Major Crimes and True Crime

Known as the Granny Killer because he exclusively killed helpless elderly women, Glover would later attempt to end his life numerous times, ultimately succeeded after serving 16 years in prison for his crimes. Before his capture he struck terror into the people of New South Wales, Australia between 1989 and 1990, with police offering a $200,000 reward for his capture. Granny killer is available on AMAZON PRIMER VIDEO Watch now  Psychiatrists claimed that he built up a pile of hostility and aggression from childhood against his mother and then his mother-in-law. She was the lightning conductor and when she died he had to take it out on other people. Glover would beat his victims in alleyways and other secluded public spaces, usually with a hammer to the head.  After this he would strangle them to death with their own pantyhose. Although there was some damage to the genitals of the victims, Glover was impotent due to a medical condition, which likely added to his rage. Unli...

prosecutors to issue a subpoena or obtain a court order or a search warrant from a judge for certain types of information.  It also allows prosecutors to accept information given voluntarily by an Internet company. Even the Department of Justice described the law as "unusually complicated" in a manual for prosecutors published last year.  "Navigating through ECPA requires agents and prosecutors to apply the various classifications devised by ECPA's drafters to the facts of each case before they can figure out the proper procedure for obtaining the information sought," the manual says. The law left unclear whether a simple subpoena could obtain an IP address or if a prosecutor needed an order signed by a judge, said Cindy Cohn, attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. It is a civil liberties group based in San Francisco.  Cohn said the lack of clarity meant prosecutors did need a judge's order. But Justice Department spokesman Mark Corallo said the ag...

The Disturbing Story of Richard Kuklinski, the Hitman Better Known as "Iceman" Richard Kuklinski died a miserable death - the notorious mob killer was left to suffer in prison until his passing in 2006 due to Kawasaki disease. His wife, in a final act of cruelty, placed a "Do Not Resuscitate" order on him, denying him a chance of survival and leaving him to die alone after wishing him dead. Here are more facts about the notorious killer. The Life of Richard "Iceman" Kuklinski, A Mafia Hitman Richard Kuklinski, known as the Iceman, was one of the most ruthless hitmen that ever worked for organized crime. Using a variety of weapons including chainsaws, poison, and even bombs attached to toy cars, he is responsible for numerous murders over several decades. He would kill business partners and steal their money, and he would kill anyone willing to pay his fee, which was in the tens of thousands of dollars. After killing his victims, he would freeze them for mo...

The Alcohol Murders: The True Story of Serial Killer Gilbert Paul Jordan This Creep is Known as the “Boozing Barber,” Jordan was a retired barber in Vancouver From 1965 to 1988, he killed at least ten women, Maybe over 200? He would target Native indigenous Women for sex on streets of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, and take his victims back to a hotel where he would force them to drink lethal amounts of alcohol.  He was eventually caught by the police after fingerprints were found linking him to the scene of the crime. but was only convicted in the manslaughter death of one woman. Jordan began killing in 1965. All of His victims were Aboriginal women from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside. Typically he would find women in bars, and buy them drinks, or pay them for sex and encourage them to drink with him. When they passed out, he would force liquor down their throats.  The resulting deaths were reported as alcohol poisoning and police paid little attention, because most of his vic...

 Brianna Denison murdered by serial rapist A 19-year-old college student missing since she was abducted nearly a month ago was strangled by a serial rapist who has attacked at least two other women and may strike again, Reno police said today.  An autopsy confirmed that a dead woman found Friday in a brush-covered field by a business park on the city’s south side was Brianna Denison and that she died of strangulation, Reno Deputy Police Chief Jim Johns said. Her body had been in the field for more than a week about 8 miles from the house where she last was seen early Jan. 20 at the edge of the University of Nevada, Reno, he said. “I would say this is a serial rapist,” Johns said at a news conference. “We have two, probably three (cases) linked through DNA.”  “The totality of the information in this case leads us to believe it is a sexually motivated crime,” he said. “I’m worried this guy is still out there, and I’m worried somebody else is going to get hurt.” Campus offic...

