civil rights leader George Lee.



1957 February  Philadelphia: Police discover the “Boy in the Box.”



1962 April  Los Angeles: The death of screen star Marilyn Monroe sparks rumors of murder and cover-up.

1962–1963 Boston: The Boston Strangler claims 13 victims. DNA disproves Albert DeSalvo’s 1964 confession.



1963 November  Dallas: President John Kennedy’s assassination leaves a 40-year legacy of doubt and conspiracy theories.

1966–1969 California: The Zodiac killer claims six victims while taunting police with coded letters.



1968 April  Memphis: A sniper kills Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Congress deems the murder a conspiracy in 1979.



1968 June  Los Angeles: The public murder of Senator Robert Kennedy leaves numerous questions unanswered, spawning theories of conspiracy.



1971 November  Portland, Oregon: Hijacker “D.B. Cooper” receives $200,000 ransom after threatening airline passengers with a simulated bomb, then escapes by parachute over the Cascade Mountains, never to be heard from again.



1972 September  Montreal: Thieves steal objects valued at $1 million from the Museum of Fine Art.



1975 July  Detroit: Jimmy Hoffa vanishes without a trace.



1979 July  New York City: Gunmen kill Mafia leader Carmine Galante at a sidewalk café.



1981 July  Skidmore, Mo.: Town bully Ken McElroy dies from gunshot wounds on Main Street, before multiple witnesses.

Chronology   109

1990 March  Brussels: Assassins kill “super gun” inventor Gerald Bull.



1990 March  Boston: Thieves steal artwork valued at $300 million from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.



1995 October  Arizona: Unknown terrorists derail the Amtrak Sunset Ltd., killing one passenger.



1996 December  Boulder, Colo.: JonBenét Ramsey is found murdered at her home.



2000 January  Oxford, England: Thieves steal artwork valued at $4.5 million from the Ashmolean Museum.

Endnotes Introduction

Chapter 10

1. Michael Newton, The Encyclopedia of Unsolved Crimes (New York: Facts on File, 2005), 63.

1. Newton, Encyclopedia of Unsolved Crimes, 256. 2. FBI, Crime in the United States, 2004 (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2004). 3. Newton, Encyclopedia of Unsolved Crimes, 258.

Chapter 1 1. Patricia Cornwell, Portrait of a Killer (New York: Berkley Books, 2002), 12.

Chapter 4 1. Michael Newton, The Invisible Empire (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001), 134.

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Bibliography “America’s Unknown Child: The Boy in the Box Mystery,” America’s Unknown Child. http://www.americasunknownchild.net/ (accessed January 25, 2007). Austin, John. Hollywood’s Unsolved Mysteries. New York: Ace Books, 1970. Begg, Paul, Martin Fido, and Keith Skinner. The Jack the Ripper A-Z. London: Headline, 1996. Brandt, Charles. “I Heard You Paint Houses.” Cambridge, Mass.: Steerforth, 2005. Brown, A.R. Lizzie Borden. New York: Dell, 1992. Engstrom, Elizabeth. Lizzie Borden. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. FBI. “Crime in the United States.” http://www.fbi.gov/ucr/cius_04/ (accessed January 25, 2007). Gilmore, John. Severed. New York: Amok Books, 1998. Green, Ben. Before His Time. New York: The Free Press, 1999. Hodel, Steve. Black Dahlia Avenger. New York: Arcade Publishing, 2003. Knowlton, Janice, and Michael Newton. Daddy Was the BlackDahlia Killer. New York: Pocket Books, 1994. Lane, Mark. Rush to Judgment. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966. Marrs, Jim. Crossfire. New York: Carroll and Graff, 1989. Moldea, Dan. The Hoffa Wars. New York: Paddington Press, 1978. Schiller, Lawrence. Perfect Murder, Perfect Town. New York: HarperTorch, 1999. Sugden, Philip. The Complete History of Jack the Ripper. Bristol, England: Sienna/Paragon, 1995. Thomas, Steve, and Donald Davis. JonBenét. New York: St. Martin’s Paperbacks, 2000. Wecht, Cyril, and Charles Bosworth. Who Killed JonBenét Ramsey? New York: Onyx, 1998.

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Further Resources Books Newton, Michael. The Encyclopedia of Unsolved Crimes. New York: Facts on File, 2005. Wilkes, Roger. The Mammoth Book of Unsolved Crime. New York: Carrol & Graf, 2005. Wilson, Kirk. Unsolved Crimes. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2002.

