Major Crimes and True Crime

Death Row Inmate Set Free After Surviving 3 Lethal Injection, Refuses To Die On this day, November, 06, 2019, A Prisoner on death-Row, Igor Hamilton was set free after he survived three lethal injections. The inmates attorney, Edward Morningwood,stated his client had done his time including the lethal injection required by the state.&nbspThe lethal injection was supposed to be a quick death, but Igor survived. It’s just not his time to go argues his attorney. Igor Hamilton hoped the lethal injection would succeed and end his suffering within the prison, but he survived and is excited about his second chance at life. Hamilton, who was sentenced to death in 1997 for killing his neighbor’s cats, said the needle wasn’t even painful.While incarcerated he claims to have found God and spoked to him in prayers, God assured him he would survive “Because cats have no soul.” he never really committed a crime. He is set to be released by the end of the month and awarded $250,000....

The teen death row inmate who was executed twice On execution day, executioners strapped Willie into “Gruesome Gertie,” the electric chair that had been used to execute twenty-three people; he convulsed and screamed, but did not die. The portable electric chair, known as “Gruesome Gertie,” was found to have been improperly set up by an intoxicated prison guard and inmate from the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. When the sheriff ordered the electricity shut off, Willie was taken back to his cell, spared and hopeful. Reflecting on the experience afterward, Willie wrote: I didn’t think about my whole life like at the picture show. Just, ‘Willie, you’re going outta this world in this bad chair.’ Sometimes I thought it so loud it hurt my head and when they put the #black bag over my head I was all locked up inside the bag with the loud thinking . . . I felt a burning in my head and my left leg and I jumped against the straps. When the straps kept cutting me I hoped I was alive...

Execution by the SS Einsatzgruppen command, 1942 Tallinn, Harju County, Estonia A naked Jewish woman with folded hands led to a mass grave. The picture was probably made near the Jaegala concentration camp in today's Estonia, where in 1942 about 6,000 Jewish women and children were murdered by the SS Einsatzgruppe A with the help of Estonian auxiliary policemen. Einsatzgruppen (German: [ˈaɪnzatsˌɡʁʊpm̩], lit. 'deployment groups'; also 'task forces') were Schutzstaffel (SS) paramilitary death squads of Nazi Germany that were responsible for mass murder, primarily by shooting, during World War II (1939–1945) in German-occupied Europe. The Einsatzgruppen had an integral role in the implementation of the so-called "Final Solution to the Jewish question" (Die Endlösung der Judenfrage) in territories conquered by Nazi Germany, and were involved in the murder of much of the intelligentsia and cultural elite of Poland, including members of the Catholic pr...

Ewa Paradies (17 December 1920 – 4 July 1946) was a Nazi concentration camp overseer. In August 1944, Paradies arrived at the Stutthof SK-III camp for training as an Aufseherin, or overseer. She soon finished training and became a wardress. In October 1944, she was reassigned to Stutthof's Bromberg-Ost subcamp, and in January 1945, back to the main Stutthof camp.  In April 1945, Paradies accompanied one of the last transports of women prisoners to the Lauenburg subcamp and fled. After she was captured, she was a defendant in the Stutthof trial. One witness testified: She ordered a group of female prisoners to undress in the freezing cold of winter, and then doused them with ice cold water. When the women moved, Paradies beat them  For this and other brutalities, including causing the deaths of some prisoners[citation needed], Paradies was sentenced to death. She was publicly executed by short-drop hanging on 4 July 1946 with 10 other Stutthof guards and kapos (five wo...

The firing squad who missed the man they were executing In 1879, the prolonged firing-squad execution of murderer Wallace Wilkerson in Utah made news. Wilkerson was an American stockman who was sentenced to death for the murder of William Baxter. He professed his innocence until his dying day, and chose his fate by firing squad over hanging or decapitation. When the day came, Wilkerson was seated on a chair at a corner of the jail yard about 30 feet away from the shooters and declined to be blindfolded or restrained. He said, "I give you my word... I intend to die like a man, looking my executioners right in the eye." A white three-inch paper target was pinned on Wilkerson's chest over his heart. He yelled, "[A]im for my heart, Marshal!" He drew his shoulders up as he braced for the impact, and pulled the white target pinned to his shirt above his heart. The volley didn't kill him; it just knocked him out of his chair to the ground, screaming “Oh, m...

The man whose execution was called off after officials failed to find a vein Ohio killer Romell Broom survived a 2009 botched execution. He was sentenced to die for raping and killing 14-year-old Tryna Middleton after abducting her in Cleveland in 1984 as she walked home from a football game with two friends. Then-Gov. Ted Strickland stopped the execution after officials tried for two hours to find a suitable vein. The inmate said he was stuck with needles at least 18 times, with pain so intense he cried and screamed. An hour into the execution, the Department of Rehabilitation and Correction recruited a part-time prison doctor with no experience or training with executions to try—again, unsuccessfully—to find a vein. Broom has been back on death row since. He tried to appeal his sentence, but lost. Despite the ruling, a second execution is years away because of other scheduled executions and uncertainty over the state's supply of lethal injection drugs. Full story Ohio ca...

