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Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle was a million-dollar movie star in 1921, when there weren’t all that many million dollar movie stars. After a Labor Day weekend party, a young actress named Virginia Rappe was hospitalized and later died. Arbuckle was the prime suspect in her death. The prosecution’s evidence came from the testimony of Maude Delmont, a woman with a shady past who kept changing her story.
The newspapers never questioned Delmont’s version of events, and they kept flogging Arbuckle. His reputation was in a shambles, even after his friends Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin vouched for his character.
But Arbuckle’s lawyers introduced medical evidence showing that Rappe had had a chronic bladder condition, and her autopsy concluded that there “were no marks of violence on the body, no signs that the girl had been attacked in any way.” (The defense also had witnesses with damaging information about Rappe’s past, but Arbuckle wouldn’t let them testify, he said, out of respect for the dead.) The doctor who treated Rappe at the hotel testified that she had told him Arbuckle did not try to sexually assault her, but the prosecutor got the point dismissed as hearsay.
No matter what happened in court, Arbuckle also went through “trial by newspaper.” Find out what happened to Fatty Arbuckle, legally and professionally, at Past Imperfect. Link
From a hook being left on a door handle by a crazed serial killer to a gang that will shoot you if you flash your bright lights at them, Halloween is a ripe time for horrific urban legends to be spread around. While most of these are fiction, the reality is that some of these stories originate from real news stories and sometimes things that start out as urban legends eventually become real horror stories. Here are five terrifying tales with some scary truths behind them.
This one involves someone checking into a hotel room and noticing that something smells rotten. Eventually, they realize it’s coming from under the bed. So they move the mattress and discover a dead body. This story has been going around forever and has even been featured in movies like Four Rooms. It seems like this story is pretty unlikely, particularly given that you’d at least think a hotel maid would notice the smell of a rotting body before a hotel guest enters the room, but if you believe that, you’re giving hotel staff too much credit. In fact, the most disturbing thing about this story is how often it actually happens.
In 1982, a few auto thieves killed an accomplice and left him under the bed of their hotel in New Jersey. Four days later, someone discovered the corpse, but the room had been rented three different times in the meanwhile and no one noticed they were sleeping above a dead body. In 1987, a drug user overdosed and his high friend stuffed him under the bed and then ran away. Three days later, a family reported a nasty odor in their room, prompting the hotel staff to discover the body.
In New York 1988, a murderer was clever enough to actually put the body inside the box spring. Even so, the smell still gave away the body’s hiding place only a few days later. This time, at least two guests slept on top of the mattress, not knowing what was below.
There are tons more stories like this. Apparently hotel workers often shrug off these types of odors and go on with their business until a guest complains or even refuses to stay in the room thanks to the smell. If there’s anything to be learned here, it’s that you should never stay in a hotel room with a funky smell. And, if you do notice something off, check under your bed or mattress…or you might not want to, that is, if you’d rather not know what’s below.
Source: Snopes
Image Via neekatnite [Flickr]
It’s easy to look at this picture and wonder, “why is this umbrella so special that it is locked in a glass case?” But that’s before you learn it was a brilliant Soviet spy weapon:
So it was that one day, while Markov was walking to his car in London, he felt a sharp bite on his thigh. When he turned around he saw nothing, only a man who fumbled briefly with an umbrella before running off. The next day he became deathly ill, and died, as one is wont to do when becoming deathly ill. To this day no one has ever been tried for the murder.
This week, mental_floss is running a series about Abraham Lincoln’s adventures as a young man, before he got into politics. In part one, we learn about a murder in Illinois. What does that have to do with Lincoln? We find out in part two, in a story of a wrestling match between Lincoln and another young man that linked the parties together. In part three, Lincoln the lawyer argues for the defense in an unorthodox but memorable manner. What happened then? Find out how all of this affected Lincoln’s political career, in part four.
The following is an article from Uncle John’s Endlessly Engrossing Bathroom Reader.
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.
more …
Ludwig II of Bavaria died under mysterious circumstances 125 years ago. The death was ruled a suicide, but many don’t buy that explanation.