Web Sites Crime Library http://www.crimelibrary.com Unsolved Mysteries http://www.unsolved.com World’s Most Wanted—Fugitives and Unsolved Crimes http://www.mostwanted.org

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Index Page numbers in italics indicate images.

Bender, Frank 56 Bennett, Susan 104 Benonis, Frederick 51 Bersinger, Betty 35 Bethesda Naval Hospital 59, 61 Bible, crime in 8 Bienkowski, Mary 103 The Black Dahlia (Ellroy) 42 Black Dahlia murder 35–42, 108 Blakey, Robert 67 blood evidence 8, 29, 29 in Borden murders 28, 29, 30 in JonBenét Ramsey investigation 99 The Body Farm 73 bombing investigations 46–47, 46, 107 Bonanno, Bill 76 Bones (television) 72–73 bones, identification from 72, 72–73 Borden, Abby 25, 27–28 Borden, Andrew 25, 27–28 Borden, Emma 27, 29, 31, 32 Borden, Lizzie 25–34, 31, 107 Borden, William 32 Borden house 26 Boston Strangler 38, 108 Bowen, Dr. Seabury 25, 30, 32 Bowron, Thomas 18 boy in the box case 51–58, 108 Brandt, Charles 76 Bright’s disease 18 Bristow, Remington 54 Broomall, George 53 Buffalino, Russell 75 Bulger, James “Whitey” 93 Bull, Gerald 109 bullet evidence, in Kennedy assassination 61, 62, 62, 66, 67 Bulling, Tom 16 Bury, William Henry 19

A

Abel (biblical figure) 8 AFIS (Automated Fingerprint Identification System) 41–42 AFL-CIO 71 age determination 72 Albert Victor Christian Edward (prince of England) 19, 22 Algae Destroyer 82 Allen, Charles 76 Allen, Dorothy 104 America’s Most Wanted (television) 55 Amtrak Sunset Ltd. 109 Anacin 85 Angel in Black (Collins) 42 Anthony, David 32 Arndt, Linda 99 art crimes 87–96, 94, 108, 109 Art Loss Register (ALR) 95 Art Theft Detail (LAPD) 95 Ashmole, Elias 90 Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology 89–90, 89, 109 Askew, Reubin 49 audio recording, of Kennedy assassination 66 Augustine, Tom 54, 55, 56 Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS) 41–42 Auvers-sur-Oise (Cézanne) 90 Axeman murders 30, 107

B

Ballard, Kimberly 101 Barnett, Joseph 19 Bass, William 73 Bayley, Dr. Walter 39 Beck, Dave 71

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114   Unsolved Crimes

C

Cain (biblical figure) 8 canvas, of art forgeries 95 caplets 85 Carlo, Philip 76 Carr, Brian 40 Carter, Henry 32 Castro, Fidel 62, 64 Central States Driving Council 71 ceramic, dating 95 Cézanne, Paul 90 Chapman, Annie 16 Chapman, George 20 chemical testing of art forgeries 95 Chez Tortoni (Manet) 88 children, crimes against 11, 97, 100, 101. See also boy in the box case; Ramsey, JonBenét Church Committee 63 Churchill, Adelaide 25 CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) 62, 64, 67 civil rights 43–45, 49, 65 The Cleveland Butcher 40, 107 Cleveland Museum of Natural History 73 Coles, Frances 18 Collins, Max Alan 42 communism 61–62. See also Cuba; U.S.S.R. The Concert (Vermeer) 88 Connally, John 59, 61 Connor, Myles 91 Cooper, D.B. 108 copycats 82–83, 85 Corll, Dean Arnold 11 Cornwell, Patricia 20, 73 Correiro, Jose 32 Cortege aux Environs de Florence (Degas) 88 Cox, Joseph 48, 49 Crater, Joseph 107 Cream, Dr. Thomas Neill 19 crime 7–8, 9, 11 crime scene contamination 28, 29, 98–99 crime statistics 7 Cross, Charles 15 Cuba 59, 62, 64, 67 cyanide 79–80, 81, 81

