Major Crimes and True Crime

April 1, 1988 April Tinsley is eight years old and lives in Grabill, a small town in the state of Indiana where, for better or worse, everyone knows each other. The little girl goes out to play with a friend and shortly after disappears into thin air. The search begins and ends only three days later when her body is found in a field, about thirty kilometers from the place of the disappearance, with some sex toys at her side. The investigations and the expert report lead to biological traces of the murderer on April's underwear. A few days after the incident, a witness comes forward, declaring that he saw the potential culprit, leading the police to release an identikit of the murderer. Investigations, laboratory tests and interrogations but no certain correspondence: the murder of little April remains unsolved. Two years after the incident, in 1990, the culprit decides - defying the authorities - to leave a message on the door of a barn a few kilometers from where the lit...

Dubbed the Black Dalia of Nanjing A case so Infamous its dubbed the Black Dalia of Nanjing. In 1996, a sanitary worker found what they thought was a bag of chopped up pork on the grounds of the Nanjing University campus. Strangely they took the bag home to prepare the meat for cooking. As the sanitary worker shifted through the meat they were horrified to find three fingers amongst the pieces of meat. The police were quickly notified and a further search of the campus led to the discovery of over 2000 carefully dissected body parts. Numerous body parts and organs had been cooked for several days, including the head. However, all the critical organs were missing leading police to believe whoever committed the crime knew what they were doing and had professional knowledge anatomy, like a surgeon or even a butcher. They were able to identify the body due to a mole on a piece of dissected meat. The body parts belong to Diao Aiqin, a student at the campus who had been missing for the...

Life in prison is not glamorous, even when you're a public figure like Sean Diddy Combs whose net worth is nearly a billion dollars. The Brooklyn MDC where Combs is housed and awaiting trial has been described by many as Hell on Earth. Imagine being locked up in an 8x10 foot room with just a bed made of steel, a toilet and sink. CNN reported that Comb's bed has a 1/2-inch mattress and no pillow. And, with the allegations against him, it's likely that, unless he is meeting with his legal team, he is not let out of his cell more than an hour a day. Inmates have a commissary account (like a bank account) where they can use the funds to buy a variety of items, including food, like Velveeta cheese and precooked rice (definitely not gourmet), shampoo and soap and paper and pencil. Since it's not actually a bank, there is no limit to how much can be in the commissary account. Anyone can add money to an inmate’s account. However, it's unclear how much money ...

Graham Frederick Young-A case of a deadly childhood obsession. He became fascinated with poisons from a young age; he read how they worked and the effects they had on human bodies. In 1962 at the age of 14, Young was taken into custody for poisoning his family members by adding thallium and antimony to their foods and drinks. His stepmother died as a result. Soon after he arrived in prison, one of the inmates died of cyanide poisoning. Young had so much knowledge of poisons that he knew how to extract cyanide from laurel leaves that were around the prison facility. In 1971, he was deemed rehabilitated and released from Broadmoor. When he found himself in a factory where his role was to make tea for the workers, his ill passion came back. He started poisoning his co-workers, he targeted his competitors first and those who annoyed him. Victims would fall ill with symptoms that included vomiting, stomach pains, nausea, and diarrhea. Initially, the mysterious illness was assumed to b...

The less young will remember one of the crime stories, among the bloodiest that our country remembers, which took the name of "Massacre of Circeo" On September 30, 1975, at 10:50 p.m., a night watchman heard strange noises coming from the trunk of a car parked in a residential neighborhood of Rome. Once the carabinieri arrived, they discovered two girls, Donatella Colasanti and Rosaria Lopez. Donatella was still alive, while Rosaria was dead. Their nightmare, however, had begun two days earlier, when three boys from the upper middle class of Rome invited them to a party in Circeo, a seaside resort south of Rome. After a couple of failed attempts to convince the girls to have sex, the boys forced them by pointing a gun at their heads. Two days of terror, rape and torture followed: Rosaria was drugged and strangled in a separate room, while Donatella was beaten for many hours and finally strangled. At that moment, she realized that her only chance of survival was to fake ...

The disappearance and death of ELISA LAM. In mid-2010, Lam began a blog named Ether Fields on Blogspot. Over the next two years, she posted pictures of models in fashionable clothing and accounts of her life - particularly her struggle with Bipolar disorder and depression. (She was taking Wellbutrin, Lamictal, Seroquel and Effexor to help her bipolar). In a January 2012 blog post, Lam lamented that a "relapse” at the start of the current school term had forced her to drop several classes, leaving her feeling "so utterly directionless and lost." She titled her post, "You're always haunted by the idea you're wasting your life" after a quotation from novelist Chuck Palahnuik. She used that quote as an ‘epigraph’ for her blog. Lam worried that her transcript would look suspicious with so many withdrawals and that it would result in her being unable to continue her studies and attend graduate school.. A little over two years after Lam had started b...

