An Almanac of Infamy

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...

On this day in 1892, Francisca Rojas murdered her two children, Ponciano Carballo, age 6, and his four-year-old sister Teresa in the town of Necochea, Argentina. She then slit her own throat to make it appear that she was also a victim and claimed that the family had been attacked by a neighbor, Pedro Ramón Velázquez, because Francisca had rejected his advances. Police arrested Velázquez and proceeded to torture him in hopes of making him confess, even tying him to the bodies of the dead children throughout the night. Despite being brutalized by the police, Velázquez maintained his innocence. Meanwhile, Juan Vucetich, the head of criminal identification at the regional headquarters, had become intrigued by new theories of fingerprint identification that were emerging at the time. When he inspected the Rojas house he found a bloody thumbprint on the bedroom door that was a positive match to Francisca Rojas. Rojas, when confronted with the new evidence, confessed to the murders and ad...