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The tragic case that shook Kansas City, Missouri awake over 33 years ago may now have a chance to be solved. Thanks to the Kansas City Police Department for releasing their file, new evidence has emerged. In “A Quest For Closure: The Kansas City Firefighters Case Part 1," the KCPD and federal agents had local and national media outlets implicate people in the crime without supporting evidence. The prosecution then won a conviction many are now calling into question after it was found that a key police report and crime scene photos were not handed over to the defense. In Part 2, coming out in 2022, the focus will be on how the crime was carried out according to the documented evidence and what went wrong. Visit http://kcfirefighterscase.com for more information.

The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in 1929 would usher in the use of forensic ballistics to solve gun crimes. 

by Dr. Peter L. Platteborze

Most of us have sat mesmerized in front of a TV watching how highly motivated detectives solve a perplexing crime.  The popular non-fictional series “Forensic Files” has as its mantra “no witness, no leads, no problem” which alludes to how crime scene evidence will ultimately lead to the identification of the unknown perpetrator. 

Forensics, simply put, is the application of science to the law.  Since the 1960s, the U.S. criminal justice system has heavily emphasized its use.  A key discipline used in solving violent crimes involving firearms is forensic ballistics.  Few know that the small Michigan city of St. Joseph provided critical ballistics evidence that solved one of the worst crimes of the 20^th century, the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.  This dark event also firmly established the field of forensic ballistics as an integral component of the legal system that is still commonly used today. 

America in the Roaring Twenties was a relatively lawless land despite Prohibition. Due to the actions of social moralists and the powerful national Temperance movement, starting in 1920 there was a Constitutional ban on the production, importation, transportation, and sale of alcoholic beverages.  While Prohibition was intended to purify society, it instead spawned widespread corruption, violence, and organized crime.  It did not stop the country’s insatiable demand for alcohol.  Since alcohol remained legal in neighboring Canada, enormous amounts of contraband were smuggled in via the narrow and heavily trafficked Detroit River from Windsor.  Crime outfits in Chicago and Detroit massively profiteered from selling bootleg alcohol.  This flourishing underground black market often led to violence between competing gangs. 

The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre stemmed from who would control the highly lucrative Chicago bootleg trade.  In 1928, a bitter rivalry developed pitting George “Bugs” Moran’s Irish Northsiders against Al Capone’s Italian Southside gang.  Moran had started hijacking Capone’s bootleg whisky liquor shipments that were coming from Detroit.  To address this, Capone allegedly sought to get Moran and his henchmen together in one location so the competition could be collectively eliminated.  The crime was triggered when Moran’s gang met on a cold Saturday morning in February 1929, which coincidentally was St. Valentine’s Day. 

A black Packard pulled up to the front of Moran’s garage; this was the vehicle used by the Chicago Detective Bureau.  Two uniformed men entered and disarmed Moran’s men who were drinking coffee in the unheated building.  After Moran’s gang was lined up along a wall other men appeared from the shadows and opened fire.  Once the shooting stopped, witnesses observed that men in overcoats walked out with their hands held above their head escorted by policemen brandishing revolvers.  Everyone loaded into the Packard which rapidly sped away; this seemed to implicate the Chicago Police Department.

Soon thereafter multiple police cars arrived to discover a horrific crime scene.  Inside the garage, seven members and associates of Moran’s Gang were found dead along a blood spattered and heavily bullet pocked yellow brick wall.  Prior to any evidence being disturbed, the Chicago coroner’s office took charge of the investigation.  An array of photographs was taken  that documented the crime scene followed by the systematic collection of all spent bullets, shell casings, and bullet fragments.  This evidence was placed into marked envelopes that were then sealed, representing a detailed forensic chain of custody.  The bullets that were subsequently removed from the victims by the coroner’s office were similarly treated and labeled with the decedent’s name.

This crime horrified the entire country and set off a public outcry demanding an end to Chicago’s rampant violence. In response, the police closed speakeasies and arrested bootleggers.  Despite being under enormous pressure to solve the crime, the police quickly exhausted all their leads.  The Chicago coroner’s office recommended using a new type of science called forensic ballistics to help solve this violent crime.  Based on this educated gamble, they contacted Dr. Calvin Goddard, the recognized field expert to assist the investigation.  To convince him to leave New York City and support the case, business leaders offered to finance a new forensic laboratory at nearby Northwestern University. This new lab was intentionally designed as a private business to exclude the notoriously corrupt Chicago police who were potentially complicit in the Massacre.  The offer worked; Goddard agreed to support the case which ultimately involved his assessment of the most firearm evidence he had ever received in his career.

The new field of forensics ballistics was based on the striations (i.e., scratches) that are imprinted onto bullets fired through rifled gun barrels.  It was hypothesized that these patterns were unique like a fingerprint and were traceable to a single source.  Striations are due to the soft lead bullet firmly gripping the rifled gun barrel’s grooves when fired which are engineered to impart a rapid spin.  This process is like the spiral pass of a football, dramatically improving the gun’s accuracy and increasing the effective firing range.  The specific rifling characteristics differ between firearm manufacturers but are consistent to a particular brand, model, and caliber.  If a gun was thought to have been involved in a shooting, it could be test-fired in a controlled lab setting.  The resulting intact bullets are then directly compared to bullets recovered from a crime scene.  This was usually done by using a magnifying glass and an investigator’s memory.  If the striations patterns matched, the weapon was placed at the crime which could lead to identification of the perpetrator. 

Goddard was well positioned to support the forensic assessment of the Massacre’s evidence.  He had recently reviewed ballistics evidence in the Sacco and Vanzetti trial appeal that involved two immigrant anarchist bank robbers being convicted of murder.  While his scientific conclusions condemned Sacco, it seemed to largely confuse the jurors and lawyers.  Goddard was a World War I veteran and retired U.S. Army Colonel academically trained as a medical doctor.  His intense interest in firearms caused him to leave the medical profession to focus on his avocation.  Critical to his success was the invention and implementation of a new lab instrument.

In 1925, Goddard co-invented the comparison microscope which proved essential to the field of forensic ballistics becoming a recognized science by the criminal justice system. Now, instead of investigators using a magnifying glass and their recall to compare striation patterns, they could use a comparison microscope.  This device is two separate microscopes side by side linked by an optical bridge.  It allows an analyst to look at two different samples simultaneously and compare key characteristics.  Under magnification, fired bullets mounted on a post were turned to determine if the nearly invisible striations matched.  If they failed to align, then the bullets were fired from different guns.  With this new technology, Goddard proved the hypothesis that no two rifled firearms are made exactly alike.  Each rifled weapon made characteristic striations on a bullet that were consistent every time it was fired.  Hence, a bullet taken from a murdered victim could identify the specific gun it was fired from.  He also showed that striations on ejected shell casings could be traceable to a single firearm.

At the Massacre crime scene, extensive firearms evidence had been collected.  This included 70 spent shell casings from the garage floor, 14 bullets that had either missed or passed through their targets and 47 bullet fragments.  In addition, 39 bullets and bullet fragments had been removed from the seven murdered gangsters. 

Goddard began his forensic examination by scrutinizing the spent shell casings.  He quickly determined that they all were of the same make and had been fired from a .45 caliber automatic weapon.  This eliminated all but two guns made in the U.S., the 45 Colt automatic pistol and the Thompson submachine gun.  Close examination of the spent bullets revealed that they had been fired through a barrel manufactured with six grooves that twisted to the right.  Since Colt firearms were manufactured with a left twist, this indicated to Goddard that the weapon used was the Thompson submachine gun whose barrel had a six groove, right twist.  Often called the Tommy gun, in the 1920s these firearms were frequently employed by gangsters and law enforcement.  Goddard’s analysis also revealed that two different Tommy guns had been used in the crime. 

As Goddard labored over this firearms evidence, the citizens of Chicago demanded to know if the killers were corrupt policemen who had been feuding with the Moran gang.  Under mounting public pressure, the city and suburb police submitted all their Thompson submachine guns to Goddard for forensic analysis.  He systematically test-fired each weapon and directly compared the resulting bullets and shell casings to the crime scene evidence.  Using his newly invented comparison microscope, Goddard firmly concluded that none of these weapons had been used in the crime which absolved the Chicago police of involvement.  

Goddard’s conclusion was corroborated by witnesses who were near the Massacre site when the crime occurred.  They described a tall, stocky man missing a front tooth who rapidly drove away in the alleged police car.  This description did not closely match any of the city’s policemen, however, it did fit Fred R. Burke.  Nicknamed “Killer,” Burke was a notorious criminal and prolific mob hitman who would do anything if the price was right.  Law enforcement was well acquainted with him, especially those in Michigan.  Burke had previously served time in the Jackson prison and was allegedly involved in several robberies of Detroit jewelry stores and a bank in Cadillac. He had also been associated with Capone and the Purple Gang of Detroit.  He was a prime suspect in the notorious March 1927 Miraflores Massacre where three Detroit mobsters were murdered and in the killing of Thomas Bonner of Hess Lake.  No one knew Burke’s whereabouts; he had disappeared from the public right after the Chicago Massacre.

This criminal investigation then went cold for nearly a year until a bizarre indent occurred 90 miles northeast of Chicago in Michigan.  St. Joseph is the seat of Berrien County and was frequently visited by Capone and other gangsters.  On a cold Saturday night in mid-December, 25-year-old police officer Charles Skelly was on a routine foot patrol and directing Christmas shopping traffic.  He became involved in an argument involving a minor traffic accident in which local farmer George Kool claimed an unknown intoxicated man had rear-ended his vehicle.  When escorting them to the police station to resolve the issue, the stranger shot Officer Skelly three times at point-blank range.  While speeding away the shooter soon crashed his car on a sharp curve.  Undeterred, the fugitive then stopped a passing motorist and at gun point commandeered his car to escape.  When the police arrived at the accident, the driver was gone but the registration papers found in the abandoned wreck identified the owner as Frederick Dane from nearby Stevensville, Michigan.  Later that night, Officer Skelly died of his wounds while on the operating table.

When Berrien County sheriffs arrived at the Dane home, Frederick was absent, and his wife did not know his whereabouts.  While searching the residence, Dane’s true identity began to emerge.  On the second floor of the lavishly furnished bungalow, they found a small arsenal of weapons in a locked closet.  This cache included two Thompson submachine guns, around 1,000 rounds of ammunition as well as revolvers, sawed-off shotguns, hand grenades, and tear gas bombs.  In addition, they found several bulletproof vests, and over $300,000 worth of bonds stolen the prior month from a Jefferson, Wisconsin bank.  Laundry markings on the man’s clothing had the initials of FRB which led the police to quickly conclude that Frederick Dane was an alias for Fred R. “Killer” Burke.  A latent fingerprint recovered from a household object was identified as belonging to Burke.

After contacting the Chicago police to discuss their findings, the Berrien County Sheriff’s Department sent the weapons and ammunition to the forensic lab at Northwestern University.  Goddard quickly determined that most of the ammunition was of the same type used in the Massacre.  He then test-fired 35 bullets from the two confiscated Thompson submachine guns.  When they were directly compared to bullets recovered from the crime scene and decedents, Goddard concluded that the striation patterns matched!  Both of these guns had been used to kill Moran’s men.  With this data, the Chicago District Attorney’s office requested that Burke be captured and held for the grand jury on charges of murder.

The media attention surrounding this lab discovery catapulted Goddard to national fame and brought legitimacy to the fledgling science of forensic ballistics.  Additional lab testing by Goddard revealed that one of the Tommy guns had also been used in the murder of New York City mob boss Frankie Yale that occurred a few months prior to the Massacre.  Bullets recovered from Yale’s body were now directly linked to Burke who was the prime suspect.

Based on this cumulative evidence, Fred Burke was designated a public enemy and added to the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives.  Four months later he was apprehended in Missouri based on a tip from an amateur detective who recognized him from a picture in True Detective Mysteries magazine.  Instead of being extradited to Chicago, the local authorities delivered Burke back to Michigan due to the airtight case against him in the murder of Officer Skelly.  This decision was also influenced by the fact that Michigan had no death penalty.  Based on the preponderance of evidence, on April 27, 1931, Burke pled guilty to the second-degree murder of Officer Skelly and was sentenced to life in prison.  He would fulfill his sentence at the Michigan State Penitentiary in Marquette registered under the alias of Frederick Dane. During his imprisonment he refused to implicate anyone else involved in the Massacre.  Approximately nine years into his sentence, he died of a massive heart attack at the age of 47.  He is buried in Marquette’s Park Cemetery under his real name, Thomas Camp.

Today, the Stevensville bungalow safe house used by Fred “Killer” Burke is still standing and the prison he resided in remains active.  In addition, the Tommy guns used in the Massacre have been retained as crime evidence by the Berrien County Sheriff’s Office.  They are occasionally shown at public educational exhibits.  The forensic ballistics analysis of the bullet striations so important to solving this incredibly atrocious crime remains a standard investigative enquiry used in today’s crime labs.  Currently, over four million digital images of striations have been incorporated into the National Integrated Ballistics Information Network, a database that catalogs firearms allegedly used in crimes.  These high-resolution images are downloaded and compared to new gun evidence which has resulted in more than 200,000 hits and countless violent crimes being solved. 

When Fatty Arbuckle was charged with manslaughter in the death of Virginia Rappe in 1921 he was the highest paid actor in Hollywood. The tabloid press went after him with a vengeance.  Eleven years later, despite being exonerated by a jury, he died of a heart attack at age 46 as an outcast.

by Benjamin Welton

In today’s era of a scandal-a-day, the public furor over the case of Fatty Arbuckle and the death of Virginia Rappe seems somehow overblown and unbelievably melodramatic. The fact that Los Angeles crowds once shouted for the portly actor’s blood seems like a moralistic viciousness from a far more Puritan America. Nowadays, we’re far more cynical, and yet there’s something about the rise and fall of Fatty Arbuckle that still holds an inglorious luster.

Part of it is the age-old thrill of seeing great men brought low. The other can be located in Hollywood – a place that was synonymous with scandalous debauchery in the early 1920s. Before New York’s Daily News called him a “Beast from [sic] Gutter” in one of the paper’s typically tawdry headlines, Arbuckle (born Roscoe Conkling Arbuckle) was a rotund but agile funnyman who made silent comedy classics. A veteran of the vaudeville circuit, Arbuckle got his first break working for director Mack Sennett – the Canadian-born godfather of American slapstick comedy. Initially, Arbuckle was just another Keystone Kop working for Sennett’s Keystone Studios. Then, in the 1913 short film A Noise from the Deep, Arbuckle took the first ever pie-to-the-face. The person who threw the pie was actress Mabel Normand, a comedienne who would go on to make 17 films with Arbuckle as the beauty to his bumbling beast.

Besides Normand, Arbuckle’s other co-workers and peers included such luminaries as Charlie Chaplin (whose Little Tramp persona owed some of its success to Chaplin’s decision to wear Arbuckle’s large trousers for comedic affect) and Buster Keaton. Keaton and Arbuckle in particular became good friends and business partners, and in 1918, Arbuckle put Keaton in charge of Comique, a film company that Arbuckle had started with Joseph Schenck. Fatty transferred his share of the company because his gold lay elsewhere. In particular, in 1921, Arbuckle signed a three-year contract with Paramount. The contract paid him a million dollars per year, thus making him, for a brief time, the highest-paid player in Hollywood.

Despite his healthy bank account, Arbuckle needed a break. In his 1976 book The Day the Laughter Stopped, author David Yallop describes how Arbuckle’s schedule, which usually consisted of six films a year, some of which were shot concurrently with each other, was taking its toll on the often sickly actor. (Arbuckle’s greatest health problem stemmed from a carbuncle, which, after its lancing and painful draining, forced Arbuckle to take morphine in order to deal with the pain. In his 2013 book Room 1219: The Life of Fatty Arbuckle, The Mysterious Death of Virginia Rappe, and the Scandal That Changed Hollywood, author Greg Merritt alleges that this morphine use made Arbuckle one of Hollywood’s first drug addicts).

St Francis Hotel

The nadir of Arbuckle’s work schedule came when, right before Arbuckle’s planned vacation trip to San Francisco, the actor received agonizing burns on his buttocks. How this happened is not quite known (while Yallop claims that Arbuckle backed into a hot stove, the notoriously suspect writer and historian Andy Edmonds claims in Frame Up!: The Untold Story of Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle that the actor accidentally sat on a mechanic’s acid-soaked rag), but regardless the injury almost ended Arbuckle’s three-day vacation in San Francisco early. Eventually, Arbuckle was talked into checking in at the St. Francis Hotel by his friend and director Fred Fischbach. To sweeten the deal, Fischbach promised Arbuckle to get some illegal booze in ‘Frisco, which of course would take the actor’s mind off of his aching backside. Arbuckle agreed, and on Labor Day weekend in 1921, Arbuckle, Fischbach and the actor Lowell Sherman were the primary occupants of rooms 1219, 1220, and 1221.

Originally planned to be, in the words of Daily News writer Mara Bovsun, “an end-of-summer ‘gin-jollification,’” the party soon became a bacchanalia full of less than savory folks. Even though it occurred in the midst of that great failed experiment known as Prohibition, alcohol flowed like water at the party. Most Americans disliked the Eighteenth Amendment and its offspring the Volstead Act, so the open flaunting of illicit spirits made Fatty and company rather pedestrian. Virginia Rappe, whom history cannot confirm as either an invited guest or a party crasher, was the opposite of pedestrian, and along with her manager Al Semnancher and the shady Bambina Maude Delmont, Rappe decided to be the life of the party.

The Life of the Party

Virginia Rappe

Rappe was originally born a “Rapp,” but added an “e” on her surname because she claimed it sounded “more elegant.” It was all for naught, for Virginia’s unfortunate last name eerily presaged the grand accusation at the center of Fatty Arbuckle’s railroading. Like Arbuckle, whose own childhood was a maze of torment and abuse, Rappe’s early life can be summed up in one word: “tragic.” The illegitimate daughter of Mabel Rapp, Rappe was primarily raised by her grandmother after her mother’s death. As Rappe grew into her raven-haired good looks, she also grew up too fast and began engaging in a lifestyle that would ultimately lead to her death.

