An Almanac of Infamy

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...

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...

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...