An Almanac of Infamy

Josefina Rivera, Agnes Adams, Sandra Lindsay, Jacqueline Askins, Deborah Dudley, Lisa Thomas On March 24, 1987, Philadelphia police received a call from a young woman named Josefina Rivera. Rivera claimed that she had been held captive in a cellar for several months and her captor was sitting just a block away at a gas station. When officers arrived to question Rivera they noticed what appeared to be chain marks on her legs and proceeded to arrest the man responsible, Gary M. Heidnik. Heidnik's arrest would unveil a real-life horror story, one of the most gruesome crimes in the history of Philadelphia. Gary Michael Heidnik was born on November 22, 1943, in Eastlake, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland. His parents, Michael and Ellen divorced three years later. When his father remarried in 1950, Michael and his younger brother Terry went to live with Michael Heidnik and his new wife. After Heidnik's arrest, he claimed that his father was abusive. Whenever young Gary would wet the

Mark Kilroy Sara Aldrete and Adolfo Constanzo In the early hours of March 14, 1989, American college student Mark Kilroy was kidnapped while celebrating Spring Break at a bar in Matamoros, Mexico. Kilroy, who grew up in the town of Santa Fe, Texas, was a pre-med student at the University of Texas at Austin. He had crossed over the U.S.-Mexican border by foot with Bradley Moore, Bill Huddleston, and Brent Martin. He and his friends were among the 15,000 spring tourists crowding Álvaro Obregón, the main street of Matamoros. One of the group's stops was the London Pub, a bar popular with spring breakers. It was two in the morning when Bill suggested the group head back to their hotel on South Padre Island, Texas. As the group left the London Pub, they spotted Mark Kilroy leaning against a car while talking to a girl. Bradley and Brent separated from the group and ended up at a restaurant while Mark stopped by a house on Álvaro Obregón to say goodnight to the girl he had been tal

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