This blog has the tagline “an illustrated introduction to criminal law and procedure.” It’s part webcomic and part law class, and all interesting. Author Nathaniel Burney breaks down criminal culpability into small pieces so we can understand some of the many facets of crime and the justice system. In the latest post, there are quite a few people who hate “you,” but they have different intents and take different actions. Which ones are guilty of attempted murder? The concepts are laid out in logical order from the beginning of the blog, but it’s not totally necessary to read them in order. Link -Thanks, Wiseayse!

(YouTube Link)

Hudson Urban Bicycles decided to try out something interesting in New York’s SoHo neighborhood-chain up a bike, take a picture of it every day and see how long it takes to disappear, piece by piece.

The findings were surprising at first (it took nearly six months for the first piece to be stolen), then slipped rapidly into familiar territory (only took another 30 days or so for the bike to disappear completely).

Hey, at least the thief (or thieves) waited almost six months before snatching the bike up piece by piece, that has to be a world record!

–via Geekosystem

Police Sgt. Jon Arnold said the woman hid in a closet with a laptop to post her plea for help on the social networking website, saying she and her son would be “dead by morning” if they were not rescued.

The post prompted someone to call police, who went to the home to check on the woman’s welfare.

“Facebook was her only outlet that she had at the home,” Arnold said. “It just happened that she was able to use it.”

Police arrested Troy Reed Critchfield, 33, and booked him into jail Saturday for investigation of aggravated kidnapping, forcible sodomy, aggravated assault, domestic violence, child abuse, animal cruelty and other charges.

Critchfield was on probation for charges related to a domestic violence incident. Link -via The Daily What

(Image credit: Salt Lake County Jail)

The police mug shot was invented by French criminologist Alphonse Bertillon in the early 1880s. Those mug shots were accompanied by body measurements for criminal identification in what was called the Bertillon System. By 1896, the New York Police Department was using the Bertillon System, and the image here is of the first NYPD mug shot. See a gallery of early mug shots at Flavorwire. Link -via Not Exactly Rocket Science

(Image credit: NY State Division of Criminal Justice Services)

At some point, Miranda’s attention was diverted and the victim was able to grab control of the gun and the two wrestled.

During the fight, Miranda accidentally discharged his gun, shooting himself in the ankle, Mirabelli said.

The victim — who told police he’s a martial arts expert and ultimate fighting champion — was able to pin Miranda down until police arrived. Police arrived to find Miranda with a face full of lacerations and two black eyes. He was taken to Holy Cross Hospital for treatment, police said.

Link -via The Daily What

The profits were astronomical at every step. In 1978 each kilo probably cost Escobar $2,000 but sold to Lehder and Jung for $22,000, clearing Escobar $20,000 per kilo. In the next stage they transported an average of 400 kilos to south Florida (incurring some additional expenses in hush money for local airport authorities) where mid-level dealers paid a wholesale price of $60,000 per kilo; thus in 1978 each 400-kilo load earned Escobar $8 million and Lehder, Ochoa, and Jung $5 million each in profits. Of course the mid-level dealers did just fine: after cutting the drug with baking soda each shipment retailed on the street for $210 million, almost ten times what they paid for it.

Soon Lehder was hiring American pilots to fly a steady stream of cocaine into the U.S., paying them $400,000 per trip. At one trip per week, in 1978 this translated into wholesale revenues of $1.3 billion and profits of $1 billion.

The profits and risks soared after that. The Jung in the quote is American George Jung, whose story was told in the 2001 film Blow. Read the rest of Escobar’s astonishing biography at mental_floss. Link

Assigned to probe the causes of the 1929 crash, he led what became known as the “Pecora commission,” making front-page news when he called Charles Mitchell, the head of the largest bank in America, National City Bank (now Citibank), as his first witness. “Sunshine Charley” strode into the hearings with a good deal of contempt for both Pecora and his commission. Though shareholders had taken staggering losses on bank stocks, Mitchell admitted that he and his top officers had set aside millions of dollars from the bank in interest-free loans to themselves. Mitchell also revealed that despite making more than $1 million in bonuses in 1929, he had paid no taxes due to losses incurred from the sale of diminished National City stock—to his wife. Pecora revealed that National City had hidden bad loans by packaging them into securities and pawning them off to unwitting investors. By the time Mitchell’s testimony made the newspapers, he had been disgraced, his career had been ruined, and he would soon be forced into a million-dollar settlement of civil charges of tax evasion. “Mitchell,” said Senator Carter Glass of Virginia, “more than any 50 men is responsible for this stock crash.”

That was just the beginning. The proceedings became a “circus” and a media sensation. Read about how Pecora unearthed the dirty secrets of the banking industry that led to the Great Depression at Past Imperfect. Link

Neatorama presents

How straight-laced were the Pilgrims? They tried to be, but you know how it goes. A shoe gets unbuckled, a bonnet becomes unlaced, and suddenly your hormones go into overdrive. The next thing you know, your horn of plenty hath spilled forth with wicked abundance.

Pretty much everything we “know” about the Pilgrims is untrue. Our modern-day image of the stern, clean-living, God-fearing residents of Plymouth Colony is largely mythical. It’s an illusion that took shape in the nineteenth century, as some overzealous American attempted to construct an official, more respectable history of our growing nation.

Historians cannot even determine exactly how many of the approximately 100 passengers on the Mayflower were Puritans and how many were just leaving to find better lives away from the gripping poverty that plagued England at the time. It is generally believed there were more of the latter than the former.