D

Dahmer, Jeffrey 11 Damman, Steven 55–56 Daniel (biblical figure) 8 Danner, Blythe 90 Davis, William 32 Dealey Plaza 59, 60 The Death of Innocence (Ramsey and Ramsey) 103 decomposition 73 Deeming, Frederick 19 Degas, Edgar 88 DeSalvo, Albert 38, 108 detection taggants 47 Dictabelt 66 DNA evidence 20, 21, 21, 22, 55–56, 99, 105 Dolan, Dr. William 25, 28 Donati, Bobby 91 Douglas, John 101 Dragna, Jack 39 Druitt, Montague John 18–19 Dudley, Irene 58 Dudley, Kenneth 58 Dunne, John Gregory 42 Dwyer, William 83

E

Eddowes, Catherine 16, 18 Ellroy, James 42 English, T. J. 75 Excedrin 82–83, 85 explosives, identifying 46–47 extortion 84 Extra Strength Tylenol. See Tylenol murders

F

facial reconstruction 57, 57–58, 72–73 false confessions 37–38, 104–105 Fatal Hour: The Assassination of President Kennedy by Organized Crime (Blakey) 67 FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation) art theft investigations by 95–96 in Gardner Museum investigation 91, 93 Hoffa and 74, 75, 76, 77

Index   115 Kennedy assassination and 63, 67 in Tylenol murders investigation 82–83, 84 Fifth Amendment 33 fingerprints on anonymous letters 22 in Black Dahlia investigation 35–36, 38–39 Borden murders and 29 of Jack the Ripper 20 use of 8, 41–42, 41 Fitzsimmons, Frank 74–75 Flinck, Govaert Teuniszoon 88 Florida, segregation in 43–45 footprints, in JonBenét Ramsey case 99, 100, 100 forensic anthropology 72, 72–73 Forensic Anthropology Facility (University of Tennessee) 73 forgeries 94, 94–95 Foster, Douglas 104 Fox News 104 Frankos, Donald 76 friendly fire theory 64 “From Hell” (letter) 17, 17–18 Futch, Truman 48

G

Gacy, John Wayne, Jr. 11 Galante, Carmine 108 Gardner, Isabella Stewart 87 Gardner Museum. See Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Gelb, Edward 104 gender determination 72 Giacalone, Anthony 75 Giants Stadium 76 Gifford, Hannah 27 Gilmore, John 40 Goody’s Headache Powder 85 Gorcya, David 78 Gordon, Matthew, Jr. 37 grassy knoll 63 Greenlee, Charles 45, 48 Groveland rape case 45–48 Gull, Sir William 19, 21

H

Hall, Edward 107 Hamann-Todd Collection 73

handwriting analysis 22, 102 Hard Copy (television) 101 Harnisch, Larry 40 Harrington, Dottie 49 Harrington, Frank 49 Harrington, Hiram 32 Henry, Raymond, Jr. 49 Hodel, Dr. George 40 Hodel, Steve 40 Hoffa, Jimmy 65, 69–78, 70, 77, 108 Hoffa, Josephine 69 Hoover, J. Edgar 63, 65, 74 Houghton, David 91 House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) 63, 65–67 Hunt, H. L. 65 Hutchinson, George 19–20

I

Institute of Makers of Explosives 47 International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) 69, 71, 74–76 International Council of Museums (ICOM) 95 International Foundation of Art Research 95 Irish Republican Army 91 Irvin, Walter 45, 48 Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum 87–96, 109 Israel 65

J

Jack the Ripper 15–23, 107 Janus, Adam 79 Janus, Stanley 79–80 Janus, Theresa 79–80 Jennings, Andrew 28 jewelry, stolen 93–96 Jill the Ripper 20 Johnson, Lyndon B. 63, 64, 65, 74 Johnson & Johnson 80, 83, 84, 85 jump-rope rhyme 33

K

Karr, John Mark 104–105 Kellerman, Mary 79 Kelly, Mary Jane 18, 19 Kennedy, John F. 59–67, 71, 74, 108 Kennedy, Robert 64, 65, 71, 74, 108

116   Unsolved Crimes Kieran, Thomas 28 King, Martin Luther, Jr. 65, 108 Klosovski, Severin 20 Knowlton, George 40 Knowlton, Hosea 28 Knowlton, Janice 40 Kosminski, Aaron 19 Krogman, Wilton 52, 58 Kuklinski, Richard “Ice Man” 76 Ku Klux Klan (KKK) 48–49, 65