Before and during the trial, journalists of the yellow variety did their best to depict Arbuckle as an overweight beast – a latter day Bluebeard with a Kansas-sized paunch. In many ways, the newspapers took over where Arbuckle’s father had left off, and like the comedian’s old man (the party responsible for naming Fatty after his least favorite politician, the Republican party boss Roscoe Conkling) the newspapers of the 1920s did their best to demean and demoralize the once beloved screen idol. As part of this organized character assassination, the newspapers did their best to uphold Rappe as a virtuous and wholly innocent victim of Arbuckle’s deranged lust. She was the white virgin to Arbuckle’s black beast, and her dramatic death seemed perfect for self-righteous pearl-clutching.

In truth, Rappe was anything but virginal. Rappe was raised without a father figure in the bustling metropolis of New York, and as a result she pursued numerous sexual relationships at a tender age and without an awareness regarding sexual contraception. As a result, Rappe suffered from bouts of venereal disease, plus it was rumored that she had had several abortions before the age of 16. At the age of 17, Rappe became the mother of an out-of-wedlock child in the tradition of her own mother.

None of this seemed to drastically affect Rappe’s career; however, and by the time of the party at the St. Francis Hotel, Rappe was a bit-part actress and a relatively well-known artist’s model who had graced the cover to the sheet music for “Let Me Call You Sweetheart.” Rappe was also engaged to one Henry "Pathé" Lehrman, one of Sennett’s men and an occasional director of Fatty Arbuckle shorts. Lehrman’s working relationship with Arbuckle didn’t mean that the two were close. In fact, Lehrman and Arbuckle were known to have a long-running feud, and Rappe wasn’t above joining in. In “Fatty Arbuckle and the Death of Virginia Rappe,” Crime Library contributor Denise Noe claims that at one point Rappe called Arbuckle “disgusting and crude...vulgar and disrespectful to women.” While these words would come to haunt Arbuckle during three different trials, Noe sees them as the platitudes of Lehrman’s loyal lover.

Arbuckle’s opinions of Rappe are a little less known to history. Some sources claim that Arbuckle was smitten with the attractive actress, while others insist that Arbuckle didn’t care for either Rappe or her set. Furthermore, on September 5, 1921, Arbuckle didn’t want either Rappe or her friends drinking all of his liquor. By all accounts that’s exactly what they did, and after several hours of imbibing, Arbuckle found a naked Rappe screaming in his room.

 Arbuckle claimed during his testimony that he, Delmont, and other guests initially placed Rappe in a tub full of ice. Next, the group called for the hotel doctor, who injected Rappe with a shot of morphine. In the morning, Rappe’s condition only continued to deteriorate, and finally, after three days of agony, Rappe was taken to a nearby hospital. On the fourth day, Rappe was taken to the Wakefield Sanitarium, an institution widely known for performing abortions. Finally, on Friday, five days after the party, Rappe died of peritonitis caused by a ruptured bladder.

Almost immediately, Delmont cried “murder.” According to her, during the early stages of the party, Arbuckle had grabbed Rappe and dragged her against her will into his bedroom. Delmont told the police that Arbuckle said: “I’ve wanted you for five years” just before closing the door. After a quarter of an hour, Delmont said that Arbuckle had reappeared as a sweaty, exhausted-looking man. Rappe had remained behind on the bed and told Delmont that: “I’m dying. He did it, Maude.”

From her vantage point, Arbuckle had raped the girl, and furthermore, the actor’s great weight had crushed her, thus causing her bladder to rupture. Years later, smut junkies like Kenneth Anger would claim that Arbuckle had penetrated Rappe with either a Coca-Cola or Champaign bottle, but at the time of the actor’s ordeal, Delmont’s nebulous accusation of rape was enough to effectively end Arbuckle’s career.

Even before he went to trial, Arbuckle was found guilty in the press. Unfortunately for him, Arbuckle’s case occurred during the height of the tabloid era and the birth of so-called Jazz Age journalism. Ever since June 26, 1919, when the Daily News debuted the tabloid format, American newspapers had given in to printing lurid and sensational headlines that came packaged with plenty of pictures. Arbuckle’s fame, his girth, and his profession all made him a perfect fall-guy for the media’s obsession with Hollywood’s moral rot.

On top of this, the death of Virginia Rappe was just another shocking case from the film world. Earlier, in 1920, the actress Olive Thomas had died after drinking a lethal quantity of mercury bichloride. The chemical compound belonged to her husband Jack Pickford, a handsome screen idol whose short life was ruled by scandal, drink, and drug abuse. Rumors had it that Pickford used the mercury bichloride to treat his syphilis, plus even more wagging tongues proclaimed Thomas’s death an act of suicide. Even though it was eventually ruled an accidental death, much of the American public believed Hollywood to be viper pit controlled by immorality.

Arbuckle’s trial, plus the concurrent scandal of the still unsolved murder of William Desmond Taylor, put Hollywood squarely in the sights of moral crusaders. William H. Hays, a former chairman of the Republican National Committee and the one-time Postmaster General, was eventually called in to be Hollywood’s in-house policeman and censorship board, and on April 18, 1922, Hays banned Arbuckle from making any more films. Although the ban was lifted in December 1922, the damage to Arbuckle’s career was irreversible.

The sad thing here was that Hays’s ban had been enacted on an innocent man. After three trials, which lasted from November 1921 until March 1922, Arbuckle was finally acquitted on all charges. In the first trial, Arbuckle was charged with manslaughter, but after giving convincing testimony on the stand, Arbuckle and his defense lawyer netted a hung jury, with 10 to two in favor of not guilty. 

During the second trial, Arbuckle did not take the stand. Coupled with a generally poor defense, Arbuckle’s silence caused yet another hung jury, this time 10 to two in favor of conviction. During the third and final trial, Arbuckle once again took the stand, and after the prosecution’s star witness (Zey Prevon, a showgirl and model) was charged with perjury, the jury only took minutes to reach a decision of not guilty. Most of the jury’s time spent deliberating was actually put towards drafting an apology letter to Arbuckle, which the jury foreman read aloud:

            Acquittal is not enough for Roscoe Arbuckle. We feel that a great injustice has been done him. We feel also that it was only our plain duty to give him this exoneration, under the evidence, for   there was not the slightest proof adduced to connect him in any way with the commission of a. He was manly throughout the case and told a straightforward story on the witness stand, which we all believed. The happening at the hotel was an unfortunate affair for which Arbuckle, so the evidence shows, was in no way responsible. We wish him success and hope that the American people will take the judgment of 14 men and woman who have sat listening for 31 days to evidence, that Arbuckle is entirely innocent and free from all blame.

Despite his exoneration, Arbuckle was forever tainted as some kind of monster. During the trials, his films were banned across the country, while constant newspaper coverage did untold damage to his character and his reputation. But while Arbuckle’s life was being ruined, the newspapers were having a field day. William Randolph Hearst, the man in charge of the San Francisco Examiner and one of America’s first media moguls, once boasted that the Arbuckle case sold more newspapers than the sinking of the Lusitania.

Because of this undue media attention, the Arbuckle case attracted more than just readers. Various con artists and hucksters, along with the professionally outraged, all gained some notoriety because of the Arbuckle case. Delmont for a short time became a public speaker and a crusader against the social excesses of Hollywood, but her second career was cut short after it was revealed that her previous job included blackmail and extortion. In particular, Delmont was known to set-up famous people for the purposes of blackmail, and she may very well have intended for Rappe, a heavy drinker with a penchant for taking off her clothes while drunk, to seduce Arbuckle during the party.

Other colorful characters in the case included Lehrman, who used the case as a way to further his career, Semnacher, a small-time hood who changed his testimony halfway through the case, Gavin McNab, Arbuckle’s San Francisco defense attorney who later represented heavyweight boxer Jack Dempsey, Milton U’ren, the Assistant D.A. who was so dedicated to convicting Arbuckle that he charged Prevon with perjury after she refused to say that Rappe had incriminated Arbuckle in her presence, and a little known Pinkerton detective named Sam Hammett.

Before he took to calling himself “Dashiell,” Sam Hammett was a private detective in San Francisco with a serious case of tuberculosis. Despite his rapidly declining health, Hammett was hired as one of Arbuckle’s guards throughout the trials. Although the experience was only a small part of Hammett’s career as a detective, it nevertheless made an impression on the budding writer. On the one hand, Hammett claimed that: “The whole thing [the Arbuckle case] was a frame-up...arranged by some of the corrupt newspaper boys,” while on the other he openly loathed the portly star. In fact, writers such as the novelist Ace Atkins and the scholar Dr. William Marling have often claimed that Hammett used Arbuckle as the model for his obese villains such as Casper Gutman in The Maltese Falcon.

By the time that The Maltese Falcon was published in 1930, Fatty Arbuckle was no longer “Fatty Arbuckle.” Working under the pseudonym William Goodrich, Arbuckle spent the early ‘30s as a director of short comedies. Then, in 1932, Arbuckle signed a contract with Warner Bros. to star in a handful of two-reel comedies as “Fatty Arbuckle.” Although these six films were successful in America, the long shadow of Virginia Rappe’s death continued to haunt the actor, and when trying to show the film Hey, Pop! in the United Kingdom, the British Board of Film Censors cited the 1921 scandal as a reason for refusal.

On June 29, 1933, Arbuckle died of a heart attack at age 46. The once adored comedy star ended his life as an outcast: An innocent man suffering because of an unscrupulous media and an occupation’s bad reputation. Even though his nimble exploits and comedic timing make him the forefather of John Belushi and Chris Farley, Arbuckle will forever be associated with a three-day party in San Francisco. This is probably the greatest crime of all.

Screen star Thelma Todd’s untimely death in 1935 set off wild speculation about the cause of her demise. Was she murdered or was she the unfortunate victim of carbon monoxide poisoning?

by Benjamin Welton

Hollywood has always been about making grand illusions. The movies are where people go for escape, high adventure, or just a chance to glimpse a world we wish existed. There’s a lot of gold in mythmaking, and Tinseltown has always been known for its bright, shiny, and extravagant character.

It sounds cliché to say it, but nonetheless true—the Land of Make Believe can and is often full of nightmares. With every star that climbed his or her way up the ladder to international fame and fortune, there are thousands of waiters and waitresses who never quite made it. Some went back home to Iowa or Oklahoma, while others started searching for rock bottom in a bottle or in a needle.

And of course “making it” is no guarantee for the good life either. Tabloids exist to pick through the wreckage of famous and fabulous lives, and the fact one can still find plenty of them in the checkout aisle speaks volumes about the decadence that still exists in Southern California. This is essentially distilled noir, and like the movies themselves, noir has a uniquely American flavor—a rich and sweet form of corruption that attracts the eye as much as it repels the soul.

Thelma Todd

In the early 1930s, some Americans caught wind of this and tried to change which the way the wind was blowing. Although a lot of the Hollywood gliterrati viewed them as yokel bums, the followers of William Harrison Hays Sr. had a proud lineage that stretched across the centuries. Their progenitors were the Puritans, then they spent time crusading underneath the banner of Progressivism. What they wanted was “good government”—a squeaky clean idea that sought the end of corruption, filth, and exploitation. They also wanted control, especially control over the media. The movies in particular were sought because they had so much power. Hays and his mostly Midwestern do-gooders knew that life could easily imitate art, and what they saw on the screen shocked them.

Before the coming of the so-called Hays Code, which tried to censor films based on a set moral order, Hollywood was rife with perversion. On the screen, characters dabbled in drugs and women showed too much skin. There was even more space allotted for violence, and movies such as The Public Enemy and Little Caesar spun stylish tales about the era’s favorite character—the Tommy Gun gangster. When the Presbyterian elder and former U.S. Postmaster General Hays was finally allowed to put into practice the Motion Picture Production Code, he helped to authorize a binding list of “Dont’s” and even more “Be Carefuls.” Under “Dont’s,” things such as “White slavery” or “Sex hygiene and venereal diseases” were completely off limits for any motion picture, along with “The illegal traffic in drugs,” “Ridicule of the clergy,” or “Any licentious or suggestive nudity...” In the “Be Careful” category, the Hays Code suggested avoiding “Brutality and possible gruesomeness,” “Sympathy for criminals,” and so-called “First-night scenes.” The Motion Picture Production Code effectively tried to clean up the pictures, and the impact was immediate. In 1931, three years before the enforcement of the Hays Code, James Cagney was allowed to smash a grapefruit into Mae Clarke’s mug in The Public Enemy. By 1934, the biggest scandal of the year was Clark Gable’s lack of an undershirt in It Happened One Night.

Away from screen, the stories that would get out about the Hollywood lifestyle made the movies themselves seem tame by comparison. Like the shindigs at Gatsby’s Long Island mansion, the Hollywood of the 1920s and early 1930s looked like one big riot, and like all Bacchants, sometimes these party animals became real wolves. Fatty Arbuckle got caught with a girl and Coke bottle, while the It girl, Clara Bow, supposedly slept her way through the USC football team. Most of these accusations are probably false, but Hollywood is a place that thrives on made-up truths, half-truths, and no truths.

Thelma Todd, a beautiful blonde originally from the harsh Massachusetts textile town of Lawrence, became another victim of the Hollywood plague in 1935. And like the other tragic stars before her, Todd’s death (and now afterlife) is a cause célèbre of the morbidly inclined.

In life, Todd was far from the world’s most popular glamor girl. Getting her start during the silent era, Todd capitalized on her good looks (which earned this former schoolteacher a job in Hollywood in the first place) in tons of comedies and a few dramas. Like her likeness Jean Harlow, Todd captured the screen as a light-hearted heartbreaker, and re-watching films like Horse Feathers, which starred all four of the Marx Brothers (Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and Zippo), validates that concept.

Although a Chicago Tribune writer called Todd “a cross between Goldie Hawn and Farah Fawcett” back in 1991, the real Thelma Todd was far more troubled than her latter day imitations. This vivacious comedienne ran with a pretty mean set, from a washed-up director to a wife beater who may or may not have been muscle for Charles “Lucky” Luciano. The washed-up director in question was Roland West—a man who was best known for his silent horror and mystery films that starred such luminaries as Lon Chaney Sr. and Boston Blackie himself, Chester Morris. By 1930, West was fresh from yet another triumph. This time around his victory was called The Bat Whispers, and this update on the 1920 Avery Hopwood play would eventually go on to influence a young Bob Kane, who would use the film’s arch-criminal, known as The Bat, as one of the templates for his own vigilante known as Batman. In that same year, a married West began a personal and financial relationship with Todd after a fortuitous trip to Catalina Island.

Before long, Todd and West were partners operating a restaurant called Thelma Todd’s Sidewalk Café. The café quickly became the place to seen, and tragically, Todd was last seen alive not far from the eatery that bore her name.

Her final resting place was her car—a 1932 Lincoln Phaeton. Slumped over and disheveled despite wearing what Los Angeles Times writer Robert W. Welkos describes as “a mauve and silver evening gown, expensive mink wrap and adorned with a small fortune in jewelry.” Todd was dressed for a party and on the night of her death, Todd and her friends were toasting her until the wee hours at the Trocadero on Sunset Boulevard.

Police Photo

At 3:15 a.m. on Sunday, December 15, 1935, Todd was dropped off at the café. She did a little walking, and crime scene photos show that her heels bore the trademark scuffs of an uphill trudge. The next morning, the police found Todd’s body and were soon going through every nook and cranny in order to determine a cause of death.

Unlike a lot of fabled Hollywood mysteries, Todd’s death seems pretty cut and dry. The coroner found a significant amount of carbon monoxide in her blood, thus making carbon monoxide poisoning the likely culprit responsible for Todd’s long goodbye. When she was discovered, the ignition in her car had been left on but the engine had died with a little gas left in the tank. According to British journalist Christopher Snowden, Thelma, “cold and unable to get into her apartment at the locked Café, trudged up to her car in the garage, started it up and turned on the heater.” Before long, the odorless carbon monoxide overwhelmed her and swallowed her up.

This end is decidedly unglamorous and does not mesh well with Todd’s larger-than-life persona. Because of this, wagging tongues immediately began offering alternative conclusions, and these unfounded theories have done plenty of damage to the image of “Hot Toddy.”

First of all, it was widely disseminated that Todd’s body was bruised and battered, thus hinting at murder. The people who believe this pointed to West (a man rumored to have a hot temper and a jealous streak), Jewel Carmen, a former prostitute, silent film actress, and West’s protective wife, and Pasquale “Pat” DiCicco, Todd’s shady ex-husband.

While those in favor of West’s guilt blame Todd’s death on the director’s covetousness, those in favor of Carmen’s articulate an idea that Carmen’s illegal gambling operations and other illicit activities were somehow threatened by Todd. For these people, the whole circus around Thelma Todd’s Sidewalk Café is comparable to the Bada Bing! In “The Sopranos.” Gambling upstairs and a protection racket run by Lucky himself, this version of café seems like a murder plot waiting to happen. Some have even speculated that Luciano himself ordered the hit, but as with most things surrounding Thelma Todd’s death, there’s a paucity of evidence to support this claim. But hey, it’s a good story!

The underworld connection is further highlighted in the figure of DiCicco, an ex-pimp and bootlegger who was a fixture among the nightlife set in Los Angeles. Because of his last name and reputation, many amateur and armchair detectives have labeled DiCicco a lieutenant in the employ of Luciano. Again, there's little support for this claim.

Still, despite this lack of credible evidence, DiCicco remains a highly alluring figure—almost as if Central Casting found him and made him out to be the perfect murderer. On the night of Todd’s death, eyewitnesses claimed that DiCicco and Todd got into a heated argument. Not long after, DiCicco hotfooted it to New York, and when the grand jury summoned him to testify back in California, DiCicco claimed that he hadn’t heard about his ex-wife’s death (Todd and DiCicco were married from 1932 until 1934).

Later, in 1941, DiCicco married the 17-year-old heiress Gloria Vanderbilt. According to Vanderbilt’s autobiographical writings, DiCicco was a brute who liked booze too much, which gave him a loose hand and an even looser temper. Whether or not DiCicco treated Todd in a similar fashion, is a question up for debate.