First off, they never referred to themselves or thought of themselves as “the Pilgrims.” The term “pilgrim” was reserved for Muslims making the pilgrimage to Mecca. The Pilgrims referred to themselves as “the Saints” or “the Separatists.”

They also referred to themselves as “Old Planters” or “Old Comers.” Draw your own conclusions from that. The name “the Pilgrims,” as we call them today, caught on around the time of the American Revolution.

Yes, they were notorious beer drinkers. They weren’t even headed for Massachusetts; they aimed for Georgia or a place further south, because of the milder weather. One of the reasons they ended up in Massachusetts in the first place was the lack of beer. According to one of the diaries of a Mayflower passenger, “We could not take time for further search …our victuals being much spent, especially our beer.”

One of the first structures built when they landed was a common brewery for the colonists. Many of the Pilgrims were brewers, this being done primarily in the home at the time.

While we don’t have the details about their private lives, we do know that by 1636, the colonists had a published set of rules that listed capital offenses. Among them were sodomy, rape, buggery, and some cases of adultery. So they were certainly concerned with sex, if not necessarily always having it.

However, court records from the colony indicate that sex-related crimes were common transgressions. Fornication, which was defined as sex outside of marriage, was a frequently committed crime, one that often resulted in a fine. Sometimes the evidence of a conviction was solely of the birth of a child in the early months of a marriage.

The only recorded execution for a sex crime occurred in 1642, when 17-year-old Thomas Granger was convicted of buggery. The young man had engaged in unfortunate, intimate relations with some local sheep, and he paid the ultimate price for it.

Less severe penalties (relatively speaking), often consisted of whippings. And like Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, adulterers were sometimes required to wear the capital letters “AD” on their clothing.

No, the Pilgrims weren’t exactly saints. But they definitely took their sins seriously!

If someone puts a gun to your head and demands your purse or wallet, hand it over immediately and run. Don’t worry about being shot in the back: If your attacker is going to shoot you for running, he was going to shoot you if you stayed in place, and at point-blank range. By running, you make yourself harder to kill. Any attempt to move you, even by a few feet—backing you off a sidewalk and into an alley, forcing you behind a row of bushes—is unacceptable and should mobilize all your physical and emotional resources.?[8]

If you find yourself in a situation where a predator is trying to control you, the time for listening to instructions and attempting to remain calm has passed. It will get no easier to resist and escape after these first moments. The presence of weapons, the size or number of your attackers—these details are irrelevant. However bad the situation looks, it will only get worse. To hesitate is to put yourself at the mercy of a sociopath. You have no alternative but to explode into action, whatever the risk. Recognizing when this line has been crossed, and committing to escape at any cost, is more important than mastering physical techniques.

Of course, there’s a lot more to consider, but you won’t have time to think these things through if the situation arises, so read the whole thing and think about it ahead of time. Link -via Metafilter

(Image credit: Flickr user Pensiero)

It’s time to unlock your body’s full potential.

1. Friends in High Places

In 2003, a 28-year-old Swedish man named Johan Adolfsson took a nine-hour flight from Thailand to Australia with eight extremely lethal snakes -four king cobras and four emerald tree boas- strapped to his inner thighs. His plan to cash in on the $3,500 booty for black market serpents was dashed when Australian officers captured him as he passed through customs at Sydney airport. Sadly, it too late for some of the snakes; all four king cobras died midflight.

2. Live by the Seat of Your Pants

The business of trafficking exotic animals is a multibillion dollar industry -and it’s more than just shoving reptiles into pairs of Dockers. In 2010, agents at Mexico City International Airport noticed a bulge moving under a nervous passenger’s t-shirt: Roberta Cabrera, 38, had 16 rare, 6-inch titi monkeys in pouches fastened to his chest with a special girdle. Two were dead. In separate incidents, airline passengers have also been caught with two pigeons, six lobsters, 14 songbirds, and 44 lizards crammed into their slacks.

3. Skirt the Issue

Mammals aren’t the only creatures customs officials have to watch for. In 2005, a 45-year-old woman was detained by customs in Melbourne International Airport after she’d arrived from Singapore. “During the search, officers became suspicious after hearing ‘flipping’ noises coming from the vicinity of her waist,” the Australian Customs Service later told the press. They found she had 51 exotic fish -all alive, hallelujah!- swimming in water-filled baggies hidden inside specially made pockets, which were concealed under her skirt.

4. Love Your Curves

In November 2010, two women were caught leaving a T.J. Maxx in Oklahoma with four pairs of boots, three pairs of jeans, a wallet, and one pair of gloves hidden in rolls of fat around their boons and bellies. All told, they’d squeezed $2,600 worth of loot under their excess body fat. The police officer on the scene later struggled to explain the situation to reporters from a local television crew: “These two were actually concealing them in areas of their body where excess skin was, underneath their, um, and their armpits, and things of that nature.”

5. The Cast System

People have been hiding objects inside of fake casts for centuries. In March 2009, a 66-year-old Chilean man one-upped his predecessors by wearing a real, functional cast that was entirely made of pure cocaine. A little more than two pounds of pressed blow, to be precise. What’s more, the cast was covering an actual injury; the Chilean had broken his own shinbone in a failed attempt to make his ruse seem believable. After the police in Barcelona caught him entering Spain, they rushed him to the hospital to treat his broken leg.

