An Almanac of Infamy

Sydney Smith What started as an ordinary summer day in June 1913 for two Scottish farmers ended in a gruesome discovery as they were walking along a quarry right outside of Edinburgh. Floating in the water were two small bodies that were so water-logged that the men couldn't tell if they were human. The bodies were tied together, and it soon became the task of forensics pioneer Sydney Smith to determine who they were and how they met their horrible fate. At the time of the discovery, Sydney Smith was working as an assistant to Professor Harvey Littlejohn at Edinburgh University. He was able to identify the bodies as belonging to two young boys. Using specimens taken from the bodies, Smith was also able to determine that the bodies contained adipocere, body fat that is hard and white. When exposed to water, it takes several months for adipocere to form in a human body. Based on the levels of adipocere that Smith found, he determined that the boys' bodies had been placed i...

On this day in 1780, rural Connecticut grist mill operator Caleb Mallory, his wife Jane, and the couple's three grandchildren, nine-year-old Charlotte, six-year-old John, and four-year-old Sherman were murdered by their border Barnett Davenport. This mass murder was one of the first major crimes in post-Revolution, and it would affect how criminals are perceived in the United States for centuries to come. Barnett Davenport was born in the town of New Milford, Connecticut, in 1760. In his early teens, he was convicted of horse theft. At the age of 16, he joined the Continental Army and served under General George Washington at Valley Forge. He likely suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of his military service. This trauma may be why he deserted the army and returned to Connecticut. After his desertion, Davenport took a job at Caleb Mallory's gristmill in what is now Washington, Connecticut. He also rented a room in the Mallory home. On February 3, 1780, ...

Vernon Booher's Mugshot On this day in 1928, police were called to the Booher family farm in Mannville, Alberta, Canada at the behest of Dr. Harley Heaslip. Upon arriving at the property, they found Rose Booher, who had been shot in the back of the head, slumped over on the dining room table. Her son, Fred, laid dead on the kitchen floor. He had been shot in the face multiple times. After searching the rest of the farmhouse, investigators moved on to the bunkhouse and barn, where they found two more bodies. The bodies belonged to two farmhands who, police surmised, had heard the shots that killed Rose Booher and her son Fred. The killer had most likely shot them to eliminate witnesses. Rose Booher's husband Henry was working on the farm when he heard the gunshots but thought nothing of it because gunshots were a common occurrence in the rural area where the farm was located. Rose's younger son, Vernon, had also been working on the farm, though in a different area from w...

Content Note: This case involves the murder of a young child. On this day in 1948, three-year-old June Anne Devaney was kidnapped from her bed at Queen’s Park Hospital in Blackburn, England. She had been admitted to the hospital on May 5 due to a mild bout of pneumonia. At 1:20 am, on the morning of May 15, nurse Gwendolyn Humphreys noticed that a door was open at the end of the children's ward. As she went to close the door she saw that June Anne Devaney was no longer in her bed. She also saw what appeared to be adult-sized footprints on the hospital's well-waxed floor. The drop side of June Anne's bed was still in place, meaning that someone lifted her out of her bed. After searching for the girl for thirty minutes, Humphreys called the police. Upon arriving at the hospital, they launched an extensive search of the hospital grounds and found the body of June Anne Devaney at 3:55 am. She was laying face down in the grass near a boundary wall on the hospital grounds. Her...

Annie and James Richardson On this day in 1989, James Joseph Richardson was released from a Florida prison after serving 21 years for the murders of his seven children, for which he was wrongfully convicted. His ordeal started on the afternoon of October 25, 1967. While Richardson and his wife Annie were working as fruit pickers in Arcadia, Florida, their neighbor, Betsy Reese, came over to heat up a pot of rice and beans that Annie had prepared the night before for the children's lunch. After the four oldest Richardson students returned to school they began to fall ill, foaming at the mouth and exhibiting other disturbing symptoms. When a teacher arrived at the Richardson house to check on the younger children, she found that they had fallen ill as well. All seven children were rushed to the hospital. By the time James and Annie Richardson were made aware of the situation, six of their children had already passed away. After Joseph H. Minoughan of the Arcadia Police Departme...