All things considered, what seems not up for question is the reason for Todd’s death. Despite West’s deathbed confession and despite the various letters from cranks, it seems fairly certain that Todd died an accidental death. The problem of course is that Todd’s prosaic ending is full of colorful elements and people. From the death and extortion threats that Todd received earlier in 1935 (which have never been argued away and even formed the source material for a newspaper article in March of 1935) to Andy Edmonds’ sensational book Hot Toddy (which is full of so many factual errors that it only muddies the waters further), the produced and sold mystery around Todd’s death just will not die. And even today, there are people who will tell you that Todd is still around, haunting the former hot spots of Hollywood and Los Angeles like the sad and unavenged ghost of some low-budget horror flick.

When the severed, mutilated corpse of Elizabeth Short was discovered in a vacant lot in Los Angeles on January 15, 1947, the search for the murderer of the “Black Dahlia” began its futile run. Over the intervening decades many theories have been advanced about who this killer was, but none have given serious consideration that he was a jilted boyfriend who stalked her as she emerged into the night from the Biltmore Hotel.

by Stephen Karadjis

In crime lore, the murder of Elizabeth Short, a/k/a the “Black Dahlia,” has achieved iconic status. Speculating on the murder of the Black Dahlia has turned into a cottage industry, with books and movies advancing a wide array of perpetrators. The truth is it remains the ultimate cold case, but there is the possibility she was murdered by an enraged, jealous boyfriend who stalked her from San Diego to the Biltmore Hotel in Los Angeles.

The enigma of Elizabeth Short and her brutal mutilation-murder brings two very
different pictures to mind. The first is a photograph of a vibrant and vivacious young
woman, very beautiful and self-possessed. The second is a horrible image of a defiled and besieged corpse, lying naked, drained of blood, and severed in two on a weed-infested vacant lot on Norton Avenue in Leimert Park, Los Angeles on the morning of January 15, 1947.

The gruesome discovery sent shock waves across the country. About a day and a half later the dead woman was identified by fingerprints. When news broke of the name of the 22-year-old victim a few people came forward to Los Angeles police to say they knew her. Police quickly established the last sighting of Elizabeth Short as being the night of January 9, at the time she left the Biltmore Hotel.

The medical examiner surmised from the extent of bruising spread over a wide area of her corpse that she had been severely beaten. There was no evidence of sexual assault because the killer had washed and scrubbed the body clean.

John Gilmore in Severed: The True Story of the Black Dahlia and the anonymous author of Infamous Murders – published by Chartwell Books in 1989 – report that the homicide bureau speculated Short had been tied up spread-eagled, either in a standing or supine position or suspended head first by a makeshift system of ropes and pulleys. That she was kept bound in this position for the period of her internment, as in a coarse and crude bondage session. The tell-tale signs being ligature marks at the wrists and ankles and impressions made by rope knots indented on the front, back and left side of her neck. The cause of death was listed as blunt-force trauma to the head. Numerous cuts had been inflicted by a sharp-bladed instrument in a criss-cross pattern over her pubic area, and pubic hair was torn out by hand. A knife was used to cut open her cheeks from each corner of her mouth, leaving a gaping injury from ear to ear. She was then cut in half at the waist and her body drained of blood.

No one knows the complete picture of her suffering.

The ‘Black Dahlia” Myth is Born

Overnight Short was dubbed “The Black Dahlia” by a sensation-seeking press. Kenneth Anger in Hollywood Babylon II and Steve Hodel in Black Dahlia Avenger suggest that reporters en masse, in their efforts to learn more of Short’s movements and lifestyle, talked to acquaintances already referring to her with this term.  

When Elizabeth Short first arrived in Los Angeles she lived in Long Beach and frequented a drug store. She wore her hair dyed black and outfitted herself in black garments. She was possessed of a fair complexion and striking, classic looks and the contrast of dark and light accentuated her beauty.

The drug store owner, Arnold Landers, told reporters that customers had already begun calling her the “Black Dahlia.”  A “B” movie, The Blue Dahlia, had opened about 10 days earlier at a nearby theater with Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake playing the lead roles. Lake was a voluptuous golden-blonde and patrons of Lander’s shop who became friendly with Elizabeth Short began referring to her as “The Black Dahlia.” When newspapers across the United States began splashing this moniker on their front pages, Elizabeth Short was on her way to an ironic form of immortality.  

Elizabeth Short in Hollywood and San Diego

In the late 1940s, Hollywood resonated images of sunshine and prosperity. With the dark days of war over and the passage of time, a new era dawned. The motion picture industry pulsated. Thousands of people across the vast expanse were beckoned. Elizabeth Short would be one of these, arriving by train at Union Station in Los Angeles in July, 1946.  Like in Nathanael West’s The Day of the Locust, as a newcomer to town, she quickly gravitated to strangers and odd individuals of like-mind for support and company.

According to www.theblackdahliainhollywood.com, Short’s stay in Los Angeles had been a hit-and-miss affair. In four and a-half months she had lived in nine locations, moving eight times. Her first residence was at the Washington Apartments in Long Beach in late July. From there she rendezvoused with Gordon Fickling, an ex-U.S. Air Force pilot she had known from back east. They moved in to the Brevoort Apartments on Lexington near Vine Street in Hollywood, but separated soon afterwards. Short then contacted Marjorie Graham, a girlfriend from Boston living in Hollywood and the two women roomed together, sometimes with a third person, at five different locations from late August until October 22, when Marjorie returned to Massachusetts. Their temporary residences included the Hawthorne Apartments in Hollywood, later the Figueroa Hotel in downtown, the private home of Florentine Gardens Nightclub owner Mark Hansen, and the Guardian Arms Apartments, also in Hollywood.

Short’s last residence in Los Angeles was a small and cramped apartment at the Chancellor in Hollywood, where she bedded down with seven other women in one main room, consisting of double-bunk beds alongside each of the four walls. A corridor separated this room from a narrow kitchen at the other end of the apartment, with a bathroom in between, off the small corridor.

On December 8 she took the Greyhound bus south to San Diego. Later that day she fell asleep in the Aztec Picture Theater and was awakened by Dorothy French, a 21-year-old cashier and usherette. Short spent a month living with Dorothy, her mother Elvira, and younger brother Cory in their home in Pacific Beach, just north of the city limits. During this time she dated a number of men, one of whom was Robert “Red” Manley, a 26-year-old travelling salesman from Huntington Park, in Los Angeles. On January 9, 1947 it would be Robert Manley who would drive Elizabeth Short back to Los Angeles and let her off at the Biltmore Hotel.

Short was discovered dead the following Wednesday, January 15. Betty Bersinger, a local resident, was out walking hand-in-hand with her 3-year-old daughter along Norton Avenue, when she came upon the shockingly mutilated remains of a young woman. She gasped in horror as she halted, frozen in fear. Then upon regaining her composure collected the child in her arms and ran to the nearest house, and immediately raised the alarm.

The press and police rapidly descended and soon a crowd of onlookers swarmed, agog to the stark sight that met their gaze. The chilly winter added an eerie and uneasy feeling. The gruesome spectacle that winter’s morning was one that was to go down as America’s most infamous cold-case murder mystery of the 20^th century. What people set their eyes upon that day was the body of a young woman severed completely in half at the waist. The two sections lying slightly at diagonals of each other were drained entirely of blood and grotesquely mutilated.

The Killer Calls the Editor

On the afternoon of Thursday, January 23, 1947, J.H. Richardson, the editor of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, received a brief telephone call from a man who alluded to himself as the killer. The caller promised to mail Richardson some of Short’s belongings as proof of his claim. (Richardson later in For the Life of Me: Memoirs of a City Editor recounted his conversation with the supposed killer. He perceived the man to be an egomaniac, a “superman” as Richardson worded it, who wanted to show the world what he could do and get away with it. This claim by Richardson was never made public at the time.)

Two days later, the only genuine item of mailed correspondence known to have come from the killer was intercepted by a sharp-eyed employee at the U.S. Postal Service on January 25, 1947.

Letters cut from the pages of a daily newspaper were pasted to the front of an envelope which read, “Los Angeles Examiner and other Los Angeles Papers. Here! Is Dahlia’s Belongings, Letter to Follow.”  The small packet-sized envelope measured 8 inches by 5 inches. It was carefully and delicately pried open by the police.

 Pacios in Childhood Shadows- The Hidden Story of the Black Dahlia Murder’ itemizes the contents of the packet as a Greyhound claim-check; Short’s birth certificate; a Western-Union telegram signed “Red”; some snapshots; an assortment of business cards; a hand-sized, leather-bound address-book with the name “Mark Hansen” embossed in gold lettering on the front cover; and newspaper clippings of Mat Gordon’s obituary. Hodel in Black Dahlia Avenger: A Genius for Murder writes that the envelope was dropped into a public mailbox at a downtown Los Angeles location and franked January 24, 1947 6:30 p.m.

The same day the envelope was posted the black handbag Elizabeth Short was carrying and the black suede high-heeled shoes she had been wearing at the Biltmore were recovered from the Los Angeles dump. Robert Hymans, who operated a cafe at 1136 South Crenshaw Boulevard, a few blocks from the death site, had noticed the shoes jutting out from the handbag where they had been tossed atop a garbage can, then driven away by the garbage truck. The killer had obviously mailed the contents of the handbag as he had told editor Richardson he would then dumped the handbag and shoes.

The small packet-sized envelope seized by police reeked of gasoline, causing detectives to surmise that the killer had momentarily toyed with the idea of burning the envelope, then decided to mail it after all. Other law enforcement reasoned the shrewd culprit soaked the packet to remove fingerprints.

Fingerprints however were enhanced by the LAPD crime-laboratory and despatched forthwith to the FBI for cross-matching, but no match was retrieved from existing files. The public has never been privy to whether the prints were complete and intact or partial, hazy smudges. But with no match on file in 1947, the Los Angeles Homicide Bureau concluded the perpetrator had never, up until murdering Elizabeth Short, been arrested for a crime and had never been fingerprinted and that the crime was a one-off aberration.

As decades passed with still no match forthcoming, detectives further deduced that the person responsible never again fell foul of the law.

A Special Grand Jury Convenes

Despite all the years having elapsed since the discovery of the murder of Elizabeth Short, the LAPD “Black Dahlia” files are still closed to the public. The files are contained in four filing-cabinet drawers. Only one LAPD homicide detective, aptly referred to as the “gatekeeper,” has the exclusive access to these drawers until the privilege is passed on to the next gatekeeper. This secrecy over the files is now obsolete. Almost every person associated with Elizabeth Short has died. Short herself would have turned 90 years old on July 29, 2014.

 In early 1949, the office of the L.A. District Attorney empanelled 12 civilians to form a special grand jury to investigate police corruption throughout the ranks of the LAPD. The other prime-purpose was to look-into the failure of the LAPD to solve the “Black Dahlia” murder and a string of other brutal slayings and abductions of women across the same time period. This monumental undertaking lasted the entire year.

The grand jury findings brought to light an avalanche of corruption at the highest levels. Inter-departmental jealousies and secrecy prevailed and were wide-ranging and it was found that very often information was not passed on. These revelations led to a complete shake-up of the LAPD, throughout the ranks.

Although many positive actions came in terms of bleeding out any festering corruption within the LAPD, there was little forward movement in solving the murder of the “Black Dahlia.”  One result of the grand jury’s deliberations was to cull the list of 22 suspects the D.A. investigators identified as possible suspects to a handful for follow-up investigation.

Profiling the Killer

Two theories prevail about the “Black Dahlia” homicide. One was that Short had never met her killer and the other that she knew him. What supports the second view are the mutilations inflicted on her corpse. To some investigators they are signs of a personal vendetta. Renowned FBI criminal profiler and author John Douglas adheres to this theory.

Douglas formed the view that the killer knew the victim well and held an emotional attachment toward her. He sees the killer as someone who lived alone, had a high school education, engaged in manual labor, and was under great personal and financial strain at the time of committing the murder. Douglas also suggests the murderer was not averse to wallowing in blood and could have worked as a butcher or in a similar profession or perhaps was a person who was accustomed to hunting animals and was likely as a child or youth to have mistreated or abused animals. The killer Douglas believes may also have been burdened by a personal physical defect or disability.

To Douglas, the ferocity and violence perpetrated on Elizabeth Short, the horrific mutilations to her corpse and the disposing of her severed body on public land for passerbys to discover are all telltale signs the killer knew the victim. The message being conveyed is that this was personal and based on a perceived wrongdoing the killer believed Short had done to him.

This personal association or perceived emotional closeness the killer felt he had to Short, coupled with individual criteria known about each suspect can be used as a premise to eliminate suspects from the DA’s 22 suspect list. From this list there were only seven suspects who were proved to have known Short on a social or personal level.

The D.A.’s Short List of Suspects

Of the seven suspects, only one deserves special mention. George Bacos, head usher at NBC Studios at Sunset and Vine in Hollywood, was an ambitious 23-year-old who was employed on a commission basis at a record promotion company, Jay Faber Associates. As another sideline to an already busy schedule, Bacos contracted entertainment talent to nightspots around town, including the Crown Grill located two blocks south of the Biltmore Hotel. Short frequented this establishment and was last seen walking in this direction.

Bacos had met Short while dating Short’s roommate, Lynn Martin. During the four plus months Short lived in Los Angeles, Bacos took Short out 12 times. When Short was identified as the murdered woman, police sought Bacos for questioning. His statements to police contained comments that were both disingenuous and derogatory towards his slain acquaintance. Website www.theblackdahliainhollywood.com  provides the following quotes, attributed to him:

            "I used to see her with a lot of people. As a matter of fact, for my part I tried to avoid her as much as possible. I was new in radio and made contacts, and she dressed kinda cheaply, you know too obvious and everything... I didn’t want to kiss her because of all that goop she used on her face. I’m used to nice cultured girls."

Photographs of Short taken in Los Angeles during the second-half of 1946 convey a strikingly attractive young woman who was discerning and elegant in the manner she dressed. Her blouses were buttoned to the neckline. There was nothing cheap or revealing. In fact she dressed with a taste for quality, contemporary fashion and outfitted herself in classic black. Her favourite colors were pink and blue.

Bacos says he was used to “nice cultured girls” yet he confessed to dating and having had sexual relations with Lynn Martin who was found to be 15 years old. She had lived with Short and Marjorie Graham at several hotel apartments in Hollywood and downtown. She essentially lived off the generosity of boyfriends and associates and from casual employment. Young women living on the fringes were easy targets for men of means like Bacos.

Jack Egger was head-usher at CBS Studios at Columbia Square on Sunset Boulevard near Gower Street. He liaised with Bacos on a professional level. Egger said of Bacos, to DA investigators, “I don’t like him very well. He is very conceited; I just don’t care for him myself. Never very close to him, just speaking acquaintance.” Egger related that Bacos frequented Brittingham’s Restaurant and Cocktail Bar adjacent to the CBS building. Bacos told investigators in response, “That used to be my hangout. I’d see her in there. I’d say hello, be as nice as possible, try to get away.” Remember this is what Bacos said after Elizabeth Short was found, the victim of a brutal mutilation-murder – a person he had dated a dozen times.

Bacos went on to become a television-writer in the 1960s and 70s. He received critical acclaim for writing a three-episode segment of the “Kojak” television series named “Night of the Piraeus.’ At age 80 in 2003 he wrote the novel Warriors Down. The setting is the backdrop of the Vietnam War with guerrilla fighting and news-reporting rampant. The lead character is a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist Michael Traynor. Traynor’s forte at journalism is brilliant and raw but far too honest and clean for some in the U.S. government – too close to the brutal truth. Those in positions of high office wanted his reporting contained. Feeling ostracised, alone and betrayed Traynor, now diminished, holds three criteria close to his heart which are worth living for: They are to reclaim his good name and self-respect and last in capital-letters REVENGE.

It is strange and uncanny that Bacos writes a novel late in life that has revenge as its principal theme. Revenge is destructive and insidious and at odds with reclaiming self-respect and one’s good name. Short’s murder is believed by many to be a crime based on incredible anger stemming from revenge.

Both the LAPD and the DA investigation held him to be a good suspect. There was no direct evidence but it is interesting that nearly three years following Short’s murder the DA had him on their condensed list of 22 suspects, aligning themselves with the LAPD.  Bacos is a definite possibility.

Debunking the Black Dahlia Literature

There have been several film adaptations and a number of books written recounting the murder of Elizabeth Short.

James Ellroy’s “The Black Dahlia,” a superbly drafted work of fiction, was published in 1987. Its main thrust was not so much about the murder and Elizabeth Short herself, but about the people around her and those investigating her murder, who become obsessed with Short and what happened to her. This is a theme that continues to the present day. There has been a number of non-fiction books authored afterwards and released onto the market.

Severed - The True Story of the Black Dahlia by John Gilmore is original, daring and masterfully written, depicting late 1940’s shadow-land noir Los Angeles. He builds his case outlaying the known facts with an interconnecting series of cameos or fabled stories coloring the pages. Jack Anderson Wilson is identified as the killer, a petty criminal harboring a long rap sheet, which lists burglary, theft and violence as his mainstay code of offenses. Despite continuing decades of similar activity intermingled with prison time, Wilson restricted his bad deeds never graduating to harder crime.

Severed was the first non-fiction work to be written and when released went down as a resounding success and was triumphantly acclaimed. For example Kenneth Anger is quoted as saying “My God, this is a frightening tale....The most famous murder in L.A., and we suddenly see that we knew nothing before, only the glitter and red of blood. This, now, is Pandora’s Box.”  Charles Higham was quoted as saying “This project stands as the only authentic true-crime book written on America’s most bizarre and haunting murder case.” But in the years since its release in 1994 there have been many detractors.

Gilmore did not provide any footnotes or endnotes, nor an index or bibliography. There is no way to clarify a lot of the things he has written. People have tried. One is Los Angeles Times journalist Larry Harnisch, who in 1997 wrote a story for the Times on the eve of the 50^th anniversary of the “Black Dahlia” murder. Harnisch who did his own research then and in the years since is quoted as saying that Gilmore’s book is 25 percent mistakes and 50 percent fiction. Gilmore expounds a number of cameos within the pages of Severed. Harnisch has said he has never been able to establish the existence of any of these characters Gilmore wrote about.