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The article above, written by Haley Sweetland Edwards, is reprinted with permission from the Scatterbrained section of the September-October 2011 issue of mental_floss magazine. Get a subscription to mental_floss and never miss an issue!

Be sure to visit mental_floss‘ website and blog for more fun stuff!

How did that happen? The ticket was supposed to be dated back to 2008, but the officer missed one of those critical zeros, dating the ticket 208. Whoops! Since then everything has been fixed and the guilty party was happy to pay his 100 Euro fine.

Link Via The Consumerist Image Via Superchou [Flickr]

Link Via BuzzFeed

“He said he was gonna go eat it in the corner and he ended up running out the front door, down the parking lot with the sandwich,” said Kelly Donatelli, who served him. “Just very bizarre. It was weird.”

That’s when he tried to make his getaway in a forklift. Ross Township police caught him.

“Apparently he was tired of walking and he saw the forklift with the keys in it and seemed like a good idea at the time,” Detective Brian Kohlhepp said.

Faulkner faces theft charges for both the sandwich (a misdemeanor) and the forklift (a felony). Link -via Breakfast Links

Officers who raided the home found a small meth lab, 19 grams of marijuana, 10 grams of heroin, 190 pills and $4,143 in cash, police say. They also seized a shotgun.

Police began looking into the home more than a year ago because of numerous neighborhood complaints. At one point, an unidentified neighbor gave police the “Heroin for sale” flier, which also had the address and names of the suspected drug dealers.

In addition, there were a number of public safety meetings where neighbors complained about the drug problem in their neighborhood, and they asked for something to be done, police say.

Six adults were arrested. There was also a teenager in the home at the time of the raid. Link -via Arbroath

The Lego version of CSI is a lot like the real thing, bad puns and all, but the gore is plastic. -via Laughing Squid

Albino hummingbirds may be pretty rare, but for that matter, seeing someone walking around with shorts filled with hummingbirds isn’t an every day sight either. It seems that releasing their birds from their bonds and putting them back in the man’s pants might just be the best punishment for the smuggler.

Link Via BoingBoing

(Video Link)

Plenty of people have pet guard dogs, but not many can say their pet bird is also a guard animal. Fortunately, Jack Dukes does because Charlie, his parrot, managed to rescue him from burglars trying to get their hands on his prescription drugs.

Link

It’s kind of surprising that the U.S. was the first to come up with the idea of creating a program to protect witnesses. Even stranger is that witness security is only about 40 years old. It began when the Organized Crime and Racketeering Section of the Justice Department introduced the Organized Crime Control Act of 1970 and started to actively protect witnesses in 1971. The law gave the Department of Justice freedom to arrange for the security of witnesses as they see fit, and though it was originally passed in order to curb mafia crimes, it now covers people who testify against drug cartels, gangs, and terrorist groups. The program was expanded by the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984 to cover some relatives and associates of the witnesses. Though there are still some problems with the program, it has been incredibly effective in coercing witnesses to provide testimonies that have landed major criminals in prison.

There are more details in the list of 10 Things You Didn’t Know About Witness Protection. Link

Anspach pleaded guilty August 31 to a misdemeanor theft count in connection with his failure to return 27 separate items (books and other media) that library brass valued at $770.67. Along with being ordered to pay restitution to the library, Anspach was fined $625.

Anspach, a Pizza Hut employee, is currently serving his sentence at the Jasper County jail.

There is no word on what happened to the library materials. Link -via Arbroath

A dark tale from our “Dustbin of Gruesome History” files.

THE DISCOVERY

One the night of April 28, 1908, Joe Maxson, a hired hand on a farm outside of La Porte, Indiana, awoke in his upstairs bedroom to the smell of smoke. The house was on fire. He called out to the farm’s owner, Belle Gunness, and her three children. Getting no answer, he jumped from a second-story window, narrowly escaping the flames, and ran for help. But it was too late; the house was destroyed. A search through the wreckage resulted in a grisly discovery: four dead bodies in the basement. Three were Gunness’s children, aged 5, 9, and 11. The fourth was a woman, assumed to be Gunness herself, but identification was difficult- the body’s head was missing. An investigation ensued, and Ray Lamphere, a recently fired employee, was arrested for arson and murder. Before Lamphere’s trial was over, he would be little more than a sidebar in what is still one of the most horrible crime stories in American history …and an unsolved mystery.

BACKGROUND

Belle Gunness was born Brynhild Paulsdatter Storseth in Selbu, Norway in 1859. At the age of 22 she emigrated to America and moved in with her older sister in Chicago, where she changed her name to “Belle.” In 1884 the 25-year-old married another Norwegian immigrant, Mads Sorenson, and the couple opened a candy shop. A year later the store burned down, the first of what would be several suspicious fires in Belle’s life. The couple collected an insurance payout and used the money to buy a house in the Chicago suburbs. Fifteen years later, in 1898, that house burned down, and another insurance payout allowed the couple to buy another house. On July 30, 1900, yet another insurance policy was brought into play, but this time it was life insurance: Mads Sorenson had died. A doctor’s autopsy said he was murdered, probably by strychnine poisoning, so an inquest was ordered. The coroner’s investigation eventually deemed the death to be “of natural causes,” and Belle collected $8,000, becoming, for 1900, a wealthy woman. (The average yearly income in 1900 was less than $500.) She used part of the money to buy a farm in La Porte. But there was a lot more death -and insurance money- to come.