In 1959, Malika de Fernandez met the man who would one day take her life. She had known Peter Reyn-Bardt for less than two hours when he asked her to marry him. She said yes, and they got married just four days later. Their relationship began suddenly and ended just as fast. After only a few months, they divorced. Two years after that, Malika vanished without a trace, and her ex-husband quickly became the main suspect. Police searched his home and even dug through his garden, but they found nothing. The case stayed cold for about twenty years—until something strange happened. Not far from Reyn-Bardt’s home, a human head was found in the Lindow peat bog. It looked like it might belong to a woman. But what exactly is peat? Peat is a type of soil made from dead plants, mostly moss, that has built up in wet places. Because it’s cold, wet, and low in oxygen, things buried in it don’t rot the way they normally would. The high acid and special chemicals in peat stop bacteria from br...

Here is the photo of Akku Yadav Know who he is? He was a notorious criminal and rapist who had several rape cases lodged against him. However, no action was taken as he bribed a local police station with alcohol and snacks, despite complaints against him. However, after a brave woman dared to go after him, all the other residents in the area took matters into their hands and destroyed his house. Seeing this and realizing they’re not the same fearful people anymore, he went to that same police station begging for protection. The officers ultimately put him behind bars for that. On 13 August 2004, Akku Yadav had a bail hearing at the Nagpur civil sessions court. As he was being taken to the courtroom, he warned each victim that he will teach them a lesson. While walking there, he mocked a victim and humiliated her, while the cops guarding him laughed. The victim, unable to sustain, took out her footwear and started beating him. Other women who were present also joined him. In the p...

In 1995, fifteen-year-old Nicole van den Hurk left her grandmother’s house for work on her bicycle. She never arrived, and later that day, her bike was found in a nearby river. Searchers were mobilized, and her backpack was recovered around a week later. Eventually, her body was recovered near a road some distance away. The cause of death was stabbing. The police reviewed hundreds of leads, but none panned out. These included a man who called the police saying he could identify the killer but then abruptly hung up. The call could not be traced. Despite the leads and a reward for information, the case went cold. But Nicole’s brother Andy never gave up hope. Andy had been a suspect early on in the case, but had been cleared. However, in 2012, he was arrested again. In a Facebook post, he confessed to having committed the murder. Other users reported this to the authorities, and, before long, he was arrested and extradited to The Netherlands. He was held for only five days. He eme...

The 1970 murders of English women Jacqueline Susan Ansell-Lamb and Barbara Janet Mayo. Jacqueline (18) and Barbara (24) were murdered seven months apart, and their bodies were found in two different counties, Cheshire and Derbyshire. Both had been hitchhiking along motorways before meeting the same fate: Sexual assault and murder by strangulation. Women came forward claiming they had been sexually assaulted in the area where Barbara’s body was found, both shortly before and after her murder. In the following decades, the lead investigators—Cheshire Police and Derbyshire Police—suggested both murders were strikingly similar, and that the same killer (or killers) was behind them, whom they referred to as the Motorway Monster. Jacqueline had been with different men before her disappearance. She met a young man at a party, then hitchhiked and took two separate lifts. She was also seen entering a car with a smartly dressed man. Barbara was also seen hitchhiking before she disappeared....

In 1994, a crew of fishermen in Hawkesbury in Sydney were out trawling for Squid when they came across a terrifying discovery. As they pulled up their nets to bring aboard the first of their morning catch, one of the fishermen noticed something heavy clinging to the net as he pulled it in. What they thought was going to be a decent morning’s work turned into something beyond their worst nightmares. Wrapped up in the net was a human-size solid iron crucifix, and attached was the body of a human. Wires and ropes around the neck and torso, along with the feet and hands, bound the body to the cross to mirror the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. An autopsy revealed that it was the body of a man. Attempts were made to mummify the man either before or after his death. Plastic was poured over his body in a macabre way of preserving him. Identification was almost impossible due to the body being in the water for at least a year, according to the examiners. The welding on the cross was done wi...

Most shocking cold case in Utah  On August 26, 1982, in the town of Sunset, Utah, three-year-old Rachael Runyan was abducted from Doxey Elementary School playground by an unknown male assailant. The only witnesses to her abduction were her older and younger brothers. According to her brothers, a man approached the group of children playing in the park offering to buy them candy and ice cream. Rachael began walking away with the man until her older brother, Justin called her to come back. The man grabbed the little girl, shoved her in his car, and drove away. On September 19, 1982, three weeks after her abduction, her lifeless body was discovered in a creek bed in the nearby Morgan County, city of Mountain Green, Utah. Two and half years after her abduction, police discovered a taunting note scrawled on the bathroom wall of a local all-night laundry. The note read “Beware I’m still at large. I killed the little Runyan girl. Remember, beware.“ Prior to the national “AMBER alert” whic...