An Almanac of Infamy

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

Martha Ann Johnson's Mugshot Content Note: This case involves violence against children. On this day in 1989, Georgia resident Martha Ann Johnson was arrested and confessed to the murder of two of her four children. All four children had died under mysterious circumstances, which the Atlanta Journal-Constitution questioned in an article about the case. The article prompted investigators to reopen an investigation into Johnson and they discovered that each death came after Johnson had experienced marital strife with her husband, Earl Bowen. Martha Ann Johnson was born in Georgia in 1955. In 1971 she gave birth to her first daughter, Jenny Ann Wright. By 1975 she had divorced her first husband, married her second husband, and had her second child, James William Taylor. In 1977, she married her third husband, Earl Bowen. Together they had two children, Earl Wayne Bowen (b. 1979) and Tabitha Jenelle Bowen (b. 1980). On September 23, 1977, Martha Ann Johnson rushed her son J