MORE SUSPICIONS

In April 1902, Belle married a local butcher named Peter Gunness and became Belle Gunness. One week later, Peter Gunness’s infant daughter died while left alone with Belle… and yet another insurance policy was collected on. Just eight months after that, Peter Gunness was dead: He was found in his shed with his skull crushed. Belle, who was 5’8″, weighed well over 200 pounds, and was known to be very strong, told police that a meat grinder had fallen from a high shelf and landed on her husband’s head. The coroner said otherwise, ruling the cause of death to be murder. On top of that, a witness claimed to have overheard Belle’s 14-year-old daughter, Jennie, saying to a classmate, “My mama killed my papa. She hit him with a meat cleaver and he died.”

Belle and Jennie were brought before a coroner’s jury and questioned. Jennie denied making the statement; Belle denied killing her husband. The jury found Belle innocent -and she collected another $3,000 in life insurance money. And she was just getting started.

NOT WELL SUITED

Not long after Peter Gunness’s death, Belle started putting ads in newspapers around the Midwest. One read:

Comely widow who owns a large farm in one of the finest districts of La Porte County, Indiana, desires to make the acquaintance of a gentleman equally well provided, with view of joining fortunes. No replies by letter considered unless sender is willing to follow answer with personal visit. Triflers need not apply.

The ads worked, and suitors began to show up at the farm with visions of “joining fortunes” in mind. John Moo arrived from Minnesota in late 1902 with his life savings of $1,000 in hand. He stayed at the farm for about a week …and disappeared. Over the years several more met the same fate; Henry Gurholdt from Wisconsin, who had brought $1,500; Ole B. Budsburg, also from Wisconsin, who brought the deed to his property, worth thousands, and was last seen at a La Porte bank in April 1907; and Andrew Hegelein, from South Dakota, also last seen in the bank, in January 1908.

Andrew Hegelein turned out the be the last of the disappearing suitors, because a few weeks after his disappearance, his brother, A.K. Hegelein. wrote to Gunness to inquire about him. She replied that he’d gone to Norway. Hegelein didn’t believe her -and threatened to come to La Porte to find out what happened to him.

LAMPHERE

We said at the start of the story that when the Gunness home burnt to the ground, killing the three children and, presumably, Belle Gunness, former employee Ray Lamphere was arrested. The reason: Lamphere had been hired in 1907, and by all accounts, had fallen in love with Gunness. The seemingly constant coming and going of suitors enraged him, and he and Gunness fought about it. In February 1908, around the time of Hegelein’s disappearance, Gunness fired Lamphere. Not only that -she went to the local sheriff and told him Lamphere was making threats against her. The day before the house fire, she went to a lawyer and made out a will, telling the lawyer that Lamphere had threatened to kill her and her children…and to burn her house down. Under the circumstances, the sheriff had to arrest Lamphere – but the focus of the investigation would soon turn elsewhere.

THE WOMAN IN THE BASEMENT

Lamphere denied any involvement with either the arson or the murders. Few people believed him …but there were serious questions about the body of Belle Gunness. Doctors who inspected the remains said they belonged to a woman about 5’3″ (they had to account for the missing head, of course) who weighed about 150 pounds. Gunness was much larger than that. And several neighbors who knew Gunness well viewed the remains -and said it wasn’t her. Then A.K. Hegelein showed up looking for his brother. He told the police his story and insisted that a search be made of Gunness’s property. The search began on May 3. Two days later, five bodies, carefully dismembered and wrapped in oilcloth, were discovered buried around the farm.

BUT WAIT! THERE’S MORE!

The first body was determined to be that of Gunness’s daughter Jennie, who, according to Belle, had been in school in California since 1906. The second body was Andrew Hegelein. The third was an unidentified man; the fourth and fifth were unidentified eight-year-old girls.

Neighbors told investigators that they had often seen Gunness digging in her hog pen, so they dug up that area -and found body after body after body. Included in the group: suitors John Moo, Ole Budsburg, and Henry Gurholdt. In the end the remains of 25 bodies (some reports say as many as 49) were found, many of them unidentifiable.

Belle Gunness had obviously lured the men to her farm and killed them for their money. People in La Porte began to believe that if she could do that, she could fake her own death, and that the body found after the fire was yet another of her victims. It was beginning to look a lot like A.K. Hegelein’s threat to come look for his brother made Gunness panic and come up with her bloody plan. But then a problem arose: On May 16 a part of a jawbone and a section of dentures was found in the ruins of the house. Gunness’s dentist, Ira Norton, inspected them -and said the dental work on the teeth belonged to Belle Gunness.

THE AFTERMATH

After a long investigation the body of the woman in the fire was officially declared to be that of Belle Gunness, and was buried as such. Ray Lamphere was tried for arson and murder-but because of all the lingering questions surrounding the case, he was convicted only of arson. He received a 20-year prison sentence and died less than a year later of tuberculosis. While in prison he reportedly confessed to a prison minister that he had helped Gunness bury some of her victims -and that the woman in the basement was not her. Gunness had hired a woman from Chicago as a housekeeper just days before the fire, he said, and drugged her, killed her, decapitated her, dressed her in Belle’s clothes, and put her in the basement. He helped Gunness start the fire, he said, and was then supposed to escape with her, but she double crossed him and left on her own. However, none of his story could be substantiated.

People reported seeing Belle Gunness at dozens of locations across the U.S. over the following decades. None of these sightings were ever confirmed. Then, in 1931, a woman named Esther Carlson was arrested for the poisoning murder of her husband in Los Angeles …and she reportedly looked a lot like Belle Gunness. Carlson died awaiting trial, but some La Porte residents made the trip to the Los Angeles morgue and viewed the body. They said that they believed it was Gunness.