The prisoner who was injected with a mummifying drug In 2015, Oklahoma Corrections Department officials used the wrong drug to stop an inmate's heart during a botched execution. They were supposed to use potassium chloride to stop Charles Frederick Warner's heart. Instead, they pumped him with potassium acetate, a drug which is used in mixtures for tissue preservation, mummification and embalming, according to the Oklahoman's investigation into the inmate's autopsy report. At the time of his execution on January 15, Warner, a convicted child rapist and murderer, took 18 minutes to die. “It feels like acid,” said Warner. “My body is on fire.” Nevertheless, a reporter present said it did not appear that he was in any pain, as he never raised his head off the gurney, and did not go into convulsions as previous inmates had. Now the story in Full Oklahoma used the wrong drug to execute Charles Warner in January, according to autopsy records obtained by the The Oklahoman on T...

When Dorothea Puente was finally put on trial in 1992, the prosecutor called her one of the most "cold and calculating female killers the country had ever seen." And though Puente didn't look the part, the prosecutor was absolutely right. For six years in the 1980s, Puente preyed on the elderly tenants of her boarding house in Sacramento, California. She'd welcome them into her home — then drug them, strangle them, and dump their bodies in a nearby river or bury them in her garden. All the while, she'd cash their benefit checks, eventually raking in thousands of dollars a month thanks to her grisly scheme. This is the full story of the "Death House Landlady": Dorothea Helen Puente (née Gray; January 9, 1929 – March 27, 2011) was an American convicted serial killer. In the 1980s, she ran a boarding house in Sacramento, California, and murdered various elderly and mentally disabled boarders before cashing their Social Security checks. Puente's...

Revisiting Norway's 50-Year-Old Mystery of the Isdal Woman On November 29, 1970, two young girls and th On November 29, 1970, two young girls and their father were hiking through the remote Isdalen Valley outside of Bergen, Norway, when they suddenly came upon a horrific sight. There on the rocky foothills in front of them was a woman's body lying on its back — and burned beyond recognition. The family rushed to report the corpse to the police, who quickly sent a team to investigate. Baffled and horrified, detectives had no idea whether this mystery woman had fallen into a fire, died by suicide, been murdered, or something else. Investigators then uncovered a strange trail of coded messages, disguises, and fake identities as well as possible connections to espionage and secret military weapons. However, even with DNA in hand, the authorities have remained unable to identify the woman or determine why she was killed for the last 50 years. Learn more about the baffling...

Molly Bish: Is the murder of 16-year-old lifeguard about to be solved with new On June 26, 2000, Magi Bish drove her 16-year-old daughter Molly to Comins Pond in Warren, Massachusetts, where she worked as a lifeguard. When they arrived, Magi became concerned about a mustached man sitting in a white sedan and smoking a cigarette, who seemingly had no reason to be there. Just to be safe, Magi walked Molly down to the pond where there were other people. But when the mother returned to her car, the man was still there. The mysterious man returned Magi's stare, but he didn't say or do anything. The next day, the Bishes returned to the pond, and Magi was relieved to see that the man wasn't loitering around her daughter's workplace again. But a truck driver told her that he had seen the same man earlier and that he had also found his behavior unusual. And that still-unidentified man is believed to have been responsible for the tragedy that happened next. Soon after M...

Abortion Doctor Shot to Death in Kansas Church (Published 2009) Anti-abortion activists spent years trying to shut down Dr. George Tiller's clinic, which was one of the only places in the nation that provided late-term abortions — until one extremist murdered him while he was at church in 2009. After more than 40 years of medical practice, Dr. Tiller had a national reputation. He was the director of one of just three abortion clinics in the United States that provided women with late-term abortions — and he had become the target of pro-life activists. For decades, those who disagreed with the procedures his practice provided tried to have his clinic closed. Eventually, some protesters resorted to violence in order to fulfill that goal. Tiller survived at least two attacks on his life before one anti-abortion extremist murdered him in cold blood. Here is the story On May 31, 2009, George Tiller, a physician from Wichita, Kansas, who was nationally known for being one of the few doct...