There is no evidence whatsoever Elizabeth Short ever met or knew Jack Anderson Wilson. None of her associates in Los Angeles ever mentioned him. Neither the Los Angeles Police at the time or the DA investigators mention him or held him to be a suspect.

One of the main selling points of his book was his theory that Short had infantile genitalia and was incapable of having intercourse and was a pseudo-hermaphrodite. This has, since the release of Gilmore’s book been disproven. Detective Harry Hansen and the LAPD found three people who had sexual relations with Short. The coroner’s autopsy report states that Short’s reproductive organs and system were “anatomically normal.”

Until Gilmore wrote his book there was little research or interest on the “Black Dahlia” murder but its releasesparked a renewed popularity and devotees and researchers have since taken him to account. John Gilmore is without doubt a highly talented writer and Severed is spellbinding and chilling, but the pages are cluttered with fairy tales.

Janice Knowlton in Daddy was the Black Dahlia Killer asserts that her father George Knowlton impregnated Short in November 1946 and because of this pregnancy murdered her. Don Wolf in The Black Dahlia Files reports that newspaper mogul Norman Chandler, owner of the Los Angeles Times impregnated Short after she had serviced Chandler as a call girl through notorious madam Brenda Allen, and that gangster Bugsy Siegel murdered her on Chandler’s orders and that Gilmore’s suspect Wilson was an accomplice. These claims make great fiction but are preposterous. The autopsy report confirms Short was not pregnant.

Both Knowlton in Daddy was the Black Dahlia Killer and Wolfe in The Black Dahlia Files assert that Short was a prostitute. Knowlton even claims that Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Short worked together as a double act. These claims are totally refuted by the DA investigation and by the Los Angeles police. Detective Harry Hansen in charge of the murder investigation stated “there was no record of any solicitation, offering or resorting or prostitution in any way, shape or form. She was no pushover. She’d bait and take all she could get and give out nothing. She did not put out.” 

Steve Hodel in Black Dahlia Avenger: A Genius for Murder nominates his own father George Hill Hodel as the killer. Dr. Hodel was a very distinguished medical practitioner and highly regarded. But his reputation was totally destroyed when in 1949 his teenage daughter Tamar Hodel accused her father of incest and threw in for good measure a statement naming him as the “Black Dahlia” killer. Following the fallout from these allegations and his trial, even though he was acquitted of the incest charge, his reputation in tatters, he left Los Angeles early the following year, 1950. He was thoroughly investigated by the Los Angeles police and by the District Attorney’s office. Both agencies came to the conclusion that he had nothing to do with Short’s murder. One blundering Hodel makes within his 500-plus pages is to tell readers that two photographs displayed in clear black and white are of Elizabeth Short. Neither bust-shot looks anything like her. Hodel was forced to retract a few years back now when one of the women still alive came forward to say she was one of the young women and that she was a friend of the late Dr. George Hodel.

William T. Rasmussen’s Corroborating Evidence: The Black Dahlia Murder is a thoroughly documented and very informative work. The author makes the case linking the “Black Dahlia” murder to the “Cleveland Torso” murders of 1934-38. But along with Don Wolfe’s Black Dahlia Files he jumps on the bandwagon and backs Gilmore’s suspect Jack Anderson Wilson as the serial killer. There is no evidence of Wilson’s involvement in either case. No evidence he was even a killer at all.

Childhood Shadows: The Hidden Story of the Black Dahlia Murder was written by Mary Pacios, a childhood friend of Elizabeth Short from Boston. A very definitive and well written look at Short’s life prior to her arrival in California, her book provides an invaluable insight into the real person and the private world of Short. Pacios, incredibly, names wonder-boy Orson Wells, the actor and director and star of Citizen Kane, as the killer.  

The Curse of the Black Dahlia by Jacque Daniel details the involvement of her father J. Paul de River, the police psychiatrist overseeing the case. Leslie Dillon was 27 and working at a hotel in Miami when in October 1948 he wrote a letter to De River after reading an edition of True Detective magazine which detailed the crime along with a psychological profile of the killer.

An exchange of correspondence ensued with the psychiatrist concluding Dillon was the murderer. A trap was set with the purpose of extracting a confession, culminating with Dillon being held against his will at a hotel near Los Angeles, without counsel, his constitutional rights being denied.

Because of this unlawful detention, a writ of habeas corpus was issued and Dillon had to be released. The fiasco led to the convening of the 1949 grand jury and the dismissal of Police Chief Clemence Horrall, following the investigation of police corruption within the LAPD.

Nonetheless, after a comprehensive investigation with evidence presented, the grand jury named Leslie Dillon as the prime suspect. Although Dillon was never indicted, there are strong reasons suggesting he should have been.

Fred Witman, a colleague of Dr. de River, was sworn in to give testimony in September 1949 before Deputy District Attorney Arthur L. Veitch and Chief H.L. Stanley of the Bureau of Investigation.

Witman divulged that subsequent to the murder he had called Dr. de River having reached two conclusions. Firstly he believed the killer had worked as an embalmer at an undertaking firm, and secondly, based on his personal expertise of such crimes and of the individuals who commit them, predicted the murderer would, by his own doing reveal himself to authorities at some point.

If Dillon were the killer then Witman was correct on both counts. Dillon had worked in Oklahoma City and in Oakland, California as an embalmer's assistant and ended up writing to Dr. de River in October 1948, thus exposing himself.

Witman further produced in testimony a photograph taken by the medical examiner of the slashed pubic region of Short's corpse and pointed out that the letter "D"' had been carved into her flesh. Deputy District Attorney Veitch then asked Witman "There is also apparentlly an 'E' or an 'F' there" to which Mr. Stanley of the Bureau stated "Definite 'E' ."

The carving of these two letters into the flesh of Elizabeth Short is a revelation in itself. There is no mention of this in the official coroner's report and the LAPD has always denied the existence of any initials carved on the deceased.

Author Jacque Daniel herself states that she and a colleague had viewed the photograph in the DA files and states in her book "and there was no initial 'D' that we could see."

But if one examines the photograph of the pubic region closely the letter "D"' can be seen in the outer-upper right-side of the pubic region and what appears to be the letter 'F' alongside to the right, although if the authorities were correct in 1947, and they most probably were then it is an"'E".

Witman alluded that Dillon was always in the habit of signing pictures he drew, simply with the letter "D". The carving of the two intitials must be part of the information pertaining to the'Black Dahlia case that has always been held back by police even to the present day.

There is no mention of it in any books or articles and it was omitted from the autopsy report and its existence emphatically denied by the LAPD. But anyone can see the initals if they look closely. This photograph is in Severed by John Gilmore, for all to see, though Gilmore never mentions it.

The police and DA failed to established Dillon's whereabouts after January 8 until January 16, 1947. He was working in San Francisco until January 8 and from January 16. There was a mountain of circumstantial evidence pinning him to the murder, but he was not brought to trial for two reasons. Firstly because he had been illegally detained and secondly for a lack of concrete evidence. Apparently he had a witness or witnesses who were willing to come forward, in the event he was put on trial, to say he was in San Francisco at the time. The police believed these characters were unsavory and lacked credibility.

The downside to the book is the author's misguided attempt to implicate people in high places and unnecessarily delve into tangents of conspiracy theories. Regardless, it is the opinion of the author of this article that Daniel's book is the most credible and compelling. The question begs to be asked: Did Leslie Dillon murder Elizabeth Short?

One fact not mentioned in Daniel's book is worth noting. The handbag and shoes belonging to Elizabeth Short were left atop a trash can at 1136 S. Crenshaw Boulevard on January 24th, 1947, nine days following the murder. This was most probably the killer's only mistake. But it was a colossal blunder on his part. The killer did not foresee the possibility that someone might link the items to the murder. It was a mistake because it reveals that the murderer most probably lived within walking distance. This was an astounding oversight by police at the time.

Dillon lived at 906 S. Crenshaw Boulevard in 1946, two blocks away. He was living in San Francisco in January 1947 but returned to live in Los Angeles in April 1947. It is possible Dillon kept the rent going for the South Crenshaw address, knowing he might return. If he rendezvoused with Elizabeth Short or met her for the first time after she had alighted from the Biltmore Hotel via the Olive Street exit then she was killed at 906 S. Crenshaw Boulevard. This address has never been proposed as the place of her execution. 

Over the years several films detailing the “Black Dahlia” homicide have come to the screen. The Blue Gardenia, a 1953 Warner Brothers picture, was the first loosely based adaptation. “Who is the Black Dahlia,” a 1975 made-for-television movie was next starring Lucy Arnaz and Efrem Zimbalist Jr. In 1981 True Confessions followed, starring Robert DeNiro and Robert Duvall. Finally 2007 saw the release of The Black Dahlia, based on the 1987 book by James Ellroy.

An Alternative Scenario

There is an alternate scenario never put forward in any books or movies that may explain what happened to Elizabeth Short: She was being stalked by a jealous boyfriend she went out with in San Diego. Of major support to the stalking theory is that no one in Los Angeles knew when Short would return. In fact, after a month in the San Diego area, she even came back a day later than she had planned to.

When Manley gave his statement to homicide detectives following the murder, he revealed a peculiar anomaly that interrupted the drive. He noticed Short craning and twisting her head round to the left as cars were passing in the same direction, and back toward those vehicles travelling south in the opposite direction. The logical explanation for this odd manifestation was that she was concerned someone she knew might be following her. Call it intuition or premonition, but it is not an uncommon occurrence for intensely appealing women to be stalked and this might have happened to her in the past.

Manley also told detectives he had noticed scratch marks on the outside of Short’s upper arms and a trickling of fresh blood. He said Short had told him she had a very jealous boyfriend who was of Italian descent. But the jealous Italian boyfriend she referred to could only have been one person, Sam Navarra.

 From the police investigation of her time in San Diego, a day-to-day time-table of Short’s movements established who she had been out with and how she filled in her time during that month. Website www.blackdahlia.info outlays this timetable.  The only man of Italian descent was Sam Navarra. Short had stepped out with Navarra on the last night she spent at the home of Elvira and Dorothy French at Pacific Beach, January 7, 1947. When LAPD detectives interviewed Navarra he told them that Short had said she was leaving the next morning to return to Massachusetts.

Manley arrived outside the French’s Pacific Beach home the next morning, January 8, and following an exchange of farewells the two were under way. But instead of heading off to a bus station for Short’s announced trip back to Massachusetts, they drove only a few miles before pulling in at the Mecca Motel where they booked a cabin for that night. Manley, working as a travelling salesman, had calls to make the following morning and Short made a decision to bide her time and wait until the next day January 9.

With the whole day in front of them they made the most of it. They had something to eat and drink and went out dancing in the evening. The following afternoon they set off along the Pacific Coast Highway for Los Angeles.

The day had gone and darkness had closed in as they approached the downtown area. Manley pulled in at the Greyhound terminal where Short checked her bags into a locker. Deposited were a suitcase, a small bag and hat box. They drove on a short distance, arriving outside the formidable facade of the Biltmore. It was dusk.

Elegantly attired in a black-collared suit with fluffy-white blouse and white gloves, black nylon stockings, high-heeled black-suede shoes and a full-length beige coat borrowed from her actress-friend Anne Toth, she stepped from the vehicle and walked toward the double-fronted doors which were opened by the hotel doorman.

Over the next four hours Short was seen passing the time, perambulating and loafing about the Biltmore’s marbled interior, every now and again stopping at the period phone booth to make a telephone call.

It is most likely she was soliciting known acquaintances for a place to spend the night. But the people she had met in Los Angeles were short-term associates and not friends of long-standing. Some she knew better than others. It is also possible she was telephoning the same person time and again. This is more likely because following her identification as the murdered woman no one came forward to say Short had telephoned them that night.

Somewhere around 10:30 p.m. she strode out into the night and disappeared into the maze of dark streets. Everything after this point is blackness, like turning off a television set, left to the imagination.

This is pure speculation, of course, but Navarra may have arisen early the morning after his night out with Short and was parked nearby to watch as Manley and Short departed. He perhaps followed them only to see the pair drive onto the grounds of the Mecca Motel. Then later, now incensed with rage, was there to observe the two retire for the night behind closed doors.

He may have been infuriated about her lying to him about going back to Massachusetts.  Perhaps by now he had made up his mind to take revenge and murder her. He stalked them all the way to Los Angeles and waited till she walked from the Biltmore Hotel and surprised her. Perhaps with no place to sleep the night and not having the chance to think she got into his car. He may simply have asked to talk to her. From there he most likely would have driven back to San Diego and then tied her up once inside his home. Navarra was said to have lived on Columbia Street, adjacent to the ocean. But it is possible he had a place in Los Angeles. No one would have seen him as it was late at night.

When Short’s corpse was discovered she had been savagely mutilated, her legs were lying spread-apart and a handful of grass-stalks were found protruding from her exposed vagina. Later during the autopsy the coroner found a hunk of flesh gouged from her left thigh which contained the tattoo of a small rose lodged full-inside her vagina. Her corpse was also dumped alongside a suburban footpath for all to see. The message the killer was conveying was that this was a woman of easy virtue, that she had done wrong by him and he had taken revenge upon her and taught her a lesson. The killer wanted the world to know this.

Navarra probably had an alibi given to police by unsuspecting family members or friends. At the time detectives were focused on someone with medical training and people like Navarra where the alibi checked out were disregarded as potential suspects and rapidly overlooked.

Navarra may not have been the killer but everything seems to fit in-place for it to have happened this way.

There are only three concluding possibilities remaining. The first is that Elizabeth Short eventually got through on the telephone to the man she had been trying for several hours to call and he agreed to pick her up outside the Biltmore Hotel. Then once back at his residence something happened to set things off leading to murder. The second possibility is that Short met with a stranger. The third is that she was being stalked by a very jealous suitor. The Los Angeles Police made numerous inquiries in the San Diego area and must have been thinking along those lines of the possibility the killer came from that city.

Jan. 27, 2014

An excerpt from Ban the Booze: Prohibition in the Rockies by Betty Alt and Sandra Wells.The authors take a brief look at the 18 years of Prohibition in Colorado.  Its pages cover the purpose, problems and people involved in the “noble experiment” and the fascinating (sometimes amusing) stories of the making and distributing of “bootleg booze.” (Kindle Edition, 2013)

by Betty Alt and Sandra Wells

Selling watermelons filled with bootleg whiskey was a clever way for a Denver man to outwit law officers in Colorado, which in 1916 had adopted Prohibition four years before the rest of the nation followed suit.  Although America’s cultural past had always included the use of alcohol, temperance movements became active in the 1800s.  These included the Anti-Saloon League and the Women’s Christian Temperance Union.  One of the most notable temperance figures to come to Colorado was Carrie Nation, the “Kansas Saloon-Smasher” known for her “hatchetations” where she would enter a tavern and proceed to destroy it with a “glittering hatchet.”  Described as “six feet tall, with the biceps of a stevedore, the face of a prison warden, and the persistence of a toothache,” Nation was not hesitant to describe her actions:       

                        I ran behind the bar, smashed the mirror and all the bottles under it; then broke the faucets of the refrigerator; opened the door and cut the rubber tubes that conducted the beer . . . . opened the bungs of the beer kegs . . . .was completely saturated with beer . . . .

However, neither Carrie Nation’s efforts nor the enactment of Prohibition laws failed to curb the public’s desire to consume liquor.  

Since selling illegal liquor was so profitable, Colorado’s Mafia became involved in what were called “rum wars” which broke out between rival groups. In southeastern Colorado the Carlinos and the Dannas were the chief contenders for control of the liquor market. One of the most notorious confrontations between the two factions was the 1922 “Baxter Bridge shootout” east of Pueblo along the Arkansas River. The battle involved 11 men, lasted several hours, and necessitated the Dannas temporarily halting the fray in order to secure more bullets from Pueblo.  Two men were killed – Carlo Carlino and what was thought to be an “imported gunman” brought from the East to “get the Dannas.”

Two of the Dannas were eventually arrested at their homes in the farming community of Vineland and brought to trial. However, it was the Christmas season and the Dannas’s attorney made a strong plea for the wives and children of the defendants.  “I ask you gentlemen of the jury,” he said, “are the children of these good Vineland farmers to be nailed to the Black Hand cross of murder and brigandage?  Is it to be broadcast to the Black Hand headquarters in Chicago, Buffalo, and Cleveland that these good American farmers . . . are to be punished for slaying the Black Handers who attacked them?”  (Apparently the plea worked, for the trial ended in a hung jury with the defendants released and never retried.)

 By the late 1920s Sam and Pete Carlino had gained control of bootlegging in southern Colorado and moved north to challenge Joe Roma, Denver’s Mafia leader who was known as “little Caesar.” Although frequent gun battles broke out between the men allied with the two challengers, Sam Carlino was killed by one of his own men – teenager Bruno Mauro from Aguilar. Supposedly Carlino had not fulfilled a promise to take care of Mauro’s family financially when the father had been arrested for running a whiskey still for the Mafia boss. 

Fearing for his life, Pete Carlino fled east but then returned to Denver and was jailed.  Immediately, Joe Roma came to Pete’s aid, paying his $5,000 bail.  A photo appeared in the newspaper of the two rivals smiling and shaking hands and with Roma referring to Pete as his “good friend.”  (A few weeks later Pete’s body was found along a highway west of Pueblo, and it was speculated that either Roma or a surviving Danna had taken revenge.)    

However, it was not just organized crime involved in bootlegging. The ordinary citizen soon learned the intricacy of distilling various products into booze.  Almost anything could be turned into liquor.  All one needed was some type of grain, fruit, sugar, water, a large vat in which to cook the ingredients, and a domed lid with an attached copper coil. An enterprising Denver mechanic used parts of an old touring car plus a few Turkish towels in which to brew his concoction. A galvanized gas tank was the cooker with a length of gas pipe as the escape outlet for fumes. Towels caught the condensation and the liquid was wrung out into containers.