UPDATE

In 2008 Andrea Simmons, an attorney and graduate student at the University of Indianapolis in Indiana, led a team of forensic biologists to the grave where Belle Gunness was buried. With permission from Gunness’s descendents, they dug up the grave with the intent of extracting DNA from the corpse and comparing to the DNA of living relatives. Results were hoped for by April 28, 2008, the 100th anniversary of the fire at the Gunness farm, but they were, unfortunately, inconclusive. Attempts are ongoing, and someday, possibly soon, the mystery of Belle Gunness, one of the most diabolical serial killers in history, might finally be solved.

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The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John’s Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts.

If you like Neatorama, you’ll love the Bathroom Reader Institute’s books – go ahead and check ‘em out!

The suspect was told by a teller and customer that he had to wait in line for his turn, and to take off his hoodie, police said. The suspect refused to remove his hoodie and left the bank.

He was last seen walking toward F Street, police said.

Police said no one was injured and no weapon was shown. The robbery attempt is under investigation and no arrests have been made, police said.

Link -via Arbroath

(Unrelated image credit: Flickr user Nathan Huth)

Link

Bernie Madoff is serving time in a federal prison for running the largest Ponzi scheme ever. The U.S. Marshals Service held an auction of Madoff’s possessions to recoup some of the losses. Frederick James designs bought some of Madoff’s clothing, which they have made into iPad cases. You could probably make one out of your own pants, but these come with a bit of notoriety …if that’s important to you. Link -via Everlasting Blort

Link Via Geekosystem

An inflated sculpture named “Is Land” was deployed at the Secret Garden Party music festival in Cambridgeshire, England. The £9,000 helium-filled sculpture is seven meters wide and looks like a chunk of land with grass and trees on top. The island drifted off after someone cut the ropes tethering the balloon on July 24th and is now nowhere to be found. Anyone who sees the island is asked to report it to the project’s website. Donations to the site will go toward getting a second sculpture ready for Burning Man. Link to story. Link to website. -via Fortean Times

If you think crime is bad in your neighborhood these days, ask yourself this: are people stealing bricks from houses on your street? If the answer is no, then your hood’s got nothing on St. Louis, Missouri, where things have gotten so bad people are literally stripping houses to the ground for a few extra bucks. There’s a video all about it at Laughing Squid.

Link Image via Bill Streeter.

(Video Link)

I’d like to point out that while it’s obvious these are some seriously wussy robbers, this is also one tough little chihuahua.

Via BoingBoing

“We were not aware of how the lemonade was made, who made the lemonade, of what the lemonade was made with, so we acted accordingly by city ordinance.”

Who knew lemonade could be so dangerous to the public health?

Link Via Consumerist Image Via ChocoladeHam [Flickr]

Screen Junkies gives us the greatest bank robbery ever to appear in the movies, which is a supercut, because it takes a lot of robberies to be the best! Some language NSFW. Link -via The Daily What

No, seriously. There are apps that display fake Drivers License, let you avoid DUI checkpoints, and more:

Want to fool merchants with a fake ID? Hack someone’s text messages? Or how about tracking where your co-workers are, without their knowing it?

There’s an app for that.

The explosion in smartphone and tablet applications that allow people to check the weather, follow their stocks and play Words With Friends has a dark side — apps that facilitate questionable if not outright illegal behavior.

Apple’s App Store, for example, offers Drivers License software that promises "unlimited access to realistic-looking licenses" for all 50 states. Though the phony licenses are advertised as entertainment, it’s not hard to imagine a minor using one to try to get into a bar or a crook trying to pass a bad check.

Link

3AM: When the Devil’s Off Duty
According to the “Exorcism of Emily Rose,” 3AM is the devil’s hour, but backed by hundreds of thousands of data points over a bunch of cities, we disagree. Judging by the volume of crime at this hour, it looks pretty safe to us.

Check it out – so if you made graphs illustrating when criminal activity goes up and down over a 24 hour period for a bunch of U.S. cities (which we did), and then overlaid them on top of each other (look at the pretty picture below if you’re not following), you’ll see a very distinct early morning dip in crime between 3AM and 7AM. Conclusion: it’s highly unlikely that you’ll be struck by a smooth criminal in the dead of the night ‘cause the devil appears to be crashed out during his allotted “hour.”

Link

Guy Swindell Fowlkes, 33, of Orlando, was working at the tent at Colonial Drive and Maguire Road but had made arrangements to work at another tent location, according to an arrest affidavit filed in the case. When his girlfriend asked about keys to a storage unit, Fowlkes said he did not have the keys and began an argument with her.

Fowlkes struck his girlfriend, who is pregnant, in the left side of her face, according to the report. He then went into the tent and began to light up fireworks, directing some of them at other employees. He also lit the fuse of two firecrackers and placed them inside the gas tank of an employee’s car.

As police approached, they could see explosions in the distance. Fowlkes was charged with arson and battery. Link -via Arbroath

“Striking,” said Alfred Blumstein, a professor and a criminologist at the Heinz College at Carnegie Mellon University, because it came “at a time when everyone anticipated it could be going up because of the recession.”