Nancy Titterton John Fiorenza Reenacting the Murder for Police On the morning of April 10, 1936, the body of novelist Nancy Titterton was found in a bathtub in her home on Beekman Place, an upscale street on the east side of Manhattan. Previous to her untimely death, she had shared the home with her husband Lewis Titterton, an executive at NBC. Titterton had been raped and strangled to death with her own pajamas. The only evidence at the scene was a foot-long cord tied around Titterton's hands and a single horsehair on her bedspread. The detective in charge of the case set out immediately to find the source of the cord used to bind Nancy Titterton. Every rope and twine manufacturer in the Northeast was contacted until police determined that the distinctive cord was produced by Hanover Cordage Company in York, Pennsylvania. Company records showed that the same type of cord had been sold to an upholstery shop in New York owned by a man by the name of Theodore Krueger. It jus...

On this day in 1951, Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck, aka The Lonely Hearts Killers, were executed by electric chair at Sing Sing Prison in New York. Before their demise, the killer couple had bragged about seducing, robbing, and murdering seventeen women. While evidence suggests that there may have only been four victims, the strange couple is still notorious among male-female serial killer pairs. Raymond Martinez Fernandez was born on December 17, 1914, in Hawaii, to parents who had immigrated there from Spain. Shortly after his birth, the family moved to Connecticut, and as an adult, Raymond Fernandez moved to Spain. There he married and fathered four children. He would abandon this family later in life. During World War II Fernandez served in the Spanish Merchant Marine and in the British Intelligence Service and at the end of the war decided to return to the United States. It was during this return trip, by boat, that a steel hatch fell on his head, causing a skull fracture a...

Tom Horn braiding rope in the Cheyenne County jail  On November 20, 1903, Tom Horn was hanged in Wyoming for the murder of 14-year-old Willie Nickell, a crime that many historians believe that the infamous hired killer did not actually commit. While Horn certainly was responsible for many deaths in the Old West, whether or not he murdered the sheep rancher's son and his possible motive are still a subject of debate and speculation. Thomas Horn, Jr., known as "Tom" was born in 1860 in Memphis, Missouri. He was the fifth of twelve children and suffered at the hands of an abusive father. His only companion as a child, a dog named Shedrick, was killed by two boys who Tom had gotten into a fist fight with. By the time he reached his teen years, it was clear that Tom Horn was a very skilled hunter and marksman. Legend has it that, at the age of sixteen, he shot and killed another man in a duel over a sex worker. After heading out west in the mid-1870s, he held various j...

Mary Woodson/Al Green On this day in 1974, famed soul and gospel singer Al Green was attacked by Mary Woodson, a woman who he had been in an on-again-off-again relationship with for a year. Woodson threw a boiling pot of grits on Green's back while he was undressing to take a bath in his Memphis, Tennesee, home. Mary Woodson then shot and killed herself with a gun belonging to Green. By the time of the attack, Al Green was at the height of his fame having sung such hits as "Tired Of Being Alone" (1971), "Let's Stay Together" (1971) and "I'm Still In Love With You" (1972). In 1973, after becoming a born-again Christian, Green began performing charity concerts at hospitals and prisons. It was at one of these concerts, held in the New York State Correctional Facility, that he first met Mary Woodson, who told Green that she was there to visit a friend. In reality, she had left behind her husband and their children in New Jersey to specificall...

Neil LaFave On this day in 1971, Wisconsin game warden Neil LaFave failed to show up for his own birthday party. His absence prompted his wife Peggy to notify the police, who found his truck in a remote swampy area along with a pool of blood and two .22-caliber shells. His headless body was found in a shallow grave. When authorities found his head, they saw that it had two bullet wounds caused by a .22 shotgun. While serving as a game warden for Wisconsin's Sensiba Wildlife Area, Neil LaFave had earned a reputation for being tough on poachers. Every poacher that he had ever arrested was questioned and anyone who didn't have a solid alibi was asked to take a polygraph test. Only one person refused, 21-year-old Brian Hussong. LaFave had arrested Hussong for poaching multiple times. After authorities obtained a warrant for a wiretap of Hussong's phones, they overheard a conversation between Brian Hussong and his grandmother Agnes, in which she assured Brian that his guns...

Fatty Arbuckle, Virginia Rappe On this day in 1921, silent-film star Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle was arrested for the rape and murder of aspiring actress Virginia Rappe. He was later acquitted, after three separate trials, but his career and reputation were irreparably damaged. Roscoe Arbuckle was born in 1887 in the town of Smith Center, Kansas. When he was two years old, his family moved to Santa Ana, California. His mother encouraged him to perform and by age eight he was singing on stage with the Frank Bacon Company. When he was twelve, his mother passed away, and his father, who never believed that Roscoe was actually his child, refused to support him. Roscoe started working odd jobs at a local hotel and was encouraged to compete in a talent show by a customer who had heard him sing. He won the competition and began his career in vaudeville which then led to starring roles in silent films. After appearing in Mack Sennett’s Keystone Cops comedies, Roscoe Arbuckle for...