“Near beer” could be turned into the real thing by adding malt syrup. Anything containing alcohol – embalming fluid, rubbing alcohol, bay rum, antifreeze, iodine – was utilized for homemade brews.  Liquor shipped in from Mexico and known as “American” whiskey was made from a mixture of potatoes and cactus. Drinking a product could sometimes be hazardous as temporary blindness could result or in some cases the death of the consumer. For example, Raymond Wilcox, a salesman for the Burroughs Adding Machine Company, was found dead in a Lake City hotel. An autopsy showed that Wilcox died from drinking a mixture of carbolic acid and whiskey that “seared his throat and completely burned thru [sic] his stomach.”

For law enforcement, the task of locating an illegal still was nearly impossible. Take the example of two enterprising men who had set up their still in the bottom of an arroyo outside of Pueblo.  When sheriff deputies found them, the two piled on a horse and took off with the deputies in hot pursuit – just like a western movie.  (These two were finally caught.)

One family thought they had found the perfect hiding place for their still – a cellar dug under a chicken and goat pen.  However, agents eventually discovered this location and emptied the barrels of illegal booze in the family’s yard.  Both the goats and chickens began drinking the liquid which resulted in some inebriated animals.

Although some distilleries produced only small quantities of illegal liquor, this was not always the case. South of Denver at Castle Rock, Vincennes and Tony Lombardi and Carmen DeCola had a huge operation from an “elaborately constructed cave-like operation in a ravine” with concrete foundations laid for the distilling equipment. It was estimated that the trio had invested nearly $5,000 for the still which produced approximately 500 gallons of whiskey a day.

Distributing a supply of bootleg booze could also create problems, and those involved had to be innovative. One individual painted clear glass milk bottles white to look like milk delivered to homes and filled the bottles with liquor. A Pueblo man had a still disguised as a gas burner in his stove. When the “pet cock” on a jet was turned, whiskey spurted out instead of gas – a very good grade of whiskey, an officer stated.  Another man had hidden his still under a dog kennel in his yard. The still was eventually discovered, and it was reported that his dog was “standing guard” over 175 gallons of whiskey.

It should be pointed out that not all consumption of liquor was prohibited. Colorado’s law permitted the use of liquor for medicinal purposes. Physicians frequently prescribed alcohol (usually whiskey or brandy) for all types of ailments, including snake bite, diabetes, cancer, dyspepsia, anemia, high blood pressure, pneumonia, tuberculosis, etc.  Under the new law, individuals could get a prescription for four-ounce doses on each form from their doctor and purchase the product at a drugstore.  It is interesting to note that in Denver, just after the law went into effect, 16,000 prescription forms were provided by doctors for those patients needing “medicinal” liquor. Use of various types of liquor was also legal for religious ceremonies. Still, one might question the real reason a Denver congregation consumed 400 gallons of “sacramental wine” in one month. 

Of course, these are only a few examples of the problems encountered during Colorado’s Prohibition days.  Local, state and eventually federal agents attempted to stop the illegal consumption of liquor. The Ku Klux Klan volunteered to help combat bootlegging, and the Klan not only infiltrated the Denver Police Department but also reached into the court system. Many bootleggers were arrested, but in attempting to mete out punishment, the courts were often overwhelmed by sheer numbers. For a first offense, a bootlegger was usually given a small fine which could easily be recovered by merely going home and making more illegal product. Repeat offenders might be given a short jail or prison sentence.  However, the amount of money that could be made usually offset the risk of capture and imprisonment.

Then, too, sometimes those in law enforcement were bootleggers themselves. In 1924 the mayor and night police chief of Walsenburg were indicted by a federal grand jury for conspiracy to violate the Prohibition law by possessing and selling liquor. In Canon City the district attorney arrested the county attorney and the former city manager and filed charges of “violation of the Prohibition law in the unlawful possession of intoxicating liquor.” The former city manager leased a house where officers found several gallons of liquor concealed in an old stove in a bedroom.

A Denver grand jury “severely condemned” a number of that city’s police department when evidence disclosed that they had been taking bribes from bootleggers.  In Pueblo, law enforcement was accused of ignoring the illegal movement of liquor through the town.  Supposedly, freight trains with 10 million gallons of wine were being shipped through the city “without a murmur from the local police or other minions of the law.”          

Whether people were involved in producing illegal liquor or merely not making much effort to stop its production, the bottom line was Coloradoans wanted to drink and would find ways to do so. If the product was not available locally, it could be brought into the state from neighboring “wet” countries and states. Booze was easily obtained by driving across the state border to New Mexico or Wyoming, where Colorado liquor producers and distributors had been forced to relocate after 1916 when Colorado became “dry.”

Sometimes people would go as far as Canada which had no prohibition against booze.  In fact, it was said that when the Prince of Wales visited Canada in 1919, he heard a “ditty” about Americans buying liquor north of the U.S. border.  It said:

                        A bunch of Americans feeling very dry.

                        Went up to Canada to get a taste of rye.

                        When the booze was poured, the Yanks began to sing.

                        God bless America, and God bless the King!

Finally, in 1933, Prohibition ended in Colorado and nationwide, and people could legally partake of their favorite alcoholic beverage. However, Colorado had some new rules for the saloons.  They could no longer be called “saloons,” which had a negative connotation.  New names such as bars, taverns, cafes, or pubs became more acceptable. Hours of operation were put into effect, and the establishments were required to serve food.  This brought in the use of the “rubber sandwich.” whereby bar owners prepared one sandwich which made its way to each new customer and then back to the kitchen.  Another crafty tavern owner placed a crust of bread and some crumbs in front of a drinker who could tell anyone – especially law enforcement agents looking for a violation – that he’d already eaten his sandwich. 

Of course, bootlegging or the making of “moonshine,” as it is called, still occurs today. A recent crackdown on this practice revealed a multimillion-dollar operation in the hills of Virginia.  “It really hasn’t changed that much,” said assistant Special Agent Earl Driskill, Jr. of the Virginia Department of Alcohol Control.  “I think you have fewer people in bootlegging in bigger ways.”

Updated April 1, 2015

The murder of British student Meredith Kercher in Perugia, Italy on November 1, 2007 caused a global controversy. Not so much for the crime itself, although it was certainly a brutal murder, but because of the disputed guilt or innocence of two of the three defendants, American Amanda Knox and Italian Raffaele Sollecito.

by Robert Walsh

The long legal odyseey of Amanda Knox and her co-defendant Raffaele Sollecito came to a surprising and startling end on March 27, 2015 when Italy's highest court, the Court of Cassastion, exonerated both defendants of any agency in the death and sexual assault of British student Meredith Kercher in 2007. Ironically, it was the Court of Cassastion that overturned Knox and Solloceito's acquittals in 2011 that led to their convictions being reinstated by a Florence court in 2014.

In rendering its ruling after 10 hours of deliberations, the high court, rather than ruling that there was insufficient evidence to convict either defendant, declared the two defendants did not commit any crimes against Kercher.

"Right now I'm still absorbing what all this means and what comes to mind is my gratitude for the life that's given to me," Knox, now 27 and living in Seattle, told reporters outside her mother's house after the exoneration was announced.

Kercher was found dead on November 2, 2007 in the apartment she shared with Knox and two others in Perugia, Italy.

The ruling ends a legal battle that subjected the Italian justice system to international ridicule for what seemed to many observers an obsession with trying to cover up how badly its police and prosecutors had botched a simple case that clearly put Rudy Guede, an Ivory Coast drifter with a spotty past, in Kercher's bedroom at the time of her murder.

Rudy Guede admitted to being present at the crime scene when the murder was committed and watching as Kercher bled to death, but denied being the actual killer. However, the forensic evidence points firmly to Guede’s guilt. A bloody handprint of his, covered with the victims’s blood, was on Kercher’s bedroom wall. Italian forensic police testified that Guede’s DNA was inside the victim.

Following his trial, Guede was convicted and sentenced to 30 years in prison. That sentence was reduced to 16 years during his appeal hearing when Guede agreed to testify against Knox and Sollecito. Guede became eligible for parole in 2014 due to his reduced sentence. Just because he will be eligible for parole is no guarantee he will be released.

The Trial of Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito

Following Guede’s trial and conviction, Knox and Sollecito went on trial in 2009 for their alleged roles in the murder of the 21-year-old Kercher. Both were found guilty and sentenced to more than 25 years. Under the Italian two-tier trial system, the case was then referred to the higher-level court to be heard a second time, after which judges would either confirm or reject the lower-level court's verdict. In 2011 the higher-level court overturned the initial convictions, issuing a ruling lambasting the police’s handling of the investigation. Judges also singled out major defects in the collection, handling and analysis of critical forensic evidence used by the prosecution.

Unlike in the United States and Great Britain where exonerated defendants are protected against being retried for the same crime, Italy operates under the Code Napoleon which offers no protection against double jeopardy. Under Italian law prosecutors have the same right to appeal acquittals as defendants to appeal convictions. Both prosecutors and defendants can go from the higher-level tribunal to the Court of Cassation (Italy's highest judicial body, equivalent to the U.S. Supreme Court). Prosecutors appealed the higher-level ruling and, in March 2013, Italian prosecutors won. The higher-level ruling quashing the murder convictions was itself overturned and the court granted a prosecution request for a retrial. That retrial began in November 2013 and lasted until January 30, 2014, when the Florence appeal court upheld their 2009 convictions, finding Know and Sollecito guilty for a second time of the murder of Meredith Kercher

Knox, in absentia, was sentenced to 28 1/2 years and Sollecito to 25 years. She refused to attend the latest trial, opting to send a long email to the court while remaining in the United States – asserting her innocence and that of Sollecito – a move which has antagonized some Italian officials.

Both Knox, who also attended the university as an exchange student and was a flat mate of Kercher’s, and Sollecito were originally convicted in 2009. Two years later, an appeal court overturned both convictions, ending four years of imprisonment for both defendants. Following that ruling, Italy's highest court, the Court of Cassation, departed from its normal role of dealing with legal technicalities and ordered a retrial before the appeal court based in Florence.

Those proceedings, before two judges and six lay jurors, began in November. At the retrial, the prosecution did not produce any new evidence or proof that Knox or Sollecito were in the bedroom when Kercher was stabbed to death in 2007. It merely changed its theory of the case from some sort of ritualistic sex game gone bad to Knox murdering her flat mate because Kercher criticized her lax housekeeping.

Although Sollecito, now 29, attended a good portion of the retrial along with his father, he was not in the courtroom when the verdicts – after 11 ½ hours of deliberation – were announced. Knox, 26, returned to Seattle following her 2011 exoneration.

The question that is fair to ask, given their shaky original case, mishandled forensic evidence and continuing public relations problems over the case, is why were Italian prosecutors still pursuing Knox and Sollecito? To be blunt, the most plausible answer was a vendetta born of anger at being ridiculed at home and abroad and a stubborn reluctance to accept that there may well have been a miscarriage of justice. Italian authorities had already expended enormous amounts of time and resources on this case. They've also had to put up with hostile global media coverage, repeated high-profile criticisms of their investigations and handling of the case and they didn’t want to be seen to endure so much trouble and have squandered so much time and effort only to publicly admit an error. The more they pursued this case, the worse the criticisms will be. The worse the criticism, the less they wanted to be seen to admit a blunder.

Another possible cause of this vendetta may have been inspired by the 2013 publication of Knox’s book, Waiting To Be Heard, allowing Knox to achieve a good dose of vindication and a $4 million advance from Harper-Collins. The book recounts the over-the-top police interrogations she was submitted to, her four years in an Italian prison, and her exoneration on appeal in 2011. In a post-publication interview with the National Post, Knox said most of the advance has already been used to pay legal fees and expenses incurred during her trials, imprisonment and appeals. She also told the National Post she will not change her story regarding alleged police misconduct simply because of threatened defamation lawsuits by Italian police and prosecutors.

Soon after the verdicts were announced, defense attorneys vowed to appeal the reinstatement of the original convictions to the Court of Cassation once the Florence court publishes its justification of its verdicts in late April of 2014.

“It’s evident we will appeal,” said Luciano Ghirga, one of Knox’s attorneys. “We continue to say that there is no evidence,” The New York Times reported the next day. An attorney for Sollecito, Giulia Bongiorno, said the trial had been “empty of proof and evidence” and pledged to appeal. These appeals could easily take two or more years to make their way through Italy’s convoluted justice system.

A request by the prosecutor to issue arrest warrants for the defendants was rejected by the Florence court. The court ruled that Knox was legitimately in the United States and that Sollecito only be required to surrender his passport and not leave Italy.

Only if all subsequent appeals are denied could Italian authorities begin extradition proceedings for Knox’s return to serve her sentence. The decision to honor Italy’s request for extradition rests solely with the U.S. Secretary of State. Because Knox was exonerated previously, the United States will most probably not agree to extradite her to Italy. Doing so would be a violation of the U.S. Constitution's prohibition against double jeopardy. But then, again, one never knows what might happen in the politically charged atmosphere this case has generated.

Now that Knox has been re-convicted she will be unable to enter any European Union country without almost certainly being arrested and held pending an Italian extradition request. European law and various EU treaties would oblige other EU nations to do so.

Furthermore, if she enters any country with a vested interest in either pleasing the Italians or displeasing the U.S. State Department, then they may opt to detain her and offer her to the Italians as a fugitive.

Contrary to popular belief, countries do not need a standing extradition treaty to detain fugitives of another state and offer them for extradition. A notable exception to standard extradition is the EU itself which refuses to extradite prisoners to any country where they even might face the death penalty. As neither Knox norSollecito (who, unlike Knox, has attended the latest trial) would face execution if convicted, that rule wouldn’t apply.

Knox, now 25, is currently enrolled at the University of Washington in Seattle and expects to graduate in 2014.

To many observers, it was a farce for the Court of Cassation to order a retrial. Judge Hellman of the original appeal court – the court that exonerated Knox and Sollecito – was outraged by the decision to allow another retrial. Hellman has claimed unequivocally that the Court of Cassation has stepped outside its own authority by interpreting trial evidence instead of strictly confining itself to legal technicalities as required under Italian law. Hellman is suggesting the Court of Cassation effectively retried the original murder case rather than assessing the lawfulness (or otherwise) of the original investigation and trial. Hellman has also made it clear, to use his exact words, that the “Ruling has explained to the judges in the new trial how they should convict the two accused.” His prediction about that was borne out by the new guilty verdicts.

One of the distinctive aspects of the case has been the level of international media coverage. That a murder case involving a British victim and African, American and Italian defendants would attract multinational media attention is no surprise at all. What has given the case a quite tacky aspect has been the kind of media coverage it has attracted. Amanda Knox has suffered from negative publicity as much about her alleged lifestyle in Perugia as her alleged guilt in the murder. She’s been vilified for behaving like a libertine by many Italian media outlets which used her “party girl” lifestyle to sell papers while lambasting her as some kind of scarlet woman. British tabloids have used her looks to her disadvantage, labelling her “Foxy Knoxy” and suggesting she fits the profile of a cold-blooded femme fatale.

U.S. media, on the other hand, have largely been more supportive towards her, not that this has necessarily helped Amanda Knox. No country likes to see its own system of justice pilloried by foreign media and Italy is no exception. It has been suggested that, far from helping Knox’s case, U.S. media criticism of Italian justice was what hardened the resolve of Italian prosecutors to continue pursuing the case against her.

The Murder of Meredith Kercher

The murder of British student Meredith Kercher in Perugia, Italy on November 1, 2007 caused a global controversy. Not so much for the crime itself, although it was certainly a brutal murder, but because of the disputed guilt or innocence of two of the three defendants, American Amanda Knox and Italian Raffaele Sollecito.

Rudy Guede admitted to being present at the crime scene when the murder was committed and watching as Kercher bled to death, but denied being the actual killer. However, the forensic evidence points firmly to Guede’s guilt. A bloody handprint of his, covered with the victims’s blood, was on Kercher’s bedroom wall. Italian forensic police testified that Guede’s DNA was inside the victim.

Following his trial, Guede was convicted and sentenced to 30 years in prison. That sentence was reduced to 16 years during his appeal hearing when Guede agreed to testify against Knox and Sollecito. Guede became eligible for parole in 2014 due to his reduced sentence. Just because he will be eligible for parole is no guarantee he will be released.

Following Guede’s trial and conviction, Knox and Sollecito went on trial in 2009 for their alleged roles in the murder of the 21-year-old Kercher. Both were found guilty and sentenced to more than 25 years. Under the Italian two-tier trial system, the case was then referred to the higher-level court to be heard a second time, after which judges would either confirm or reject the lower-level court's verdict. In 2011 the higher-level court overturned the initial convictions, issuing a ruling lambasting the police’s handling of the investigation. Judges also singled out major defects in the collection, handling and analysis of critical forensic evidence used by the prosecution.

Unlike in the United States and Great Britain where exonerated defendants are protected against being retried for the same crime, Italy operates under the Code Napoleon which offers no protection against double jeopardy. Under Italian law prosecutors have the same right to appeal acquittals as defendants to appeal convictions. Both prosecutors and defendants can go from the higher-level tribunal to the Court of Cassation (Italy's highest judicial body, equivalent to the U.S. Supreme Court). Prosecutors appealed the higher-level ruling and, in March 2013, Italian prosecutors won. The higher-level ruling quashing the murder convictions was itself overturned and the court granted a prosecution request for a retrial. That retrial began in November 2013 and lasted until January 30, 2014, when the Florence appeal court upheld their 2009 convictions.

Amanda Knox refused to leave the United States to stand for retrial, but Raffaele Sollecito, frequently in the company of his father, attended a good portion of the retrial. He was not present in the courtroom when the verdicts were announced.  

The Victim

Meredith Kercher

Meredith Kercher had a passion for Italy and its people, language and culture. She started a degree course at Leeds University in 2007 studying European Politics and Italian, electing to spend her foreign study year at the University of Perugia. While at Perugia she studied modern history, political theories and the history of Italian cinema. She was fluent in Italian and supported herself with the usual low-paid student work including promotional work for a local company, working as a tour guide and bar work at local nightclub Le Chic, owned by a Congolese immigrant, Patrick Lumumba.

It was through Lumumba that she met Amanda Knox when Knox took a job at Le Chic. Through Knox she met co-defendants Rudy Guede and RaffaeleSollecito.(Knox has denied ever having met or known Guede, but Candace Demspey, author of Murder in Italy, has stated unambiguously that Knox did meet him at least once. In a recent letter to Italian authorities Knox herself stated she met Guede only once, but never after that.)

