Category: Uncategorized
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Books, books, beautiful books.
Originally posted on Crimescribe: The following are available from bookstores and online: Murders, Mysteries and Misdemeanors in New York. Murders, Mysteries and Misdemeanors in Northern California. Murders, Mysteries and Misdemeanors in Southern California. Criminal Curiosities: Twelve Remarkable Reprobates you’ve Probably Never Heard Of. And my latest: Dark River: The Bloody Reign of the Ohio River…
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Dark River : The Bloody Reign Of The Ohio River Pirates
Dark River tells a fascinating, and not well known, story of an age of the Western frontier (1770-1850). Social pressures spurred on by rapid western expansion and years of warfare became the breeding ground for violence. This atmosphere brought about the creation of a unique type of person. Those who would use the Ohio River…
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Merle Haggard, James ‘Rabbit’ Kendrick, Caryl Chessman, Eddie Bunker and Johhny Cash.
Robbing a supermarket near Madera turned “Rabbit” into the “Safeway Bandit.” Already wanted for the escape, Kendrick racked up another ten felony charges in the two weeks he was at large. They ended with an eleventh charge—the first-degree murder of a police officer. The Safeway Bandit had become a cop-killer; soon, he would return to San Quentin a condemned cop-killer.
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On This Day in 1957: Albert Anastasia, New York’s ‘Lord High Executioner,’ Murdered.
Originally posted on Crimescribe: Anastasia, murdered while getting a shave at New York’s Park Sheraton Hotel, was and remains one of the most callous and murderous criminals in American history. An illegal immigrant who jumped ship in 1919, he also jumped into New York’s underworld. Born into poverty in Parghelia, Italy in 1920 he would…
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George Harsh – Great Escaper and the ‘Milwaukee Thrill Slayer.
Before George Rutherford Harsh, Jr. became a crucial member of the Great Escape he became the ‘Milwaukee Thrill Slayer,’ at least according to the Georgia newspapers. Shot down on a bombing raid over Cologne in 1943 while serving in the Royal Canadian Air Force and a confirmed troublemaker in the eyes of his guards, Harsh…
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On This Day in 1924 – Howard Hinton, Georgia’s first electrocution.
Originally posted on Crimescribe: The former Central State Prison Farm at Milledgeville, since demolished. It’s common to find ‘Peachtree Bandit’ Frank Dupre, armed robber and murderer executed on September 1, 1921 with Luke McDonald, listed as the last man to hang in Georgia. He wasn’t. That was Arthur Meyers, a murderer hanged at Augusta on…
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On This Day in 1953 – France’s last inmates return from Devil’s Island.
Originally posted on Crimescribe: “The Bagne is a charnel house, a mass grave, running from syphilis to tuberculosis, with all the tropical diseases one can imagine (carrying malaria, ankylosis, amoebic dysentery, leprosy, etc.), all destined to work hand in hand with an Administration whose task it is to diminish the number of prisoners consigned to…
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On This Day in 1965: Joel Singer and Jack Franck, the real-life ‘Thunderbolt and Lightfoot.’
Originally posted on Crimescribe: If you’re a fan of Clint Eastwood then ‘Thunderbolt and Lightfoot’ is probably in your DVD collection. Not one of his better-known movies and perhaps not one of his best, but well worth watching all the same. Nor were Joel Singer and Jack Franck the original Thunderbolt and Lightfoot, that dubious…
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On This Day in 1963: New York State’s Last Execution, Eddie Lee Mays.
Originally posted on Crimescribe: Eddie Lee Mays, his Death House file at Sing Sing Prison. August 15, 1963 was an historic day in New York’s penal history, although nobody involved knew it at the time. New York’s lawmakers didn’t know it. the Warden of New York’s infamous Sing Sing Prison (now the Ossining Correctional Facility)…
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On This Day in 1936 – George ‘Diamond King’ Barrett, first to die for murdering a Federal agent.
Originally posted on Crimescribe: Barrett is certainly a criminal curiosity. His life was one of crime and allegedly several murders. The murder for which he finally died gave him an unwilling place in the chronicles of American crime, though he was hardly appreciated becoming one of history’s footnotes. So why did he hang in a…
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