Major Crimes and True Crime

Shortly before being executed for the murder of Deputy John Murphy, Dennis Dilda was granted the opportunity to pose for a photograph with his wife and two children. Shortly before being executed for the murder of Deputy John Murphy, Dennis Dilda was granted the opportunity to pose for a photograph with his wife and two children. His final words before the execution were, "Goodbye, boys!" The Hanging of Dennis Dilda In September 1885, Dilda got a job helping to manage William Hamilton Williscraft’s farm. The farmhouse came along with the job and Dilda and his wife and children moved in. Williscraft went to live elsewhere but kept one room in the farmhouse for himself. The room was always securely locked and inside was a locked trunk. Dilda was supposed to have worked alongside the farm’s general caretaker, “General Grant” Jenkins. By December, however, Jenkins had disappeared, and Williscraft noticed the lock had been pried off the door of his reserved r...

In 1946 in Kent, the strangled body of a 46-year-old former telephonist known as Dagmar Peters was found by the side of the road. In the same year, not far along the south coast, in Bournemouth, a hunt was launched for a handsome pilot by the name of Neville Heath, suspected of a foul murder in London. And in Eastbourne, another southern coastal town, Dr John Bodkin Adams, a suspected serial killer, was about to "ease the passing" of another wealthy patient with an injection of morphine. And in that same year, George Orwell wrote an article for Tribune in which he considered just what murder tells us about society.  The essay, prompted by a casual killing carried out by an American army deserter, Karl Hulten, and a teenage waitress, Elizabeth Jones, was called "Decline of the English Murder". Nearly 70 years later, those 1946 cases are being examined in full forensic detail. Are murders a mirror of the society we live in? How much, for instance, can ...

Jerome Brudos was a serial killer who murdered several women in Oregon during the 1960s. Some serial killers kill because they feel alive or feel good. Jerome had an entirely different story. In 1944, when Brudos was just five years old, he found a woman’s heeled shoe at a junkyard. Brudos was fascinated by it and brought it home. Brudos got infatuated with women’s shoes. He stole shoes from his teachers and his mother to satisfy his growing fetish. This same fetish grew into a deadly obsession. When his mother found him wearing the shoes he found as a boy and hence discovered his obsession, she took them away from him and threw them away. Repeatedly rejected by his mother and further repressed sexually(owing to the sexually repressive era he lived in), he turned his pain and anger inward. His anger turned into ferocious hatred for not only his mother but for all women. Jerome started his serious of crimes at the age of 17 when he sexually assaulted a woman....

In 2006, emergency room nurse Suzan Kuhnhausen returned to her empty house after a long hard day at work. All she wanted to do was kick her feet up and relax, but unbeknownst to her, a dark figure was lurking in her home, waiting for their moment to strike. Suzan went to her bedroom to get on her PJs, and as she stepped into the room, a man jumped out from the dark corner of her bedroom and attacked her with a claw hammer. He struck her in the head twice, but she managed to fight back. She struggled with her attacker for 15 minutes before putting him in a chokehold. As she squeezed hard on his windpipe, she screamed, “Tell me who sent you, and I will call you a fucking ambulance.” The man didn’t respond to her request, so she squeezed harder until his body went limp. The amateur assassin Ed Haffey was pronounced dead at the scene when police arrived. Amature Assassin Ed Haffey It turned out that her husband, who she had kicked out of the house, had hired the hitman ...

The photo depicts Barbara Jane Mackle, daughter of billionaire Robert Mackle, and has become a famous photo because of the absurd circumstances of her kidnapping. Then twenty years old, she contracted the Hong Kong flu at Emory University in Georgia, which the girl attended. In order to better care for her, her mother decided to fly from Florida to the home of relatives in Coral Gables, where she was visiting, to move her from the campus to a nearby motel and then bring her back home during the Christmas holidays. On December 17, 1968, the same night they checked into the motel, the two women were surprised by two officers, who were actually Gary Stephen Krist and Ruth Eisemann Schier disguised as a man, who informed her that the girl's close friend Stephen Woodward had been the victim of a car accident. They entered the room and stunned her mother Jane Mackle with chloroform, tied her up, and told Barbara that she had just been kidnapped. The next day, the Mackle...