Today, Ludwig remains famous for the castles he built and attempted to build, most notably Neuschwanstein Castle, perched high in the Alpine foothills. The king was a romantic, a friend and suporter of composer Richard Wagner, and he hired theatrical set designers rather than architects to design his castles. More absorbed in his personal world than state affairs, Ludwig spent most of his time on his own projects — emptying his personal coffers — and left his ministers frustrated by his inattention.
What is left is a mystery -and those castles! The Atlantic has a collection of 30 photographs of the king’s life and those gorgeous palaces that still grace the region. Link -via TYWKIWDBI
(Image credit: AP/Christof Stache)
In retrospect, it may have been a bad idea for Anthony Garcia to commemorate his first killing by having it inscribed on his chest. When a LA County homicide investigator was later looking through pictures of gang members, he noticed something important:
Each key detail was right there: the Christmas lights that lined the roof of the liquor store where 23-year-old John Juarez was gunned down, the direction his body fell, the bowed street lamp across the way and the street sign — all under the chilling banner of RIVERA KILLS, a reference to the gang Rivera-13.
As if to seal the deal, below the collarbone of the gang member known by the alias “Chopper” was a miniature helicopter raining down bullets on the scene.
Lloyd’s discovery of the tattoo in 2008 launched a bizarre investigation that soon led to Anthony Garcia’s arrest for the shooting. Then sheriff’s detectives, posing as gang members, began talking to Garcia, 25, in his holding cell. They got a confession that this week led to a first-degree murder conviction in a killing investigators had once all but given up hope of solving.
Link via SayUncle | Photo: LA County Sheriffs
Clara Tang is going down in the history books. She is currently the oldest woman on record ordered to stand trial for murder in Australia. She is 92.
After almost 70 years of marriage, Mrs Tang – suffering dementia – allegedly killed Ching Yung Tang in their plush sixth-floor unit in the Connaught apartment complex overlooking Sydney’s Hyde Park on March 12, 2010.
It is said that Clara believed her husband was trying to poison her. She allegedly confessed to the murder.
Is 92 too old to stand trial for murder? Is there a point where the cost of proceeding outweighs the need for societal justice?
Les Kennedy of the Sydney Morning Herald has more: Link
Are you good at cryptography? Then the FBI wants to hear from you – they’ve just released a code that may just solve a 12-year-old murder case:
On June 30, 1999, police in St. Louis found the body of Rick McCormick, 41, who had been murdered and dumped in a field. The only clues the FBI found about the time leading up to his death came in the form of two pieces of paper in his pants pocket: Handwritten on the scraps were 30 lines of numbers and letters grouped into several sections.
After 12 years of trying to untangle the cryptographic mess, investigators from the FBI’s Cryptanalysis and Racketeering Records Unit and the American Cryptogram Association are throwing up their hands.
This is where you come in.
Link (self-starting video)
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
Rubber is a French comedy/thriller that revolves around a murderous tire.
RUBBER is the story of Robert, an inanimate tire that has been abandoned in the desert, and suddenly and inexplicably comes to life. As Robert roams the bleak landscape, he discovers that he possesses terrifying telepathic powers that give him the ability to destroy anything he wishes without having to move. At first content to prey on small desert creatures and various discarded objects, his attention soon turns to humans, especially a beautiful and mysterious woman who crosses his path. Leaving a swath of destruction across the desert landscape, Robert becomes a chaotic force to be reckoned with, and truly a movie villain for the ages.
Despite an April 1 release date, this is a real feature film that made the rounds of film festivals last year. Link -via Buzzfeed
The Zodiac Killer claimed to have murdered 37 people. The killings, which paralyzed Californians with fear for years, began in 1968, and soon after mysterious letters were sent to news outlets, many featuring cryptograms.