Mary Blandy On this day in 1751, wealthy Englishman Francis Blandy slipped into a coma and died that same evening at his home in Henley. Soon after, his daughter Mary asked one of the household servants to help her escape to France in exchange for a handsome payment. When the servant refused, she attempted to escape on her own but was caught by neighbors who had heard that Francis Blandy had succumbed to poison. Prior to her father's death, Mary Blandy had been known as a well-mannered and well-educated young woman who was greatly respected by the people of Henley. Then, at the age of 26, she met and fell in love with Captain William Henry Cranstoun. Francis Blandy initially approved of the match and even allowed Cranstoun to live in the Blandy home. However, Cranstoun had a wife and child in Scotland and when he wrote her to ask that their marriage be annulled so that he and Mary could wed, she became outraged and caused a stir in the town of Henley. Cranstoun was soon expell...

On this day in 1930, Joseph Force Crater, a judge on the New York Supreme Court, became, according to the media, "the most missingest man in New York". His law clerk reported that on the morning of his disappearance he had destroyed some documents in his office, moved several others to his apartment on Fifth Avenue, and arranged for $5,000 to be withdrawn from his bank account. He then left his office, bought a ticket for a Broadway show, and had dinner with the lawyer William Klein and showgirl Sally Lou Ritz. After dinner, according to Klein and Ritz, Crater headed out to see the play. He was never seen again. Joseph Force Crater was born to Irish immigrants in 1889 and grew up in Pennsylvania. After receiving a law degree from Columbia University, he worked his way up from law clerk to lawyer and made several political connections along the way. He was appointed to the New York Supreme Court in April 1930 by Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was the governor at the time. Rumor...

José Gallardo Díaz On this day in 1942, a man by the name of José Gallardo Díaz was found unconscious by the Sleepy Lagoon in Commerce, California. The lagoon was a reservoir beside the Los Angeles River popular with Mexican-Americans. After Díaz passed away at the Los Angeles County General Hospital, without ever regaining consciousness, it was determined that he had been intoxicated and suffered from blunt head trauma. Although a medical examiner stated that his injuries were consistent with being hit by a car, police decided that Díaz had been beaten. Two days after Díaz was found, police arrested 24 men, all of Mexican descent, for conspiring to beat him to death. The media claimed that they were all members of the "38th Street gang". The media also began calling for police to take action against so-called "zoot suiters". As a result, on August 10 police arrested 600 Latinos and charged them with suspicion of assault, armed robbery, and related offenses. O...

On this day in 1918, Nebraska native Della Sorenson murdered her first victim by poisoning her infant niece, Viola Cooper. It would take seven years and six more deaths for anyone to realize that Sorenson was a serial poisoner. Two years after the murder of Viola Cooper, Sorenson poisoned her mother-in-law. Over a two-week period in September of 1920, she poisoned her husband Joe and her daughter Minnie. Within four months of their deaths, she remarried and moved to the village of Dannebrog, Nebraska. During an August 1922 visit from her former sister-in-law, she poisoned the woman's 4-month-old son with a piece of candy, the same as she had done with Viola. Her sister-in-law, failing to realize what had caused her son's death, visited Sorenson again a few months later with another of her children. Luckily, Sorenson's poisoned candy did not work this time around. In 1923 Della Sorenson poisoned her daughter Delia on the child's first birthday. A week later Sorenso...

On this day in 1914, Joe Hill was sentenced to death in Salt Lake City Utah for the January 10, 1914, murders of John G. Morrison and his son Arling in their grocery store. Hill had immigrated to the United States from Sweden in 1879. In 1910, he joined the International Workers of the World (IWW), popularly known as the Wobblies. The group was successful in organizing mistreated and exploited workers in the mining, logging, and shipping industries and rejected the capitalist system. They encouraged their members to express themselves in song and Joe Hill soon became one of their leading singers and songwriters. He coined the phrase "pie in the sky" for his song "The Preacher and the Slave" and also wrote the union anthems "The Tramp", "There is Power in a Union", "The Rebel Girl", and "Casey Jones—the Union Scab". By 1914, Hill was one of the most famous Wobblies in the United States and this notoriety may have led to his...