Picturesque Perugia is a popular place for students, especially foreigners. The nightlife is vibrant, foreigners – both tourists and students – come and go in large numbers and local people generally welcome foreigners.Kercher lived with two Italian students and Amanda Knox. They shared a flat at Via Della Pergola 7, regarded by locals as one of Perugia’s less desirable neighborhoods, and seemed to get along well. Doubtless there were the usual occasional flatmate arguments, but nothing serious. Just two typical students abroad, sharing a flat and picking up casual work to pay the bills.

Knox, originally from Seattle, had enrolled at the University in Perugia to study Italian, German and creative writing on a one-year course, starting in 2007. She secured a room in the same flat as Kercher just prior to the start of the 2007 academic year in September. She met Sollecito at a classical music concert in mid-October 2007 and the two became a couple only a week before Kercher’s murder.

Sollecito came to Perugia from the town of Bari. A couple of years older than Knox and Kercher, he was nearing the end of his own course in computer engineering. His grades were good and there was nothing unusual about either Sollecito's background or lifestyle.

On November 1, 2007 Kercher was found dead on her bedroom floor. She had been physically restrained, sexually assaulted, beaten and slashed with a knife. The cause of death was two stab wounds to her neck. Suffocation also played a part, her naked body being discovered on her bed covered from head to foot with a quilt. An upstairs window had been broken into and Kercher’s two cellphones were missing along with her house keys, two credit cards and some cash. At first the broken window and stolen property suggested a burglary gone terribly wrong. Police soon discounted this theory. The broken window was around 12 feet above ground level and the missing cellphones were soon found in a nearby garden. The other stolen items and cash were never recovered which did indicate theft was a motive.

Ensnaring Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito

Kercher’s murder was discovered by her Italian flatmates, who immediately notified the police. The flatmates initially reported a break-in. After finding bloodstains, they found Kercher’s bedroom door was locked and, despite repeatedly calling her to open it, they got no answer. Fearing for her safety, they broke it down and found her body.

The police quickly began investigating and started by interviewing people closest to the victim. Murder investigations frequently involve starting with the victim and then those closest to him or her. Knox and Sollecito being among the first interviewed implies nothing about either their guilt or innocence. Murder is very often a personal rather than professional crime. Knox (Kercher’s flatmate) and Sollecito (Knox’s new boyfriend) were interviewed separately and their stories compared for discrepancies. As they were being interviewed as witnesses and not (at the time) interrogated as suspects, nothing they said was admissible in court under Italian law. But their status as witnesses also meant they weren’t given the standard protections afforded to suspects such as immediate access to lawyers. Nor were any audio recordings or film footage taken of their initial interviews. .

Sollecito and Knox initially claimed they were together at Sollecito’s flat at the time of the murder. Knox had been told by a text message from bar owner Lumumba that she had the night off. Business was slow that night and it didn’t look like she’d be needed. Both Knox and Kercher worked at Le Chic as barmaids.

The stories Knox and Sollecito told didn’t hold water for very long.

Both were interviewed several times over the next few days. It was Sollecito who changed his story first. (His account originally agreed with Knox's, claiming that they'd spent the whole evening at his flat. He now changed his story, stating that he'd only been with Knox for part of the evening, wasn't entirely sure when she'd left his flat and that he'd spent the rest of the evening at home alone using his computer.

According to Sollecito, investigators told him that Knox had cracked and implicated him in the murder. Sollecito later alleged that police had heavily pressured him to save himself by implicating Knox, threatening to prosecute him for the murder unless he named Knox as the ringleader. Sollecito further claimed that, while he himself had no intention of cracking, he wasn’t sure they wouldn’t bully Knox into implicating him. He was sure that they were trying to do exactly that.

Knox alleges that, once she formally became a suspect instead of a witness, police employed physical abuse, verbal threats and intense pressure to force a confession. At her appeal Knox claimed police slapped her at least twice during questioning. She also accused them of denying her food, drink, sleep and bathroom breaksand that, as she spoke little Italian, the police interpreter not only mistranslated her words but attempted to twist them and pressurise her still further.Italian officers present during her interviews deny all those allegations.

At one point investigators told Knox they had transcripts of the text messages between her and Lumumba when he gave her the night off. Knox claims police interpreted her use of the common phrase “See you later” in her final message to mean that Knox and Lumumba were co-conspirators planning to meet later and commit the crime. It was then that Knox did something very foolish. She accused Lumumba of murdering Meredith Kercher. She claimed he was obsessed with Kercher and she was sure of his guilt.

In doing so she both changed her initial story (of being at Sollecito’s flat for almost the entire evening) and made an entirely baseless accusation against Lumumba.That false accusation would have serious consequences for both of them. She was now claiming that she'd met Lumumba at the Piazza Grimana, accompanied him to her flat and actually seen him murder Kercher.

Why an innocent person would implicate herself in a murder while falsely accusing an innocent man is hard to understand, but Knox herself alleges that police mistreated her during her questioning and kept pressing her to admit her involvement in the crime. The statement containing these new claims was in Italian, a language Knox wasn't fluent in and wouldn't have been able to read fully before signing it.

Knox also acted oddly both immediately after the murder and during her initial interviews. Her emotional state regularly fluctuated between apparent indifference, crying fits and seemingly clowning around which only increased police suspicions. It also generated increasingly hostile media interest and public opinion. Her unpredictable behavior isn’t evidence of guilt so much as of stress, fear, mental fatigue and perhaps not fully realizing the seriousness of her situation. That said, it isn’t hard to see how it could be considered inappropriate by conventional expectations and suspicious to police officers.

Knox admits she practised yoga techniques at the police station between interviews. She’s also admitted spending some of her time between interviews sitting on Sollecito’sknee.

Other students and mutual acquaintances told police that Knox’s initial response toKercher’s murder seemed disinterested and seemingly callous. When questioned about her apparent aloofness and “inappropriate” behavior Knox stated, understandably, that individuals deal with stressful situations in their own ways. She also said she was under immense stress and pressure and that she never intended to offend anybody or arouse any suspicion. Contrary to police claims, Knox also denies that, in addition to yoga, she also performed cartwheels while waiting to be interviewed.

As a result of Knox’s accusation regarding Lumumba, the bar owner was arrested. He spent two weeks in detention until his alibi (being at Le Chic throughout the night of the murder) was verified. He was released without charge and eliminated as a suspect. During the investigation, his detention and subsequent lawsuit against Knox for calunnia (an Italian form of slander prosecuted as a crime, not as a civil case) he incurred substantial legal fees. His business also suffered greatly. The negative publicity forced him to sell Le Chic to pay legal fees and business debts.

After successfully suing the Italian police for false imprisonment and the loss of his good name and business, Lumumba was awarded 16,000 Euros. His successful lawsuit against Knox brought further compensation when Knox was ordered to pay his legal fees for both his initial two weeks in jail after her false accusation and for his successful lawsuit for slander. The judgment required Knox to pay 62,000 Euros to Lumumba in damages and to serve three years in prison. The prison term was later reduced to time served after Knox won her initial appeal on the murder conviction. It is not known whether she has paid Lumumba.

If things were difficult for Lumumba they were about to get much worse for Knox and Sollecito. Sollecito had also changed his story. He now claimed that Knox had not been at his home for the entire evening and that he’d spent most of it alone using his computer. Changing his story did nothing to allay police suspicions, especially when police examined his computer and refused to accept he’d been using it on the evening of the murder. They also wanted to know why, after Knox’s texts with Lumumba, both Knox and Sollecito switched off their cellphones for three hours that coincided with the murder. Knox claimed she wanted to avoid Lumumba changing his mind and calling her into work that night. Investigators clearly didn’t believe her, although the response was reasonable.

By changing his story –and only making his own situation worse – Sollecito destroyed Knox’s original alibi. With those facts and Knox’s inappropriate behavior, Italian police stopped viewing them as witnesses to be interviewed. Now they became suspects to be interrogated and anything they said could be used against them in court.

 The Ivory Coast Drifter

Rudy Guede

So far, investigators had Knox and Sollecito facing possible murder charges and Patrick Lumumba facing financial and personal ruin. There was only one other suspect to examine more closely. That suspect was Rudy Guede. He’d already had run-ins with Italian police on suspicion of burglary, threatening behavior involving a knife and was suspected of dealing cannabis and hashish.

Both Amanda Knox and Raffaele Sollecito came from law-abiding, respectable backgrounds. Rudy Guede's background was more turbulent and rather less law-abiding. Originally from the Ivory Coast, Guede, from age 5, had lived in Italy since 1991. His father had returned to the Ivory Coast in 2004 and left Guede in the care of friends, family and a local priest before he was adopted by a local family at the age of 15.

Guede became an underachiever, dropping out of college courses in hotel management and computing. At the time of the murder he had been fired from a job as gardener for his adopted parents who had also evicted him after finally losing patience with his lifestyle and behavior. Guede became a petty criminal, arrested more than once on suspicion of burglary and drug-dealing. His most recent arrest occurred only days before the murder when he was picked up for suspected burglary during which he allegedly threatened the homeowner with a long-bladed knife while escaping.

Police came to believe that Guede’s alleged drug-dealing was how he first met Knox and Sollecito, who both used marijuana freely. As he knew Knox and Sollecito, he also met Meredith Kercher. He first became acquainted with all of them only a couple of weeks before the murder. He knew Knox and Kercher’s address and had previously been found inside their flat. Residents didn’t know how he entered or why he was there. They did know that they had found him sitting asleep on the toilet. Some say he took a particular interest in Meredith Kercher.

Guede was suspected by police of having burgled a lawyer’s office by breaking in through an upstairs window. Only days before Meredith Kercher’s murder, the owner of a nursery school in Milan had caught Guede burgling the nursery school. When confronted Guede allegedly threatened the owner with a long-bladed knife to make his escape. According to Italian forensic experts working the Kercher case that knife was similar to the weapon used to murder Meredith Kercher.

On hearing the police wanted to question him, Guede promptly disappeared. He left Italy and turned up in Germany where he was promptly arrested as a fugitive and returned to Italy. Guede presumably thought leaving Italy put him outside the reach of Italian police. Within European Union member states there’s often considerable co-operation between national police forces. The European Arrest Warrant allows (and obliges) member states to return fugitives wanted in other EU countries. If Guede thought he was safe simply by entering a different EU country, he was wrong.

Guede was formally charged and held in preventive detention to await trial. Rather than plead not guilty and try clearing his name, Guede opted for a so-called “fast-track” trial which was his right under Italian law. Guede was returned to Italy on November 20, 2007. His trial began in February, 2008.

At trial, his claims of non-involvement in Kercher’s murder were thoroughly discredited by forensic and DNA evidence. His DNA was found all over Kercher’s bra strap. A bloody handprint was found on the bed under her body and it matched Guede’s handprint. Prosecutors could prove that he knew Kercher, that he had been present at the crime scene and that his DNA was found not only at the crime scene but also on and inside Kercher’s body.

Guede’s claim that Kercher had invited him into the flat and consented to sex was given no credibility by the panel of trial judges. On October 29, 2008 Guede was convicted of murder and sexual assault. He drew 30 years (later reduced to 16 years on appeal) and will soon be eligible for parole. It’s possible that he might be leaving prison before Knox and Sollecito’s cases are adjudicated.

Despite Guede being by far the most likely suspect, Knox and Sollecito were still regarded by prosecutors and police as prime suspects. With their changing, contradictory stories, seeming lack of verifiable alibis and Italian forensic experts claiming to have found solid evidence of their participation, including DNA evidence linking Knox to what prosecutors claimed was the murder weapon and linking Sollecito to the clasp of Kercher’s bra, it wasn’t long before they were both formally charged with her murder and held to await trial. Their situation looked bleak.

On November 8 they came before Judge Claudia Matteini. It was during an adjournment that Knox met her trial lawyers for the first time. Having met her lawyers only that day, Knox had no time to discuss her case with them or prepare a case for being granted bail. Judge Matteini denied bail for both Knox and Sollecito and ordered that both be detained for a year, long enough for a trial to be arranged.

Knox and Sollecito remained in jail until their trial started on January 16, 2009. They would be tried not before a jury, but before a presiding judge, a deputy judge and six lay jurors. The Italian system is based on the Code Napoleon, a different legal system common in Continental Europe. The Code Napoleon system isn’t used in the United States or the United Kingdom where a single judge and 12-person jury are the norm in criminal trials.

The First Trial of Knox and Sollecito

Their trial began before Presiding Judge Cristiano Massei, Deputy Judge Beatrice Cristiani and the six lay jurors at the Perugia Court of Assizes. The prosecution claimed that Knox and Sollecito teamed with Guede to attack, rape and murder Meredith Kercher, that the supposed burglary was faked by Knox and Sollecito (hence the easily-recovered stolen cellphones) and that the murder was either a group sex game gone wrong or the result of a feud between Knox and Kercher. The prosecution claimed that they had DNA evidence, that Knox and Sollecito had changed their stories under interrogation, that they had improvised a cover story and that Knox had falsely implicated Lumumba to protect their real co-conspirator, Rudy Guede.

The prosecution also alleged that Kercher couldn’t have been physically restrained by a single person and that Knox’s “inappropriate” behavior after the murder and at the police station suggested guilt.

A police crime scene photograph.

The physical evidence, according to the prosecution, was heavily in favor of Kercher being overpowered by more than one person. Prosecutors claimed that a knife found in Sollecito’s cutlery drawer was the murder weapon and that, on searching his flat, they noticed a strong smell of bleach which, police claimed, was evidence of the knife having been thoroughly cleaned after the murder. Guede’s shoe prints, fingerprints and DNA had been found all over the crime scene and, as prosecutors alleged he was a co-conspirator with Knox and Sollecito, that this too pointed to their guilt.

According to the prosecution case Knox performed the actual murder while Guede and Sollecito helped restrain the victim and fake the burglary. As evidence of there being more than one attacker they cited the fact that Kercher had no defensive wounds on either her hands or arms. Defensive wounds are very common on victims trying to escape an attacker armed with a knife. Their absence from Kercher’s body was a circumstantial piece of evidence used aggressively by prosecutors. They claimed that Knox had repeatedly banged Kercher’s head against the bedroom wall, forcibly gripped her face to restrain her, forcibly undressed her, repeatedly slashed her with a knife and finally stabbed her twice in the neck while Guede and Sollecito restrained Kercher. They also suggested that two knives might have been used to commit the crime, rather than just the one police had actually found. Proof of Sollecito’s involvement, according to the prosecution, came from his DNA being found on the clasp of Kercher’s bra, which was found at the scene having been cut away from the rest of the garment.

The defense case was, arguably, somewhat more solid. No shoe prints, clothing fibres, hairs, skin cells or DNA from Amanda Knox were found either on Kercher’s body or at the crime scene. Defense DNA experts claimed that DNA on the alleged murder weapon (alleged to be Sollecito’s by the prosecution) consisted of a trace too small to be identifiable as the victim’s. Claiming that police forensic experts had incorrectly collected, handled and analyzed the evidence the defense demanded the prosecution provide dates for the examination of each individual exhibit. If exhibits were examined on the same day (and examined incorrectly) then the risk of contamination was greatly increased.

Police experts refused to provide those dates and were not ordered to by the trial judges. The defense also asked the judges to order the evidence be turned over to an independent forensic and DNA experts for re-examination. They especially wanted new DNA tests and to confirm whether the victim’s wounds actually matched the knife claimed by prosecutors as being the murder weapon. The judges denied their request.

Prosecution claims that Knox and Kercher had a fractious and confrontational relationship despite being flatmates was also challenged by the defense. They produced their own selection of text messages between the defendant and the victim to support their claim that the two women were perfectly friendly and didn’t have any feud with each other.

Defense lawyers freely used their clients’ allegations against the police. Both defendants accused police of using brutality, threats, intimidation and frequent attempts to turn them against each other. Knox claimed that police deprived her of basic necessities during her initial questioning. They also claimed that police ensured Knox had no access to a lawyer, any representative of the American Consulate or Embassy or even a visit from her relatives until after she had been charged. The defense alleged police knew that Knox’s mother was due to arrive in Italy and, the day before she was scheduled to arrive, police increased their pressure on Knox in an effort to make her crack before her mother visited and could involve U.S. consular officials.

Another defense angle came from the initial interviews with the defendants. The absence of film or audio recordings neither proved nor disproved the defendants’ claims of police misconduct. But, according to the defense, police couldn’t disprove those allegations either. It was a somewhat shaky plank in the defense case that, bluntly speaking, came down to whether the judges believed the police or the defendants. At the original trial they clearly believed the police.

The defense was unsuccessful. On December 5, 2009 both defendants were found guilty. Knox received 26 years (with an additional fine and three years added later for falsely accusing Lumumba). Sollecito received 25 years. Both were sent to Capanne Prison to await their mandatory appeal to the higher court.

The Appeal

Italian criminal courts operate under a two-tier system as part of the Code Napoleon. Having been through the first grade level (primo grado) the judgments had to be confirmed or rejected at the second grade (secundogrado) after which they would officially be convicted. If confirmed by the second-grade court then their only option for appeal would be to the Court of Cassation (the Italian Supreme Court). Appeals there could only be brought over legal technicalities or mistakes made during the investigation and first-grade trial. Fortunately for the defendants their lawyers had a number of points to raise at the second-grade hearing.

The second-grade hearing is effectively a second trial. It began on November 24, 2010, presided over by Judges Claudio Hellmann and Massimo Zanetti. This time the judges did order independent reviews of the DNA and forensic evidence as originally requested by the defense team. The independent review was damning for the prosecution, police forensic experts and the police themselves. Sapienza University experts Carla Vechiotti and Stefano Conti, both widely respected within the European forensics field, reviewed the DNA-related evidence and submitted a report running to 145 pages. Much of their report detailed incompetence and carelessness on the part of detectives and police forensic experts.

Forensic expert Patrizia Stefanoni was castigated by independent analysts.

Junk Science

According to Conti and Vechiotti, the work of forensic expert Patrizia Stefanoni was bungled and flawed, failing to conform to internationally accepted standards of proficiency. They further accused Stefanoni of the much more serious error of giving evidence in court that was unsupported by her own laboratory findings. Vechiotti has also stated that, from the time she was chosen to perform the independent review, unspecified “important documents” were being withheld from her.