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
Stories can change your life – some inspire you to learn and to achieve, but alas some can lead to evil. Weird Worm has a list of 4 novels that inspired real life murders. Take, for example, John Fowles’ The Collector
The Book:
The first book in John Fowles’ distinguished career, “The Collector” (published in 1963) has been on the edge of popular culture for decades. It even inspired a highly regarded movie that almost nobody seems to remember. And maybe that’s for the best.In the novel, Frederick Clegg is an avid butterfly collector and with what seems to be a nasty version of Aspergers syndrome. Lacking social skills, he lives emotionally apart from the rest of the world until he wins a soccer pool that allows him to finally live physically apart from people as well. However he grows lonely in his cabin in the woods and kidnaps young Miranda, whom he had been obsessing over for quite some time, and keeps her in the cellar, adding her to his collection (book titles!). Anyway, some changing narration shows Miranda and Clegg’s twisted relationship, as well as the scope of Clegg’s illness. Let’s just say, in the end, he resolves to continue to add to his collection.
The Psychotic:
Christopher Wilder, a serial killer of eight young women in the early-mid eighties, was found to have the book in his possession when he shot himself. Robert Berdella, the Kansas City Butcher, tortured and killed at least six men in the 1980’s, and claimed to be inspired by the film version of the novel.The killers Leonard Lake and Charles Ng are the most closely tied to the book, as Lake was directly inspired by and obsessed with the novel. Lake sought his own potential Miranda’s, deemed “M-Ladies”, two of whom were abducted and ultimately killed. The pair also killed close to two dozen others. A chance arrest on a firearms charge related to shoplifting lead to their discovery, with Ng fleeing before being caught and Lake swallowing a hidden cyanide pill while in custody.
Read 3 more examples of novels that inspire (some) people to kill: Link
Artist Tom Thomson has been called “Canada’s Van Gogh”. His death in 1917 remains Canada’s greatest mystery. But there is some new information in the case, thanks to CSI-style forensic analysis.
The “truth” eluded Canadians for nearly a century, right back to July 16, 1917, when the missing painter’s body surfaced on Algonquin Park’s most famous lake – a bruise over his left temple, one ankle wrapped round and round with fishing line.That suspicious death – accident? murder? suicide? – and the subsequent question as to whether his body remained at Canoe Lake, where his friends had buried him, or had later been exhumed at the Thomson family’s request and taken to Leith, Ont., has made Tom Thomson Canada’s greatest enduring mystery, his famous works inextricably tied to his fate.
In 1956, a body was unearthed at the Canoe Lake cemetery that some thought might have been Thomson’s, particularly because of the hole in the skull. Others said it was was a young aboriginal man who had undergone trepanation. Just this past year, modern technology was brought into the picture to determine just who the skull with the hole in it belonged to. Link -via Nag on the Lake
In 1926, Francesco Travia was caught dumping parts of a dead woman. The rest of her was in his apartment. The Brooklyn police thought the murder case was open-and-shut.
The New York City medical examiner, Dr Charles Norris himself, was on call the night of the Travia arrest. He followed the policemen up the wooden stairs to Travia’s apartment, walked over to inspect the dismembered corpse.
His thick eyebrows drew together. The blood pooled around the half-body was a bright cherry-red. He bent to look closer at the woman’s face. It was flushed pink, despite the massive blood loss. As told by a crime writer, Norris walked over to the waiting detectives and announced: “Boys, you can’t hold this man for murder.”
The Brooklyn police assured him that they could – and would.
Unlike the police, Travia’s lawyer found the medical evidence compelling.
The case pitted forensic science against police procedures of the day, and science won.
In March 1927, he was acquitted of murder, convicted instead of illegally dismembering a dead body. A life-saving difference: in 1920s New York, it meant that he went to prison instead of Sing Sing prison’s infamous electric chair. They celebrated at the city medical examiner, believing that the case had given them new credibility, that they’d also proved that forensic toxicology was a credible, believable tool.
Read the whole story at The Guardian. Link -via Boing Boing
Nestled in a chest of drawers existed a list of names of those lives that succumb to the Blood Countess, Elizabeth Bathory. For years, Bathory’s sadistic killing spree went unnoticed as she left a trail of blood from Cachtice Castle to her abode in Vienna.