Nationally, murder fell 4.4 percent last year. Forcible rape — which excludes statutory rape and other sex offenses — fell 4.2 percent. Aggravated assault fell 3.6 percent. Property crimes — including burglary, larceny, motor vehicle theft and arson — fell 2.8 percent, after a 4.6 percent drop the year before.

Richard Oppel Jr. of The New York Times explains: Link

In a related note, Baltimore Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis predicted that the NFL lockout drags on, we’ll see more crimes:

“Watch how much crime picks up if you take away our game,” Lewis told ESPN’s Sal Paolantonio. Pressed to explain why, Lewis replied, “There’s nothing else to do Sal.”

My theory? Criminals are so hard up they can’t afford weapons

When I’m 91 years old I hope I have the stamina and good humor of New Zealand World War II veteran John Bray. Bray has been told  by local officials to stop going out at night to patrol the streets.

Just like Batman, Mr Bray started out with a Robin-like partner, but decided to ditch him after he kept falling asleep on duty.

Link

The woman went to investigate and found Sirben asleep on her couch. She woke up her husband, who went to the living room and confronted Sirben. Sirben argued with the husband, telling him that he lived there, before he passed out again.

“They had no idea who this guy was,” said Sheriff’s Office spokeswoman Cecilia Barreda.

When a deputy arrived, Sirben was still asleep on the couch with a plate of food at his side. The couple said Sirben must have cooked something for himself before he fell asleep.

They found food in a frying pan they had not prepared. Sirben, who has a record of DUI convictions, was jailed for trespassing and criminal mischief. Link -via Arbroath

(Image credit: Florida Mugshots)

Crime Scene Fleece Throw – $15.95

Spring is here! Are you looking for the perfect picnic blanket? You need the Crime Scene Fleece Throw from the NeatoShop. It’s to die for!

Be sure to check out all the fiendishly funny Home & Garden items available at the NeatoShop!

It seems everyone is familiar with the dangers of drug-resistant staph infections and well aware of just how scary they are. As it turns out, they are so terrifying that a woman recently robbed a convienance store using the staph infection on her arm as a weapon.

When a worker confronted her, prosecutors said Slusher showed her Methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus-infected arm to the attendant, told him to stay away and then left the store.

She was later arrested and hopefully held in a cell away from the other prisoners.

Link Image via mtsofan [Flickr]

“Big Nose” George Parrot got his nickname for the fact that he had a very large proboscis, but his real claim to fame comes from something much stranger than a prodigious schnoz.

THE (NOT SO) GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY

In the late 1870s, a band of Wyoming outlaws called the Sim Jan gang decided to try their hand at robbing Union Pacific trains. Most banking was done by cash in the 19th century, and much of the cash moved by rail. This made trains very tempting targets for criminals looking for big scores.

Some gangs, the James-Younger and Hole-in-the-Wall gangs among them, became quite adept at train robbery. Sim Jan and his gang never did: When, for example, they tried to derail a train out of Medicine Bow, Wyoming, by loosening a length of rail, a railroad crew on a handcart came by and discovered the damage to the track. After repairing the track, the crew sped off to report the incident to the sheriff, all in plain sight of the gang, who were hiding in the bushes nearby. The next day the gang shot it out with the two lawmen sent to find them, Deputy Sheriff Robert Widdowfield and railroad detective Henry Vincent, killing them both. They were the first Wyoming lawmen killed in the line of duty.

FRONTIER JUSTICE

Frank Tole was the first member of the gang to pay for his crime; he was killed a few weeks later while trying to rob a stagecoach. Then came “Dutch”  Charlie Buress, who was arrested for the murders and put on a train bound for Rawlins, Wyoming, where he would have gone on trial had he lived long enough to see a trial. He didn’t: when his train made a stop in the town of Carbon, which was deputy Widdowfield’s hometown, an angry mob pulled him from the train and hanged him from a telegraph pole.

"Big Nose" George Parrot

Next up for justice: “Big Nose” George Parrot. His turn might never have come at all, had he not gotten drunk in Montana two years after the killings and been overheard boasting of his in

volvement in the crimes. He, too, was arrested and put on a train bound for Rawlins; when the train pulled into Carbon, history seemed about to repeat itself, because once again a lynch mob was waiting. But Big Nose managed to talk the mob out of the hanging by admitting his guilt and promising to tell all if they let him live long enough to face trial. Had he known what fate awaited him, he probably would have preferred being lynched.

DOPE ON A ROPE

Big Nose George lived long enough to be sentenced to death by hanging, to be carried out in 3 and 1/2 month’s time. But he didn’t live long enough to see the sentence carried out, because when he nearly killed a guard trying to escape from jail, the lynch mob decided that a speedier, unofficial hanging would do just fine. On March 22nd, 1881, a crowd of about 200 people dragged Big Nose George from the jail and hanged him from the crossarm of a telegraph pole.

Twice.

The mob had to hang him twice because the first rope broke. After a sturdier rope was found, Big Nose George, still very much alive, was hanged again. By now, however, George had managed to untie his hands from behind his back without anyone noticing. Then, when he was strung up the second time, he swung himself -by the noose around his neck- over to the telegraph pole, wrapped his flailing arms around it, and held on for dear life.

Big Nose George had no sympathizers in the crowd. The mob was happy to wait for gravity and muscle fatigue to finish the job. Over the next several minutes, he slowly lost his grip and died what must surely have been a slow and painful death.

(According to legend, George’s namesake beak was so big that when he was finally cut down hours later and laid out in a coffin, the undertaker had trouble nailing down the lid because the dead man’s nose was pressing up against it.)