The independent experts stated that DNA found on the alleged murder weapon was of insufficient quantity to identify it as Kercher’s. They also quoted some of Stefanoni’s own testimony during the first-grade trial where she herself admitted that she perhaps should have double-checked her own scientific findings but hadn’t actually done so. Regarding the bra clasp used by the prosecution and confirmed as having Sollecito’s DNA, the experts noted huge errors in collection and handling of the clasp. On crime-scene pictures the clasp is obviously marked for collection and examination. It was also found some distance from the rest of Kercher’s bra.

By Stefanoni’s own admission police and forensic experts then forgot about the clasp and it wasn’t actually collected until 46 days after being found at the scene. Even then, the clasp itself was found in the middle of a pile of other objects found at the crime scene. If any of those objects had Sollecito’s DNA on them then being left in an unsorted pile for so long could easily have transferred his DNA to the clasp. Equally important, while Guede’s DNA was found all over the straps of the bra, Sollecito’s was found only on the clasp.

Anybody with even basic forensic knowledge is unlikely to consider such evidence as having huge evidentiary value. The risk of cross-contamination is simply too great. And how, if as the prosecution claims, Sollecito was physically restraining Kercher during the actual crime, could his DNA not be found on her clothing or her body? The experts also questioned the validity of the clasp as evidence when they requested it be re-examined. They were told that it was now too rusty and unfit for re-examination because it had been incorrectly stored by police forensic experts. This wasn’t as conclusive as test results proving cross-contamination, but it certainly bolstered defense claims that evidence-handling by the police forensic experts was substandard. Further proof of that claim was presented in the video footage of the clasp being recovered by the police forensic team themselves. That footage clearly showed the clasp being handled by Stefanoni wearing a visibly dirty latex glove.

Another important shot fired by the defense concerned DNA evidence used against Amanda Knox. According to the prosecution they had Guede’s DNA all over the victim and the crime scene. They had what they considered incriminating DNA from Sollecito on the bra clasp. What they didn’t have was any forensic traces of Amanda Knox on Kercher’s body or in her bedroom which was the crime scene itself. No shoe prints, fingerprints, hairs, clothing fibres or DNA from Amanda Knox were found either on Kercher’s body or in her bedroom.

The second-grade hearing could have confirmed the findings of the first-grade hearing. It could have rendered a verdict of “not proven” rather than a full acquittal. What the judges did was to quash the murder convictions against Knox and Sollecito while upholding Knox’s conviction for falsely accusing Patrick Lumumba. Even after they increased her fine and prison sentence for libelling Lumumba they still ordered her release, ruling her libel sentence had already been served while awaiting her murder trial and appeal. Both Sollecito and Knox – imprisoned for the last four years – were now freed. The judges’ ruling placed the police firmly in the firing line.

Their ruling was damning for police detectives and forensic experts. According to the appellate judges the verdict against Amanda Knox “Was not corroborated by any objective element of evidence.” They disputed the testimony of a supposed witness, a tramp named Curatolo, who claimed he saw Knox and Sollecito near the crime scene at the time of the murder. The judges felt that homeless heroin addicts are seldom the most reliable witnesses. They criticized the original trial judge, Massei, especially the fact that he used the word “probably” at least 39 times in his written ruling deciding their guilt.

They also criticized the police regarding their interrogations of Knox. They described her interrogations as being “Of obsessive duration,” stating that in their opinion her changes of story and fluctuating emotional state were signs of extreme mental pressure and stress rather than guilt. They also noted that, despite the police and prosecution claiming that Knox and Sollecito conspired with Rudy Guede, there was no evidence of phone calls or text messages between either Knox and Sollecito and Guede himself.

In short, although the second-grade finding didn’t explicitly state that Knox and Sollecito were either railroaded or convicted through incompetence that was the impression that was left.The appellate judges excoriated both the police and the prosecution’s forensic experts in their ruling. In a British or American case that would almost certainly have been the end of the matter. It wasn’t.

Jan. 13, 2014

Countess Erzsébet Báthory

by David Robb

Lady Macbeth is perhaps the most famous fictional female villainess in all of literature, but in 1606, while William Shakespeare was creating her bloodthirsty character, one of the world’s worst real life villainess was on a serial murder spree like no other.

All but forgotten today, Countess Erzsébet Báthory was descended from one of the noblest families in the Hungarian region of Transylvania. But Erzsébet wasn’t like other girls – she liked to torture and murder them. All told, she may have murdered more than 650 young girls and virgins. The exact number won’t be known until the government of Hungary makes public her diary, which reportedly contains the names of all her victims – a diary so shocking that Hungarian authorities have kept it under lock and key for over 400 years.

Testimony from the ensuing trial revealed that she bit hunks of flesh from the bodies of her victims while they were still alive. Legend has it that she bathed in their blood, believing that this would preserve her youth. No one knows for sure why she did it. What is known is that she murdered at least three-times more young women than did Jack the Ripper – and possibly 100-times more. She was the most prolific female mass murderer of all time, and perhaps the most prolific serial killer – male or female – ever to live. 

Born in 1560, Erzsébet Báthory was a strikingly beautiful 15-year-old girl when she married Count Ferenc Nadasdy, whose wedding gift to her was Cachtice Castle, a majestic, medieval palace set atop a hill overlooking a beautiful valley.  It was here that she would commit a series of ghastly murders. It was, without a doubt, the most picturesque mass murder site of all time.

 Cachtice Castle

Initially, Erzsébet’s husband took part in her sadistic sex games, which she practiced on her servants. Together, they would pierce the servants’ lips and nipples with pins and needles, stick sharp objects under their fingernails, whip them, stab them and bite them – but not to the point of death. They would cover them in honey and let insects bite away at them, or stand them in the freezing snow and douse them with water.

But when her husband left to fight in one of Hungary’s many wars with the Turks, Erzsébet’s thirst to inflict pain and suffering became unquenchable.

Testimony from the hair-raising trial would uncover a catalogue of depravity, mayhem and mass murder.

Erzsébet set up a torture chamber in the castle’s basement where no one could hear her vicitims’ screams. Young girls would be abducted from the nearby village or lured to the castle with the promise of work, and then Erzsébet would tear into them. 

Assisted by her majordomo, her childrens’ nanny, a washerwoman and several other servants, Erzsébet would beat the girls with boards, burn them with hot pokers, freeze them, drown them or starve them to death – all the while ravaging them sexually. Cutting, stabbing, poking and piercing were her favorite pastimes. Their hands were cut off, their eyes gouged out, their breasts and vaginas mutilated. She particularly enjoyed burning the girls’ noses and lips off with a red-hot flatiron, or ripping their jaws off with her bare hands. Erzsébet would bite pieces of flesh off their faces, attack them with knives, and set their pubic hair on fire with a burning candle. Once, a servant testified at trial, while torturing two girls, Erzsébet stuck needles under their fingernails and scowled, “If it hurts, you whores, then simply pull them out!” And when the girls pulled the needles out, Erzsébet cut their fingers off. Then they were killed.

This went on for decades.

But what to do with all the dead bodies? They were dumped in pits and canals, or buried in shallow graves in the surrounding fields or on the castle grounds.

Rumors began circulating about atrocities going on at the castle in 1604, but it wasn’t until 1610 that King Matthias sent someone to look into it. When the king’s envoy finally arrived at the castle, he and his men found one girl dead, another one dying, and many more locked up and hysterical.

The king wanted Báthory beheaded, but his advisors cautioned that this would reflect badly on the other nobles. Instead, Báthory was locked up and her four accomplices were put on trial, during which one testified that 36 young girls had been murdered; another said that the number was 37, and the other two claimed it was more than 50. Local townspeople claimed that as many as 200 bodies had been removed from the castle, and a witness who saw her book said it contained the names of 650 victims.

In the end, three of her accomplices were found guilty and executed. The other defendant was acquitted. Báthory herself was never tried, and was found dead in her cell on Aug. 21, 1614.

Jan. 6, 2014

“Colonel” Thomas Blood, who stole the Crown Jewels of England in May, 1671.

The theft of the Crown Jewels in 1671 was the crime of its age, but King Charles II inexplicably pardoned the motley gang and granted extensive lands in Ireland to the ringleader, Colonel Thomas Blood.

by Robert Walsh

London, May 1671.

A motley group of conspirators was making its final preparations for a robbery that will become the most widely known crime of its age. As his accomplices ready themselves, self-appointed “Colonel” Thomas Blood, an Irish “adventurer,” offers a final prayer for his safety and the success of his plot. This is no ordinary, run-of-the-mill score. If they succeed Colonel Blood and his gang will have stolen the most famous symbol of the British monarchy: The Crown Jewels.

The stealing of precious gems has always exerted a particular allure for thieves and not always for purely financial reasons. For Thomas Blood, stealing the Crown Jewels was said to be an act of political protest against the sitting monarch Charles II. Or was it?

Colonel Blood is one of crime’s less-remembered and certainly more mysterious characters. An Irish Protestant, Blood started off as a Royalist but switched to the Parliamentarian side during the Civil War between the Royalists under King Charles I and Parliamentarians under Oliver Cromwell, serving as a cavalry commander.

After winning the Civil War and ordering the execution of King Charles I in 1649, Cromwell ruled as Lord Protector until his death in 1660 when the monarchy was re-established and Charles II was enthroned as King of England. This change of fortunes caused Thomas Blood to suffer considerably as a result. Having changed sides from the Royalists to the Parliamentary forces, Blood had been awarded lands and considerable financial benefits when the Parliamentarians won the war. Under Charles II, Blood’s lands and perks were confiscated by the Crown, leading him to turn to crime to make a living.

It was also in 1660 that the new monarch King Charles II ordered a lavish Coronation ceremony which included spending the then-staggering sum of £32,000 on a new set of Crown Jewels. The medieval originals had been confiscated by Cromwell and sold to raise funds so Charles ordered exactly similar, equally lavish replicas to replace them. The Imperial Crown was solid gold and held over 400 precious stones, the Royal Sceptre was also solid gold and so was the Royal Orb. Both the Sceptre and the Orb were also encrusted with gems, albeit not as heavily as the Crown itself.

Charles II had inherited an impoverished country whose national coffers were seriously overstretched but, being a man of flamboyant (some would say decadent) tastes, money was seemingly no object and Charles felt it necessary to make the Crown Jewels not only a set of ultra-lavish trinkets, but also a symbol of the newly restored monarchy itself. According to the conventional historical interpretation, it was for their symbolic value (and in protest at his own treatment by the Royalists) that Thomas Blood decided he was going to steal them.

Before he could steal the jewels Blood needed a good look at where they were kept and how well they were guarded. They were kept at the Martin Tower within the Tower of London (not the easiest place to get into or out of) but were protected by only a locked door and a single custodian named Thomas Edwards. To add to the somewhat serious security deficiencies, Edwards was an unpaid custodian making a living entirely by charging visitors to come and view the jewels in the Jewel Room. Visitors couldn’t enter the Jewel Room itself, but they could get a clear view of the Royal treasure through the single, locked metal grille that stood between them and the swag of a lifetime, a grille to which Edwards had the key. Edwards was a thoroughly honest man, but he was also poor and, being 77-years old at the time, not the type of custodian you might expect for something so valuable. When a friendly country vicar  and his wife dropped by asking to view the jewels, Edwards (also far too trusting a man for such a job) was only too happy to earn some extra money. The vicar was really Colonel Thomas Blood. The wife was an actress. Edwards was in harm’s way and didn’t know it.

While his “wife” feigned illness and Edwards went to get her a glass of water, Blood had the time he needed to case the Jewel Room thoroughly. He noticed the single metal grille and realized that Edwards was almost certainly the keyholder. He also noticed a case of pistols which Edwards kept in the Jewel Room, presumably for protection, but which had never been out of their case and were all unloaded. Once his wife had recovered from her sudden bad spell and Edwards had returned, Blood made a show of admiring the pistols and offered to buy them. Edwards, probably thinking that if you can’t trust a clergyman then you can’t trust anybody, sold them to him. Edwards was now totally disarmed in every sense by the very type of man he’d been employed to stop.

Finding Edwards so compliant and friendly, Blood then used the occasion to propose a wedding between his son and the custodian’s daughter, carefully mentioning the large cash dowry Edwards would receive. Now for the master-stroke. Blood suggested that he return with his son and a couple of friends to finalize the wedding plans and asked Edwards if they could view the jewels as well. Edwards agreed instantly and, in that single moment, the greatest robbery of the time was set in motion.

A couple of days later, Blood and his confederates returned. They arrived at 7 a.m. (a time they chose to avoid early-morning crowds and so leave clearer escape routes when the job was done). Edwards greeted the vicar, his friends and his prospective son-in-law (actually Thomas Blood Jr. the Colonel’s own son, known as “Young Blood”) and left his wife and daughter while he led Blood and his accomplices to the Jewel Room. Edwards unlocked the outer door, ushered his paying guests in for their viewing and suddenly everything moved very quickly.

Edwards suddenly found himself with a hessian sack over his head. Blood smashed him on the skull with a wooden mallet while Young Blood, Robert Halliwell and Robert Perrot restrained him. Edwards, despite his age and being outnumbered by several armed men all younger than him, gamely resisted when they demanded the key to the grille. Blood hit him a couple more times and he still struggled to free himself. One of the gang then stabbed him in the stomach and Edwards, while not fatally wounded, finally decided to play dead and buy himself time to figure out what else to do. With Edwards out of commission and the key taken from him, Perrot stuffed the Royal Orb into his breeches. Halliwell busied himself trying to saw the solid-gold Royal Sceptre in two for easier concealment while Blood used the blood-stained mallet to flatten the Imperial Crown before stuffing it under his coat. The security had been bypassed, the custodian was out of action and the Crown Jewels were literally in the hands of the thieves. What could possibly go wrong?

What Blood and his crew didn’t bank on was the unexpected return of Edwards’s son Wythe. Wythe Edwards had just returned from fighting as an officer in the Dutch Wars and he’d also brought a friend with him, Captain Marcus Beckman. Both were hardened, experienced soldiers and neither was the type to back away from a fight. As they walked into the Martin Tower, old Edwards managed to remove the gag he’d been muzzled by and bellowed “Treason! Murder! The Crown is stolen!”

Wythe and Beckman instantly ran towards the noise. They drew their pistols and pursued the thieves at full speed, demanding their surrender in the name of the King. Blood fired a pistol at Wythe and missed while he and Perrot fled towards their horses, being held at the Iron Gate by another accomplice, William Smith. All three were caught as they tried to mount their horses and escape. Halliwelland Young Blood managed to leave the Tower but Young Blood crashed his horse into a passing cart and was immediately arrested. Halliwell was picked up not long afterward, leaving the robbers all arrested and the Crown Jewels recovered. In Thomas Blood’s opinion “It was a gallant deed, although it failed…” History doesn’t record the opinion of Captain Beckman and especially the Edwards family.

Despite facing the particularly hideous death meted out to traitors (namely being hung, drawn and quartered before a public audience) Blood remained curiously (and, some say, suspiciously) calm and relaxed while under arrest. The outlaws were held in the White Tower of the Tower of London to await their trial and ultimate fate. Nobody would have doubted that they would all be providing entertainment for the general public in short order, especially considering that, by stealing the Crown Jewels, they wouldn’t have been charged with robbery or theft, but with treason, a capital offense.

A Most Unlikely Royal Pardon

Time for another twist in the tale. No less a visitor than King Charles II arrived and visited Blood privately where thief and victim spent some time in very private conversation. The most widely told version of their conversation has Blood not only not begging for his life, but even admitting that after the Restoration of the crown he had spent a morning looking at Charles through the sights of a musket while finally deciding not to squeeze the trigger. Not only was Blood arrogant enough to rob the King of England, he’s also supposed to have then joked with the King about previously attempting to assassinate him. Charles, so it’s said, was so impressed by Blood’s sheer audacity and his remarkable crimes that, rather than simply sending him for trial and execution like any other prospective regicide and violent thief, he pardoned Blood, awarded him extensive lands in Ireland and even a pension of £500 a year for life. Pretty good going from Blood’s point of view, considering that he could have ended up being dismembered before a jeering mob instead.

King Charles could easily have ensured that Blood and his accomplices were tried, convicted and publicly executed. He could certainly have ensured that all of them either spent the rest of their lives in English jails or the penal colonies in modern-day Georgia or Virginia. What he didn’t have to do was heavily reward the leader of the gang and allow the others their freedom and to disappear into obscurity, which is exactly what he did do. The question has to be “Why?” Why would King Charles not only give up the chance to make an example of Blood and his colleagues? Why would he spare the gang and reward their leader after they’d committed treason and inflicted so personal an insult to the monarchy?

According to Alan Marshall, a leading historian on the period, the answers are simple. The first involves money. Charles was by nature an ostentatious man with a strong taste for high living and lavish excess. The fact that he’d inherited a country whose finances were heavily depleted and whose credit was over-extended hadn’t curbed his expensive tastes. Marshall believes that the robbery was an inside job, ordered by the King and given to Blood by one of Charles’ chief hatchet men, the Duke of Buckingham. The Duke was a devoted ally of Charles with a long-established record of arranging dirty deeds that Charles profited from in various ways but could never be seen to involve himself with personally. Buckingham often acted as his middleman, making sure that Charles’s less savory activities were done discreetly, without any direct links to the King himself. Charles could easily have used Buckingham to arrange the robbery, pocket the proceeds privately and then order that taxes be levied to provide replacements at public expense. All of which raises the distinct possibility that the robbery was an inside job and Blood not only surviving but being richly rewarded was really a payment for services rendered.

Marshall also provides evidence that Blood, while seemingly a solid member of the London underworld after losing the lands he gained after the Civil War, also acted as a hitman and spy for Buckingham, performing a number of illegal services on Buckingham’s behalf (and, by extension, the King’s). This would account for Blood having evaded capture for so long during his criminal career prior to the robbery. It would also explain why he made such incredible gains from a crime that would normally have cost him his life. The last thing Buckingham (and especially Charles) would have wanted was one of their former spies playing such a trump card in open court. Blood would very likely have done that if he’d found himself facing the executioner’s axe. Far better to publicly show mercy, claim to be utterly charmed by the sheer audacity of the crime and then seal his own reputation as the “Merry Monarch” by letting Blood and his accomplices off the hook and provide a huge payoff for Blood’s previous work under the cover of Charles’s own well-known eccentricity.