In Bathory’s Vienna Mansion, her cellar acted as a sadistic torture chamber, fashioned with a cage of spikes. The spikes could be raised or lowered by using as a pulley. Peasant girls and seamstresses with ample bosoms were locked in the cage, while Elizabeth Bathory’s maid Dorothea Szentes prodded the girls with a red hot poker. Elizabeth Bathory would shout perverse words at the girls, forcing them to be impaled upon a spike. She would later bath in their blood, believing it would preserve her youth.
From the Upcoming 
ueue, submitted by lannaxe96.
Was your first day on the job a little bit rough? I’m sure it was probably nothing compared to 39-year-old Terry Billups. He was arrested when he showed up for his first day at work covered in the blood of his girlfriend, whom he stabbed to death the same morning:
According to LRPD public information officer Lt. Terry Hastings, Billups and his girlfriend, 35-year-old Briticia Walters, “got into an argument and he stabbed her in the throat and killed her” in her bedroom at some time before 1 a.m. this morning at Walters’ home at 4215 West 18th St., Little Rock.
According to Hastings, Billups stuffed Walters’ 7-month-old son between the mattress and a wall and “covered him up with clothes” before driving Walters’ car to Conway to start his new job.
Link – via Unknown Highway
Double jeopardy is a legal concept that bars a defendant from being tried twice for the same crime. This concept is so important that it’s enshrined in the Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution.
But apparently, there is a way around double jeopardy – here’s the story of a triple murder and triple jeopardy:
Master Sgt. Timothy Hennis was convicted once before of killing Kathryn Eastburn and her daughters, Kara, 5, and Erin, 3. He even spent several years on death row awaiting execution after his 1986 conviction, but he gained his freedom after an appeal and acquittal at a second trial in 1989.
After that, he continued his career in the Army.
Big mistake.
Years later, the move allowed prosecutors to put him on trial yet again — and a U.S. Army court martial jury today unanimously found Hennis guilty of murdering Eastburn and her daughters nearly 25 years ago.
Hennis was found guilty and has now been sentenced to death for the second time.
Link (Photo: Jim R. Bounds/AP)
Some serial killers become massively infamous and have movies made about their lives, while others for various reasons slip through the cracks of history without leaving much of an impression on our collective conciousness. This doesn’t mean there aren’t some incredibly disturbing relatively unknown killers in our history though, take Tillie Klimek for instance:
Tillie found a schtick, and stuck to it. Namely: murderous insurance fraud. She went through five husbands, three neighborhood children, and just about anyone else she could get her hands on. Not only did she grab insurance money out of the deal, she also gained a reputation as a fortune teller based on predicting the deaths of these people. At one point, she was buying a dress for her husband’s funeral, when a stranger asked when he had died. Her response? “Ten days from now.”
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by redsfaithful.
If you want to sing in a karaoke bar in the Philippines, be forewarned not to sing Frank Sinatra’s My Way … that tune by Ol’ Blue Eyes could just be your last …
“I used to like ‘My Way,’ but after all the trouble, I stopped singing it,” he said. “You can get killed.”
The authorities do not know exactly how many people have been killed warbling “My Way” in karaoke bars over the years in the Philippines, or how many fatal fights it has fueled. But the news media have recorded at least half a dozen victims in the past decade and includes them in a subcategory of crime dubbed the “My Way Killings.”
The killings have produced urban legends about the song and left Filipinos groping for answers. Are the killings the natural byproduct of the country’s culture of violence, drinking and machismo? Or is there something inherently sinister in the song?
Whatever the reason, many karaoke bars have removed the song from their playbooks. And the country’s many Sinatra lovers, like Mr. Gregorio here in this city in the southernmost Philippines, are practicing self-censorship out of perceived self-preservation.
Norimitsu Onishi of The New York Times has the fascinating story: Link (Photo: Jes Aznar/NY Times)
On November 15, 1959, Herb and Bonnie Clutter and two of their four children were murdered in Holcomb, Kansas. This crime was later chronicled in Truman Capote’s book In Cold Blood and in four movies. The Guardian takes a look back at the crime, the book written about it, and how the town of Holcomb has dealt with its notoriety for 50 years. Some of the townspeople welcomed the attention; others wish everyone would stay away. Bob Rupp, the last townsperson to see the Clutters alive, and who erected a memorial plaque honoring the family, has his own opinion.