AND NOW THE GRUESOME PART

When no next of kin arrived to claim the body, two local doctors, Dr. Thomas Maghee and Dr. John Osborne, claimed it in the name of medical science. Dr. Maghee had a personal interest in the case: His wife was criminally insane, the victim, it was thought, of head injuries sustained from falling from a horse.

Maghee wanted to examine Big Nose George’s brain for any signs of abnormality that might explain his criminal behavior, then use what he learned to try to help his wife. With the assistance of Lillian Heath, his 15-year-old apprentice, he sawed off the top of the skull, removed the brain, and studied it, but found nothing unusual. Perhaps in a macabre gesture of thanks, he let Lillian keep the top of the skull as a souvenir.

NEXT OF (S)KIN

(Image from the Carbon County Museum)

Dr. Maghee would probably have been better off examining Dr. Osborne’s brain for signs of abnormality. Osborne’s interest in Big Nose George was anything but scientific (he may have been motivated by revenge; according to one account, he was on one of the trains robbed by the Sim Jan gang and the delay caused him to miss a party). After making a plaster death mask of the deceased, a common practice at the time, Maghee removed the skin from Big Nose George’s chest and thighs (but not his nose), and mailed the human flesh to a tannery in Denver, Colorado, where it was made into human “leather” -definitely not a common practice at the time. Osborne then had the leather made into a coin purse, a doctor’s bag, and a pair of shoes.

Dr. John Osborne

Well, not the entire shoes. They were made from  combination of 1) leather taken from the shoes Big Nose George was wearing the day he died and 2) Big Nose George’s own skin. If you’re ever in the Carbon County Museum in Rawlins, where the shoes are on display to this day, you’ll see that it’s easy to tell where the ordinary cowhide ends and Big Nose George begins: Most of the shoes’ leather is an ordinary dark brown, but the leather on the front of the shoes over the toes is much paler -the color of Big Nose George’s own Caucasian hide.

Dr. Osborne loved to wear his Big Nose George shoes. He wore them while practicing as a country doctor, and when he diversified into ranching, banking, and politics in later years, he kept wearing them. When he was elected the first Democratic governor of Wyoming in 1892, in what some claimed was a stolen election, he wore the shoes to his inauguration -which must surely make him the only elected official in U.S. history to be sworn into office while wearing another man’s skin.

Let’s hope so, anyway.

WHERE’S THE REST OF ME?

The remainder of Big Nose George’s remains did not fare much better: Drs. Maghee and Osborne kept him in a whiskey barrel filled with salt water for about a year; then, when Dr. Maghee decided he’s learned everything he could (or Osborne decided one pair of shoes was enough), Maghee buried the barrel, with Big Nose George still in it, in the yard outside his medical office.

(Image from the Carbon County Museum)

The remains, long since forgotten, were still there in 1950 when Dr. Maghee’s office building was torn down and the site cleared for new construction. It was then that workmen found the whiskey barrel containing a human skeleton -a human skeleton with the top of its skull sawed off.

Dr. Lillian Heath

Luckily for the medical examiners called in to investigate, someone remembered that many years earlier a young woman named Lillian Heath had been presented the top of the skull of an outlaw named Big Nose George as a gift. She had gone on to become the first female doctor in the state; now in her eighties, she was still very much alive. She still had the top of the skull, too. Over the years she had used it as a pen holder and a doorstop; her husband had used it for an ashtray. When the skull top was brought to where the barrel had been found, it fit the rest of the skull perfectly. A DNA test later confirmed the match.

REST IN PIECES

Today, the lower portion of Big Nose George’s skull is on display in the Carbon County Museum alongside “his” shoes, his death mask, and other related artifacts. But if you want to see the top of the skull, you have to go to Iowa -Dr. Heath held onto it for another decade or so, then donated it to the Union Pacific Museum in the city of Council Bluffs.

That leaves the coin purse and the doctor’s bag, also made from Big Nose George’s hide. They haven’t been seen in ages. Who knows? Maybe they are still out there somewhere, waiting to be discovered, perhaps in a future episode of Antiques Roadshow. How about you -do you have an old, pale leather coin purse or doctor’s bag collecting dust in your attic?

They may tell a stranger tale than you realize.

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The article above was reprinted with permission from the Bathroom Institute’s newest book, Uncle John’s Heavy Duty Bathroom Reader. Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts. If you like Neatorama, you’ll love the Bathroom Reader Institute’s books – go ahead and check ‘em out!

Llovera was alone in the house at the time of the arrest, and he was unarmed.

“I think taxpayers should be shocked,” said Robert Campus, Llovera’s attorney. Campus said he believes the operation costs tens of thousands of dollars.

Deputies had no probable cause to believe Llovera was armed or dangerous, according to Campus.

Campus said he believes the entire scene was basically a stage, to help actor Steven Seagal’s TV show, “Lawman.”

Seagal was riding in the tank.

The Sheriff’s Department has entered into a contract with Seagal and part of that contract gives Seagal carte blanche to go along with the sheriff as he arrests people.

Thousands of dollars in damages were made to the property and 115 birds were euthanized on the spot.

One neighbor was so frightened she called 911 to report the raid. Link -via reddit

I’ve found myself watching a lot of Law & Order reruns lately, mostly because you can find it most hours of the day on various TV channels. Now we have statistics that track the outcomes of the cases in each season. Not only that, but they are compared with what was actually going on in New York City at the time -the NYC murder rate and the politics of municipal law enforcement. Some of the changes in the show over time reflect the real world, and other changes were made for the TV audience. Read the analysis at, appropriately enough, Overthinking It. Link -via Metafilter

The men taped Lester’s legs to his kitchen chair.