Was the notorious Colonel Blood really a disaffected soldier making a political protest or was he merely the inside man? Was the Merry Monarch really a common thief, stealing his own national treasures to further fund an unsustainably lavish lifestyle? Was the most audacious robbery of its time, involving the theft of the most famous jewel collection in the world, merely a put-up job?

Historians and crime buffs can (and still frequently do) debate these questions. But, of all the questions raised by this remarkable heist, only one entirely solid truth emerges: We’ll probably never really know for sure.

Dec. 30, 2013

An excerpt from The Rough Guide To True Crime by Cathy Scott, featuring Pablo Escobar, the Lucchese Family, and the hunt for Jimmy Hoffa’s body.

by Cathy Scott

Organized Crime

Drugs, extortion, gambling, black economy of organized crime.

The Mafia has a clan structure: hierarchical, with a boss at the top, then underbosses, then lieutenants, then soldiers. In this it resembles other traditional outfits – notably the Japanese yakuza and the Chinese Triads.  All three organizations are bound by strict codes of loyalty and silence, of “honor among thieves.” Members see themselves as outsiders and outlaws. They get their sense of belonging from the surrogate family that is the mob. Many such men tattoo themselves to proclaim their affiliations, or use other signs and marks to signal to those in the know that they are gangsters.

Though its exact origins are obscure, many think that the Sicilian Mafia – the Cosa Nostra (“our thing”) – began as a resistance movement, a band of fighters rebelling against the island’s foreign invaders. But it soon enough became a criminal conspiracy, which today makes annual profits estimated to be well over $100 billion. From the small Mediterranean island off the “toe” of Italy, the web of the underworld extends across the globe. In the 19^th century, the Mafia found a foothold in the United States, where it would soon become entrenched, an integral factor in the country’s pursuit of wealth. From Chicago mobster Al Capone in the 1920s to New York’s “Dapper Don” John Gotti in the 1990s, the Mafia constitutes a significant chapter in the American story, mythologized in the Godfather films, in Martin Scorsese’s Casino (about the Mafia in Las Vegas) and Goodfellas (set in New York) – and, of course, in the hit HBO show about the New Jersey Mafia, “The Sopranos.”

The profits made in the black economy are staggering. Pablo Escobar’s Medellín Cartel’s 1980s narcotics operation boosted the entire economy of Colombia before the cartel was smashed. Today, the Russian Mafia is thought to be the most powerful and ferocious organized-crime group, with tentacles stretching across the world.

There are of course smaller players in the underworld too, especially in the multicultural United States. Here, it’s not so much about money but about belonging – gangs that spring up on city streets and in prisons such as the Bloods and Crips, the Black Spades and Latin Kings, the Mongols MC and Aryan Brotherhood.

Pablo Escobar and the Medellin Cartel

The notorious Colombian drug lord Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria was one of the most brutally ruthless, ambitious, and powerful criminals in history. Escobar was so wealthy from his profits in the drug trade that in 1989 Forbes magazine listed him as the seventh-richest man in the world. The drug lord had become one of the narcotic trade’s first billionaires. One law enforcement agent interviewed for a PBS documentary, The Godfather of Cocaine, simply said of him: “Escobar was to cocaine what Ford was to automobiles.”

He was born in 1949 on the outskirts of Medellín, in central Colombia. His background was comfortable, although not wealthy. As a teenager he developed a lifelong taste for marijuana and rebelliousness. He dropped out of education at 16 and gravitated towards the petty street crime that was endemic in the area. The Escobar legend has it that he made a start by stealing headstones which he then cleaned up for sale, but his activities were probably more mundane: street cons, selling smuggled cigarettes and fake lottery tickets. He then moved into car theft, then kidnapping, proving himself capable of staying calm under pressure and meting out violence without hesitation. He was always ambitious, and his career received a boost when he became known for the kidnapping and killing of an unpopular, exploitative factory-owner in 1971.

Escobar was always able to portray himself as a kind of Robin Hood and he nursed that reputation later with calculated acts of charity for Medellín slum-dwellers. In the 1980s, he founded his own newspaper, the Medellín Civico, which from time to time ran admiring profiles that stressed Escobar’s social conscience. In one such article, quoted by author Mark Bowden, an interviewee spoke of the emotional pain that injustice caused Escobar: “I know him, his eyes weeping because there is not enough bread for all the nation’s dinner tables. I have watched his tortured feelings when he sees street children – angels without toys, without a present, without a future.” Escobar was the founder of Medellín Without Slums, a housing charity with a mission to improve slum conditions.

By the mid-1970s, he had moved into the cocaine business that would bring him almost unimaginable wealth. A decade later he would own fleets of boats, property around the world and 18 residences in Medellín alone. He had so much money that sometimes it was impossible for him to know what to do with it and it was simply buried. His lifestyle was self-indulgent and unlimited. He would play amateur soccer games on professional pitches with top announcers paid to commentate, as if it was a professional tournament. He hosted huge parties at his country estate east of Medellín, where he indulged his taste for the bizarre, encouraging friends to climb naked up trees or eat insects. Built in 1979, the complex on the Magdalena River reflected his lavish and exotic tastes: hundreds of zoo animals, artificial lakes and, in pride of place, a bullet-ridden 1930s sedan car that the drug kingpin claimed had belonged to Bonnie and Clyde.

Medellín became a boomtown on the back of the surge in the cocaine trade prompted by the soaring popularity of the drug in the United States. Employment was up, and construction thrived. In 1978, he was elected as a substitute city council member in Medellín, and in 1982, he was elected to Congress. As a congressman, Escobar had automatic judicial immunity and could no longer be prosecuted under Colombian law for crimes. He was also entitled to a diplomatic visa, which he used to take trips with his family to the United States. Escobar was a key player in Colombia and his business hugely benefited the national economy. The government recognized this surreptitiously by, for example, making it possible for banks to convert unlimited amounts of U.S. dollars into Colombian pesos.

During his reign, Escobar bribed countless government officials, judges and other local politicians. He was known to personally execute subordinates who didn’t cooperate, and he assassinated anyone he viewed as a threat. Corruption and intimidation characterized the Colombian system during Escobar’s heyday. He had an effective strategy that was known as “plata o plomo,” which translated into English means “silver or lead.” In other words, if you didn’t accept a bribe you’d be facing a bullet. Escobar was believed to be personally responsible for the killing of three Colombian presidential candidates, all competing in the same election. He was also believed to be the mastermind of the 1989 bombing of Avianca airlines Flight 203 that killed 100 and the truck bombing that killed 52 and injured 1,000 outside a security building in Bogotá, Colombia. Some analysts have said Escobar was behind the 1985 attack on the Colombian Supreme Court by left-wing guerillas, which resulted in the murder of half the judges in the court.

Near the end of his second term in office, the U.S. President Ronald Reagan signed National Security Decision Directive 221, which declared the drug trade a threat to national security – and therefore a military problem, not just a matter for law enforcement. In 1988, with the election of George Bush as U.S. president, the tide started to turn against Escobar. The Bush administration made the drug war a priority. Crack had started to appear in American inner cities and cocaine was taken increasingly seriously, rather than seen as simply a yuppie party drug.

At the end of the decade, after more than one anti-trafficking candidate had been assassinated, Colombia had a reforming government at odds with Escobar. Led by Colonel Hugo Martinez, the police Search Bloc was formed to break his power. Many of its members were killed by Escobar loyalists, but Menendez was dedicated and unbending – and he refused the $6 million pay-off Escobar offered him if he would only back away.

Gradually the net tightened. In 1992, Escobar went into hiding. Then, on December 2, 1993, the day after his birthday, a joint U.S.-Colombian task force located him, hiding out in a middle-class Medellín neighborhood. Escobar attempted to escape by climbing up on the roof of the house. He was spotted by Colombian National Police, and then shot after an exchange of gunshots. Escobar died at age 44, having suffered gunshot wounds to his legs, back and a fatal one to his head, behind his ear. For the officers’ safety, their identities were never made public.

After Escobar’s death, the Medellín Cartel fragmented and the cocaine market was taken over by the rival Cali Cartel until the mid-1990s, when its leaders, too, were either killed or captured.

Long Island Mafia – The Lucchese Family

Gaetano “Tom” Reina was, in the 1930s, the first boss to run the Long Island Mafia in New York. But the Lucchese mob syndicate took its name from loyal underboss Gaetano “Tommy Gunn” Lucchese, who finally became boss in 1953, after the death of Reina’s successors Joseph “Fat Joe” Pinzolo and Gaetano “Tommy” Gagliano. The Luccheses were one of the “Five Families” that for two decades had a stranglehold on organized crime activities in New York.

In their heyday, the Luccheses ran most of the street rackets (loan-sharking, gambling, restaurant extortion, construction payoffs, and construction bid rigging) on Long Island and in New Jersey. Another sideline money-spinner was the family’s fleet of hotdog wagons and coffee trucks that doubled as bookmakers. Lucchese himself kept a low profile, gaining respect from fellow bosses for never being convicted of a crime. He was deft at infiltrating trucker unions, workers’ co-ops and trade associations, and his organization successfully ran rackets out of Idlewild Airport. The Lucchese family became one of the most profitable of the East Coast mobs.

Tommy Lucchese died in 1967. By the 1970s, the gang was heavily involved in heroin trafficking and was implicated in the so-called “French Connection” – a Corsican-run smuggling ring based in Marseilles that smuggled drugs to the United States in partnership with the Mafia. The Lucchese family also conspired with corrupt NYPD cops to get at heroin seized by the authorities. This tangled web of corruption and criminality was the source material not only for the French Connection films, but also for Serpico, the Al Pacino movie that deals with the crooked New York cops’ drug dealings.

This period also saw the rise of Anthony “Tony Ducks” Corallo, head of the Lucchese family from 1973 to 1986. With great ingenuity, the FBI managed to bug Corallo’s car (where he conducted most of his business). The recorded material was dynamite and led to the Mafia Commission Trial in which all the heads of the Five Families were prosecuted, Corallo being sentenced to life imprisonment. He died in jail in 2000.

Under subsequent Lucchese bosses, notably Vittorio “Vic” Amuso, violence and rivalry increased – there was particular animosity towards Gambino boss John Gotti. Amuso was imprisoned in 1992, but he is reputed to have remained nominally in command – albeit of a much-weakened organization.

On July 1, 2004, Louis “Louie Bagels” Daidone, the acting boss of the Lucchese crime family since 2001, was sentenced to life in prison on loan-sharking and racketeering charges. The charges were in connection with conspiracy to murder two men – Thomas Gilmore and Bruno Facciolo – one of whom was found with a dead canary stuffed in his mouth, which was meant as a warning to government informants that if they talked, they too would die. Testimony during Daidone’s trial detailed him lying in wait for Facciolo, ambushing him, fatally stabbing and shooting him, then leaving the body in the trunk of Facciolo’s own car.

But it was not only Daidone’s imprisonment that damaged the family. The year before, the crime family was seriously shaken by a massive three-year investigation into the Luccheses’ involvement in the construction industry in New York City. The result was crippling. In September 2000, 38 people were indicted by the state of New York for racketeering. Named in the indictment were Steven “Wonderboy” Crea, the acting Lucchese boss at the time who was inducted into the family in the 1980s, and two Lucchese capos, Dominic Truscello and Joseph Tangorra. Also named were five Lucchese soldiers and three associates. Among the indicted were union officials and contractors suspected of benefiting from criminal enterprise. Based on the scope of the investigation and resulting indictment, the district attorney’s office called it the decade’s most significant case involving organized crime in the construction industry.

In a joint news conference, Manhattan district attorney Robert M. Morgenthau and New York City police commissioner Bernard B. Kerik laid out the specifics of the case against the alleged mobsters. The suspects were accused, the authorities said, of engaging in a criminal enterprise through “the Lucchese Construction Group” to commit “labor bribery, bid rigging,” and other schemes to systematically siphon “millions of dollars from both public and private construction projects”. The case involved eight different construction projects, including the renovation of the Park Central Hotel, the construction of the Doral Arrowwood Conference Center and the addition of five floors of apartments to a building on Broadway in Manhattan. The projects each enabled siphoning of $6 million directly to the Lucchese family.

In December 2007, among those arrested for promoting gambling, money laundering, and racketeering were alleged capo Ralph V. Perna and his three sons, and Joseph DiNapoli and Matthew Madonna. The authorities touted the arrests as the “breaking up” of the crime family, but the parole of Wonderboy Crea, who made a plea bargain in 2006, ended in 2009. It is thought that he might again take over the day-to-day running of the family.

Jimmy Hoffa’s Disappearance

When James Riddle “Jimmy” Hoffa, 62, disappeared on 30 July 1975, speculation about his fate was feverish. He was due to meet two Mafia bosses and had made many enemies in the course of a tumultuous union career, and it did not take long for him to be presumed dead. However, no body has ever been found.

Hoffa began organizing workers and challenging management while working in an Indiana food warehouse. After he was fired in 1932, he took a job as a full-time official of the truck drivers’ union, the International Brotherhood of Teamsters, Local 299 (Detroit, Michigan). As the union president from 1957 to the mid-1960s, the labor leader wielded considerable influence and power. Hoffa maintained links with organized crime (when he was president, Teamster money was used to build several Las Vegas casinos) from early on. Union organizing was a dirty business then.

Hoffa’s predecessor Dave Beck went to prison for bribery and in 1964 Hoffa was sentenced to 15 years for attempting to pay off a grand juror. However, after serving a decade in prison, in December 1971, President Richard Nixon commuted Hoffa’s sentence to time served. He was released on the condition that he not participate in union activities for 10 years. Three and a half years later, Hoffa disappeared from a car park at the Machus Red Fox Restaurant in Bloomfield Hills, a suburb of Detroit. He was there for a meeting with Mafia capos Anthony “Tony Jack” Giacalone, from Detroit, and Anthony “Tony Pro” Provenzano, from Union City, New Jersey, and New York City.

The latest theory about the disappearance is to be found in a book by Charlie Brandt, a former prosecutor and chief deputy attorney general of Delaware. It tells the story of Wilmington Teamsters official and Mafia hit man Frank Sheeran – nicknamed “the Irishman” – and his connection with the presumed death. Sheeran learned to kill as a soldier in Europe during World War II, where he waded ashore in three amphibious invasions and marched from Sicily to Dachau, serving 411 days of active combat in what has been called General Patton’s “killer division.”

His combat duty prepared him for his future life of crime. After being released from the service and returning home, he married, became a truck driver, and met mob boss Russell Bufalino in 1955 in a chance meeting at a truck stop. To earn pocket change, Sheeran began running errands and doing odd jobs for Bufalino. That beginning led to a prominent position in the Teamsters and the Bufalino family. In a U.S. federal suit using the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), then-U.S. Attorney Rudy Giuliani named him as one of only two non-Italians on a list of 26 top Mafia figures. When Bufalino ordered Sheeran to kill his friend and mentor, Jimmy Hoffa, Sheeran, in his confession (taped by Brandt), said he followed the order.

In the late 1990s, Brandt had represented Sheeran in an unrelated case. That’s when he initially came close to confessing to killing Hoffa, according to Brandt: “He called me and we sat down. His soul wanted to tell the truth. [But] his body didn’t want to go to jail.” Both the FBI and Detroit police had already named Sheeran as one of a handful of suspects in Jimmy Hoffa’s disappearance. The media, as a result, pursued Sheeran for years. “Frank said to me, ‘I’m tired of being written about,” Brandt said. “I want to tell my side of it, and I want you to tell it for me.” Finally, in 2003, the wise guy made a deathbed confession to Brandt that he was the assassin.

Brandt’s book is called I Heard You Paint Houses. “To paint a house is to kill a man,” Brandt explained during a book signing in Las Vegas. “The paint is the blood that splatters on the walls and floors.” In the interview with Brandt, Sheeran described a professional hit: “Jimmy Hoffa got shot twice at decent range – not too close or the paint splatters back at you – in the back of the head, behind his right ear.” He immediately dropped the gun and left the scene to “cleaners” (Mafia men who rid crime scenes of evidence) who put Hoffa’s body in a bag. The corpse, Sheeran said to Brandt, was taken within minutes to a nearby mortuary and cremated – though what happened to the cremated remains was not explained.

Sheeran identified the cleaners as two brothers from the Joe Gallo gang, whose names were listed by the FBI as suspects along with Sheeran. The two brothers, who were only identified as Cisco and Benny, have, however, never been charged in connection and always denied any involvement in Hoffa’s disappearance. Sheeran was in and out of prison until his death in 2004, but was never charged with Hoffa’s disappearance or murder.

On May 17, 2006, acting on a tip supplied by Donovan Wells (or so the Detroit Free-Press reported – there was no official confirmation), a 75-year-old prisoner at the Federal Medical Center in Lexington, Kentucky, the FBI began digging for Hoffa’s remains outside a barn on what is now the Hidden Dreams Farm in Milford Township, Michigan, where they surveyed the land and dug up sections of the 85-acre property. More than 40 agents sectioned off a piece of the horse farm where they believed Hoffa’s bones might be. The investigation team included forensic experts from the bureau’s Washington laboratory and anthropologists, archaeologists, engineers and architects. A week later, on May 24, FBI agents removed a large barn on the property to look under it for Hoffa’s remains. Six days after that, on May 30, agents ended their search for Hoffa’s body without any remains being found at the Hidden Dreams Farm.

Officially, the Jimmy Hoffa mystery remains unsolved. And while the authorities have not closed the case, Dr. Michael Baden, former chief medical examiner for the City of New York, has said that Charlie Brandt’s book “is supported by the forensic evidence, is entirely credible, and solves the Hoffa mystery.”  Jimmy’s son, James Phillip Hoffa, became a Teamsters’ president. His daughter, Barbara Ann Crancer, is an associate circuit court judge in St Louis County, Missouri.