Bob Rupp has a third view. He says he has never read In Cold Blood, nor seen the movies, and never will. But he believes that Capote was unfair to the Clutters, because he left to posterity a memory of them that is dominated by the gruesome manner of their deaths rather than the wonderful accomplishments of their lives. He still thinks about the Clutters often, hence his idea for the memorial.
Link -via Metafilter
What would you do if someone killed your child, and authorities refused to extradite the suspect? Here’s what one father allegedly did:
A retired accountant whose daughter was killed 27 years ago was facing charges last night over the alleged abduction of the man he always blamed for her death. The man was left bound, gagged and injured outside a French courtroom.
André Bamberski, 72, is suspected of taking justice into his own hands over the German authorities’ failure to act against Dieter Krombach, a German cardiologist, after a French court convicted him of manslaughter in his absence.
Mr Krombach, 74, was found trussed up with head injuries in a lane near the criminal court in the eastern city of Mulhouse on Sunday after an anonymous caller with an Eastern European accent tipped off police. Mr Bamberski, who is of Polish origin and lives near Toulouse, was in Mulhouse at the weekend and is suspected of making the call, police said.
Link (Photo: Remy Gabalda/AFP/Getty Images)
Do two wrongs make a right or is Bamberski – if he did do it – justified in kidnapping the alleged (Update 10/26/09: alleged/convicted – there’s controversy about this) killer? What would YOU do if it were your child?
In 1920s, mutilated bodies of murdered children turned up in the streets of New York City. The crimes were so horrific that they were quickly attributed to a boogieman.
The truth was more mundane but much more disturbing – the murders were perpetrated by a man named Albert Fish, who aptly earned the nickname of the Vampire of Brooklyn:
At this time, Albert H. Fish was working at the nearby YMCA and the center for mentally challenged children. He was fired when “things about these children came out”. He was quoted as saying he “liked killing disabled and black boys because no one would miss them”.
February 11, 1927 Billy Gaffrey was snatched from a hallway in an apartment building. A witness said “it was the Boogieman that got him”. Albert Fish had taken the boy back to the boarding house he was staying at and got right to work. Using a saw, knife, and cleaver he dismembered and drained the blood of Billy Gaffrey. He drank the blood and saved the meat for food. He took the ears and face and made it into a stew with carrots and onions and his behind was roasted in the oven.
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by lannaxe96.
Hundreds of detectives in Germany spent two years trying to track down a mysterious female serial killer whose DNA was collected at 39 different crime scenes. When no progress was made in the cases, police offered a 300,000 euro reward for information leading to the killer.
It’s no surprise the money was never claimed, however, because the so-called ‘phantom killer’ was a complete myth!
Detectives had apparently been tracking the DNA of a factory worker who packaged cotton buds used by the police to collect samples, according to ‘Stern.de’.
Psst! If you’re a criminal and you’re considering a deathbed confession, make sure you’re actually dying first.
Here’s what happened to a man named James Brewer, who thought he was dying and confessed to a murder … only to get charged with it after he got better!
Convinced he was dying after a stroke, Mr Brewer reportedly admitted shooting dead 20-year-old neighbour Jimmy Carroll.
The 58-year-old, who had fled Tennessee after the killing, was arrested after his condition improved, reports the BBC.
"He wanted to cleanse his soul, because he thought he was going to the great beyond," said police detective Tony Grasso, who interviewed Mr Brewer in an Oklahoma hospital.
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Either somebody messed up or the news anchor just got pranked royally.
When reporting a sad news about Molly Bish, a 16-year-old girl who disappeared eight years ago, WFSB Connecticut news anchor Kara Sundlund came face to face with an unlikely suspect …
– via lemondrop
From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by bckids1208.
British physician Harold Shipman may have killed as many as 400 of his patients during his medical career, which would make him the most prolific serial killer of all time. An official audit estimates the number of victims at 236 over 24 years, but the exact number will probably never be known.
From the Upcoming Queue, submitted by 