L

labor unions 69–71. See also International Brotherhood of Teamsters (IBT) A Lady and a Gentleman in Black (Rembrandt) 88, 90–91 Landscape with an Obelisk (Flinck) 88 Larry King Show (television) 104 LBJ. See Johnson, Lyndon B. Lee, George 108 letters identifying authors of 22 from Jack the Ripper 16–18, 17, 20 in JonBenét Ramsey case 97, 98, 101, 102 in Tylenol murders 84, 85 Lewis, James W. 84, 85 Lindbergh, Charles, Jr. 107 List, John 56 Los Angeles Police Department 95 Louisiana axe murders 30, 107 Lumbrera, Diana 11 Lusk, George 17

M

Machus Red Fox Restaurant 69 Macnaghten, Sir Melville 18 Mafia 63, 67, 71, 74 magic bullet theory 61, 62, 67 Manet, Édouard 88 Manley, Robert 37, 39 Marriott, Trevor 21 Martinez, Margaret 58 Maybrick, James 20 McCall, Willis 45, 48, 49–50 McElroy, Ken 108 McFarland, Mary 80

McKenzie, Alice 18 media, in JonBenét Ramsey case 100–101 metal, dating 95 Michigan Conference (IBT) 71 military-industrial complex 65 Milito, Louie 76 Mills, Eleanor 107 Minninger, Bonar 64 Miranda rights 33 missing children 11 Mob. See Mafia Monroe, Marilyn 108 Moody, William 28 Moonlight Murderer 107 Moore, Harriette 43, 44, 44 Moore, Harry 43–50, 44, 44, 108 Moore, Henry 30 Moore, Juanita Evangeline 44 Morse, John 25, 27, 32 Morse, Sarah 27 murders of children 11–12, 97, 100, 101. See also boy in the box case; Ramsey, JonBenét statistics on 100 Museum of Fine Art (Montreal) 108 mutilation, by Jack the Ripper 16, 18 mysteries, popularity of 11

N

Nacirema 49 National Academy of Sciences (NAS) 66 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) 45 National Museum of Natural History 73 Nichols, Mary Ann “Polly” 15 Nickell, Bruce 82 Nickell, Stella 82–83 Nicoletti, Arthur 54, 55 Nicoletti, Catherine 54, 55 Nixon, Richard M. 74–75

O

Oakes, Harry 107 O’Brien, Charles 75, 78

Index   117 oil companies 65 organized crime. See Mafia Ostrog, Michael 19 Oswald, Lee Harvey 59–63, 67, 74 Owens, Bill 103 Oxford University 89, 89–90

P

Parkland Hospital 59, 61 patience, in fighting crime 7–8 “patsy” 60 Paul, Robert 15 Peckham, Charles 32 Pedachenko, Dr. Alexander 21 plasticizers 46 The Plot to Kill the President (Blakey) 67 police investigation methods 8–9 police officers, qualities of 7–8 Portrait of a Killer (Cornwell) 20 Posivak, Edward 56 potassium cyanide 79–80, 81 Powroznik, John 56 Prince, Paula 80 product recall, of Tylenol 80 product tampering 80, 81, 82–83, 84–85 profile, of Tylenol killer 84–85 Program for an Artistic Soiree (Degas) 88 Progressive Voters League (PVL) 45 propellants 46 Provenzano, Anthony 75, 76 Prussian blue 95 public tips, in Black Dahlia investigation 37–38

Q

questioned documents 102. See also letters

R

race determination 72 racial terrorists 65, 108. See also Ku Klux Klan (KKK) racist bombings. See Moore, Harry Ramsey, Burke 103 Ramsey, John 97–104 Ramsey, JonBenét 97–105, 109 Ramsey, Patsy 97, 100–104

Ransom (film) 103 ransom note, in JonBenét Ramsey case 97, 98, 101, 102 recall, of Tylenol 80 Red Fox Restaurant 69 Red Jack. See Jack the Ripper Red List 95 Reichs, Kathy 72–73, 72 Reiner, Mary 80 Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn 88, 90, 91 Richardson, James 38–39 Richardson, Robert (alias) 84 right to silence 33 Ripper diary 20 Robert J. Terry Collection 73 Robinsky, Sam 32 Robinson, George 28 Ruby, Jack 61, 62–63 runaways 11 Russell, Alice 25, 28 Russia. See U.S.S.R.