Murders of Abigail Williams and Liberty German. This is the last photo ever taken of 13 years old Abby Williams. Just a minutes after her beat friend Libby German shared this on Snapchat, both girls were murdered beside the bridge Thirteen-year-old Abigail Williams and 14-year-old Libby German were best friends who went everywhere together.  But when they met up for a walk in the woods in Delphi, Indiana on February 13, 2017, they never returned. The next day, authorities found their bodies, but what happened to them remains largely a mystery. Footage later recovered from German's phone shows a man approaching them on the bridge just before they were killed — but police still have no idea who he was. On February 14, 2017, the bodies of Abigail Williams (June 23, 2003 – February 13, 2017) and Liberty German (December 27, 2002 – February 13, 2017) were discovered near the Monon High Bridge Trail, part of the Delphi Historic Trails in Delphi, Indiana, United States, after the girls ha...

Darlie Routier And The Real Story Behind The Murder Of Her Sons In the early morning hours of June 6, 1996, emergency dispatchers in Rowlett, Texas received a panicked call from 26-year-old Darlie Routier. She claimed that an intruder had broken into her home and stabbed her two sons, Devon and Damon, as well as herself. Her other child, an infant named Drake, was upstairs asleep with her husband Darin and both were unharmed. She described the attacker as a white male about six feet tall. Police found a window screen in the garage had been cut, suggesting an entryway for the attacker to gain access to the home. However, holes soon began to appear in Routier’s intruder story. Not long after, infamous footage surfaced that showed her laughing and spraying silly string around her sons’ grave. Darlie Lynn Peck Routier (born January 4, 1970) is an American woman from Rowlett, Texas, who was convicted and sentenced to death for the murder of her five-year-old son Damon in 1996. She...

'Disturbing' Halloween display at home where teen violently killed his mother, sisters On January 22, 2003, 17-year-old Jon Siesling brutally murdered his mom and two younger sisters in a gruesome triple homicide. The crimes took place in a Michigan home that's been in the family of current occupant Amanda Gee for decades. The Siesling family had been renting the home at the time of the murders, and Gee was forced to clean the victims' blood out of all three levels of the house before she moved in. Tired of people gawking at her "triple-homicide home," Gee decided to give a nod to the crimes that took place there years ago with an unusual Halloween display that many people are calling disrespectful and in poor taste. For 18 years, Amanda has lived and been harassed in the home where Jon Siesling brutally murdered his mother and two sisters. She decided to do something about it. WALKER, Mich. — In the 18 years since Jon Siesling brutally murdered his m...

The Tragic Story Of Sheila Caffell, The Woman Whose Brother Framed Her For Killing Their Entire Family For more than a month after the brutal 1985 murders at White House Farm in Tolleshunt D'Arcy, England, Jeremy Bamber convinced police that his sister Sheila Caffell had killed their family before turning the gun on herself. In August 1985, 28-year-old Sheila Caffell was accused of committing one of the worst mass murders in British history and then turning the gun on herself. Police believed that Caffell had experienced a psychotic break and murdered her father, mother, and her twin six-year-old boys at her parents' farmhouse before putting a rifle to her own chin. The only member of the family to survive the massacre was her brother, Jeremy Bamber, who had left the house earlier that evening. For a month, the police believed this version of events, given to them by Bamber, until investigators discovered that Caffell had been shot in the head — twice. Then, police cau...

The Full Story Of Cleopatra’s Death, The Snakebite Suicide Of Egypt’s Storied Queen "No one knows clearly in what way she perished, for the only marks on her body were slight pricks on the arm. Some say she applied to herself an asp which had been brought in to her in a water-jar, or perhaps hidden in some flowers."⁠ ⁠ The story of Cleopatra's death has echoed throughout the ages. By the time she died, she was cornered by the Romans and apparently feared capture more than dying. But did Cleopatra really kill herself with a snake? Modern historians argue that an asp would've been too unreliable, as its bite wasn't guaranteed to kill a person. Plus, the snake may have been too large to fit inside her small hiding place anyway. While some believe that the Egyptian pharaoh drank poison to end her life, others wonder whether she was actually murdered by the Romans — who would have been more than happy to see her dead. ⁠ Go inside the enduring mystery of Cleopatra's...

In 1983, Diane Downs shot her three children and drove them to the hospital. . One of her daughters was pronounced dead upon arrival, her other daughter suffered a stroke, and her son was paralyzed from the waist down. Diane claimed a "strange man" tried to steal her car and then shot at everyone. However, police later found her secret diary which "detailed her obsession with a married man who did not want kids."  This ultimately led to her arrest. She was sentenced to life in prison, plus 50 years. Elizabeth Diane Downs (née Frederickson; born August 7, 1955) is an American criminal who murdered her daughter and attempted to murder her other two children near Springfield, Oregon, in May 1983. Following the crimes, she made claims to police that a man had attempted to carjack her and had shot the children. She was convicted in 1984 and sentenced to life in prison plus fifty years. She briefly escaped in 1987, but was quickly recaptured. Elizabeth Diane Downs was bor...