But after the thieves snatched his money and his truck, Lester chewed through the tape with his false teeth!

“It took me about two hours,” Lester said with a grin. “Boy, it was sticky!”

Lester was then able to call the police.

The robbers got away with about $400 cash and Matteson’s Ford Ranger. Link -via Arbroath

“He started fighting with the driver, and the girls got out and ran,” said Karl Kammann, a Buckingham Bus driver who had just dropped off 48 guests at the church. “It was chaos. Right out from under the wedding party! What a way to get married.”

Headed in the opposite direction on Columbia Road was Gerald Whelan, who was sitting in traffic when he spotted the man get into the limo.

“I saw the driver’s side open, and the driver struggling, half in and half out,” said Whelan, 61. “He started yelling, ‘Help me! Somebody help me!’ ”

The driver managed to get out, unharmed, and the limo disappeared down Columbia Road, only to be abandoned shortly afterward on West Fifth Street in South Boston as police searched for the wedding bandit.

The ceremony went on as scheduled while police cordoned off the area as a crime scene. Another limousine was summoned to carry the wedding party. Link -via Arbroath

From this point on, the killer started communicating via letters and greetings cards. Each of these messages was concluded with the crossed-circle design pictured above. Later it became known as the Zodiac signature. These letters as well as some coded messages were sent by the killer to different, well-known newspapers, including the San Francisco Examiner and the Vallejo Times Herald.

Many of these notes still haven’t been decoded, and the murders have yet to be solved. See the coded messages at Environmental Graffiti. Link

“Hey!” said Christopher, “could you call my mom, tell her there’s an emergency and she needs to come home immediately?”

Officer Martin said, no, he couldn’t do that.

He is a police officer, after all.

Instead, he asked for Christopher’s mom’s phone number and called with nothing but the truth.

“Mrs. Martha Sternickle?”

“Uh, huh.”

“This is Officer Martin of Bloomington Police. We’ve had a report of somebody trying to enter your home. It was unsuccessful but you might want to come home to make sure there’s no problem.”

When Sternickle arrived, Officer Martin led her to the police car to identify the “suspect” in the back seat. A joyful reunion followed. Link

(Image credit: Officer Fred Martin/Bloomington Police)

I didn’t cry but I jutted my lower lip out the entire way home. It was a genuine sad face. I tried to stop the sad face but I could not. I really love my yellow bike, and it is summer and riding your bike is the best, and also it is my main form of transportation around town. I didn’t know how I was going to be able to afford a new one, and seriously, I was super bummed. It is a material object, yes, and it can be replaced, but it’s MY BIKE AND I LOVE IT.

I sad-faced myself to sleep.

This morning I woke up around 9 AM and checked Craigslist to see if there were any reasonably priced bikes on there and lo and behold, there was a picture of my bike for sale for $75. They even had a picture of the scratches.

The story gets exciting from that point. Her friend did some detective work, and the police set up a sting operation. Then she had to meet the guy who had her bike. It sounds like a television show that wraps up in an hour, and it all happened just today. Link -via Buzzfeed

“Next time there better be more than $586,” he said during one call. He made “a similar threat” in the second call, police said.

About 11:15 p.m., a man wearing a ski mask and holding a gun walked up to the drive-through window at the Wendy’s at 1940 Piedmont Road, police said. He told an employee to put the cash drawer on the counter.

Police are hoping to get clues as to the thief’s identity by studying the security cameras. Link -via Gawker

(Image credit: Flickr user TheTruthAbout…)

Before you chalk this one up as the discredited pseudoscience of physiognomy rearing its ugly head, consider the argument behind a paper by Georgia State University economist (and dashingly handsome guy) Erdal Tekin:

Ugly people are more likely to break the law. This is the statistically based conclusion in a paper published in The Review of Economics and Statistics entitled Ugly Criminals [...]

This takes us to the modern Ugly Criminals study, which is subtler than it might seem. It is based on an anonymous questionnaire combined with equally anonymous ratings of the subject’s attractiveness. It shows a small but significant correlation between attractiveness, or the lack of it, and criminality. The most unattractive segment are 1.5 per cent more likely to have committed robbery, 2.2 per cent more likely to have committed assault, and 3 per cent more likely to have sold drugs. Or to have been caught doing so, at any rate.

The authors note previous work showing how more attractive people are more successful in their careers and earn more. This puts less attractive people at a disadvantage in the world of work and nudges them towards criminal alternatives. In addition, less attract ive people suffer socially, make fewer friends and build less of what the authors call “human capital”. They are therefore not as sympathetic to others and have less of an investment in society. This effect is far more pronounced in females, suggesting that they are judged on their appearance to a much greater degree.

Links: Article at Fortean Times | The paper Ugly Criminals by H. Naci Mocan and Erdal Tekin [PDF]

Not only had Detective Hudson had previous run-ins with Kevie, he knew the Valencia Club’s liquor license had been surrendered.

When Detective Hudson went to the bar to investigate, he found it open for business and customers at the bar. Kevie quickly went from behind the bar to behind bars.

Kevie is being held on charges of selling liquor without a license and, of course, burglary. Link -via Arbroath

(Image credit: Ben Furtado/Auburn Journal)