S

“Sailor X” 21 St. Valentine’s Day massacre 107 Sanders, Harold 53 San Francisco parade bombing 107 second gunman theory 66, 67 Secret Service 67 segregation 43–45 Self Portrait (Rembrandt) 88 Senate Committee on Labor 71 Sheeran, Frank 75, 76 Shepherd, Sam 45, 48 Short, Elizabeth 35–42, 36 Sickert, Walker 20, 21 SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome) 11–12 Siegel, Benjamin “Bugsy” 39, 108 Sifakis, Carl 11 Silvia, Joseph 33 Sinex nasal spray 85 skeletal remains 72, 72–73 Smith, Alfred 33 Smith, D.R. 27 Smith, Emma 15 Smit, Lou 103 Snow, Hayley 82 Snow, Sue 82–83

118   Unsolved Crimes La Sortie du Pelage (Degas) 88 Soviet Union 64 Speece, Terry 53 Spelman, Joseph 52 stabilizers 46 statute of limitations 90, 94 Stephen, James Kenneth 22 Stephenson, Ronald Donston 22 Sternfeld, Florence 54 Stolen (film) 90 stolen artwork 93–96 Stoner, Jesse 49 The Storm on the Sea of Galilee (Rembrandt) 88, 91 Stride, Elizabeth 16 Sudafed 85 Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) 11–12 Sullivan, Bridget 25, 27–28, 29, 32 Sullivan, Mary 38 swampers 71 sweetheart contracts 71

T Tabram, Martha 15 taggants 47 Tague, James 59, 61 tamper-proof packaging 85 Teamsters. See International Brotherhood of Teamsters Terry Collection 73 Texas axe murders 30, 107 theft-for-hire 93 thermo luminescence 95 Thomas, D.B. 66 Thomas, Ernest 45 Thomas, Steve 102, 104 Thompson, Cora 53 Thompson, Francis 22 Three Mounted Jockeys (Degas) 88 Tinning, Marybeth 11 Tippit, J. D. 60 Tobin, Daniel 71 tree rings, art forgeries and 95 True Confessions (Dunne) 42 Tuggle, Debra 11 Tumblety, Francis 22 Tylenol Act 83, 85 Tylenol murders 79–85, 81

U

ultraviolet light, art forgeries under 95 University of Tennessee 73 unsolved crimes, number of 11 U.S.S.R. (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) 59, 61–62, 64, 67

V

Vermeer, Johannes 88 Verrazano Narrows Bridge 76 Victoria (queen of England) 19 Vidocq Society 55 Vietnam War 65 Visine eye drops 85 voting rights 45

W

Wall Street bombing 107 Walton, Kenneth 76 Warren, Earl 63 Warren, Fuller 48 Warren Report 63–64, 66, 74 Wecht, Cyril 101 Wells, Donovan 76 Whitechapel district 15 Whitechapel Vigilance Committee 17 white racists 65. See also Ku Klux Klan (KKK) Who Is the Black Dahlia (film) 42 Williams, Franklin 48 Williams, Sir John 22 Willis, Herman 40 Wilson, Jack Anderson 40 Winter Hill Gang 93 Wood, Lin 103 Woods, Martha 11 wounds, skeletal evidence of 72

X

X-rays, of art forgeries 95

Y

Youngworth, William 91, 92, 93 Y2K 89–90

Z

Zapruder, Abraham 63 Zodiac killer 108

About the Author A former public school teacher (grades 6–8, 1979–1986), Michael Newton has published 202 books since 1977, with 18 more scheduled for release from various houses through 2010. His first nonfiction book—Monsters, Mysteries and Man (Addison–Wesley, 1979)—was a volume for young readers on cryptozoology and UFOs. His recent reference works include The Encyclopedia of Serial Killers (2nd edition, 2006) and seven other books from Facts on File (2000–2007), plus the FBI Encyclopedia and an Encyclopedia of Cryptozoology (McFarland, 2004 and 2005). His history of the Florida Ku Klux Klan, The Invisible Empire (University Press of Florida, 2001), won the Florida Historical Society’s 2002 Rembert Patrick Award for Best Book on Florida History. A full list of Newton’s published and forthcoming titles may be found on his Web site at http://www. michaelnewton.homestead.com.

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About the Consulting Editor John L. French is a 31-year veteran of the Baltimore City Police Crime Laboratory. He is currently a crime laboratory supervisor. His responsibilities include responding to crime scenes, overseeing the preservation and collection of evidence, and training crime scene technicians. He has been actively involved in writing the operating procedures and technical manual for his unit and has conducted training in numerous areas of crime scene investigation. In addition to his crime scene work, Mr. French is also a published author, specializing in crime fiction. His short stories have appeared in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and numerous anthologies.

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