Before becoming Donald Trump's mother, Mary Anne MacLeod was a poor immigrant from Scotland. In 1930, she boarded a steamship to America with only $50 in her pocket. She moved in with her sister and worked as a maid until she married a rising businessman named Frederick Trump. After her husband made a fortune in real estate, her life changed completely. She went from having very little to living a life filled with luxury, including fur coats and amazing vacations. Mary Anne was truly living the American dream. Despite her newfound wealth, she was always generous and happy to help others. She dedicated much of her time to charitable causes, such as supporting those with cerebral palsy and helping adults with intellectual disabilities. She continued her work for others until the day she passed away.

Meet Armin Meiwes, The German Cannibal Who Placed An Online Ad To Eat Someone — And Someone Answered "Blood is the juice of life. It contains everything a person needs for nutrition."  In 2001, Armin Meiwes killed and feasted on a willing victim at his home in Rotenburg, Germany who he met through an online ad he placed looking for someone to be eaten. And once he was done, he butchered the man's body and stored it in freezer bags in a secret compartment in his kitchen refrigerator for the next 20 months. In total, Meiwes consumed more than 44 pounds of human flesh and even tried to grind his bones into flour.  But eventually, the meat began to run out, so Meiwes returned online to find a new victim. This time, however, a college student alerted the police to the ads. When they raided Meiwes' home, they uncovered his first victims' remains along with a four-hour-long videotape of the initial encounter — only 19 minutes of which were played at his trial because the...

The most chilling photo you’ve ever seen This may seem like a normal photograph. It’s not normal once you see the context. The photo was taken in 1998, in Omagh. The red car is fitted with a large bomb, that exploded seconds after this photo was taken. The photographer and most of the people you see in the photo were killed. Miraculously, the man and the child survived. 29 people were killed in the Omagh bombing, including six children and a mother pregnant with twins. The photo shows Malaysia Airlines MH-17 taking off from Amsterdam Airport to Kuala Lumpur. The journey was supposed to be a 12—hour flight. 3 hours after this photo was taken, it was shot down over Ukraine, killing all 298 people on board including 80 children. Aftermath of the Brussels airport bombing, March 22, 2016. What is even more horrifying is how the victims were affected. They are bloodied. Horror, despair, helplessness are painted on their face. The last image of the Concorde flight Air France 4590. One of the ...

Ruth Braun was the German-Jewish daughter of Hildegard (née Kretschmer) and Werner Braun. She was born in Berlin on the 16th of February 1940. Her father was Jewish while her mother was born to a Catholic father and a Jewish mother then baptised and raised as a Catholic. Her mother converted to Catholicism after marriage.  Both parents were from Germany. Both tried to gain the necessary papers to emigrate to America, but after the birth of Ruth, they had to reapply for 3 people instead of 2 and by that time their papers were invalid and so they could not leave the country. In 1941, Werner was arrested in the street and imprisoned in Moabit as an "enemy of the Reich". At the end of March 1942, Hildegard received had to report to the Levetzowstrasse assembly camp with Ruth. Her sister Ursula, also baptised and raised Catholic, later reported that she and her father went to the Gestapo to try to convince them to release her sister and niece. But any attempts failed and Hildegard...

Yerakhmiel Risio Blass was the Polish-Jewish son of Gdaliyahu and Khana (née Charna) Blass. He was possibly born in Wlocławek in 1936. He had a sister, Tami (1939). His parents were Polish Jews. In December 1939, both the immediate and extended family, which included cousins, aunts, uncles and grandparents, were put on a train from Wloclawek to Zamosc. Khana was pregnant with Tami and began to have contractions. She asked to get off the train together with her husband. When an SS officer saw her husband climb down after her, he was forced to go back on the train. When Khana told the officer that he was her husband, the SS man threw Risio out of the train. It's unknown where exactly Tami was born.  The remaining family on the train were sent onwards to Zamosc ghetto where they remained together until Tami's grandparents were deported to the extermination camps. In 1940, a cousin escaped Zamosc and returned to Warsaw. There she found Khana, Tami and Rysio. She told Khana that eve...

Herta Oberheuser had trained to make sick people well. Instead the doctor used her skills to perform cruel, sometimes deadly, experiments on prisoners. On this day in 1946 a trial began to hold Nazi doctors accountable. Oberheuser was the only woman tried in the case. “ … I do not believe that the patients suffered that much because they never expressed any kind of disagreement,” she testified in her defense. At the Ravensbrück concentration camp for women, the doctor tested antibiotics on patients by intentionally infecting wounds with wood, ground glass, and dirt. Some patients were treated for the resulting infections while others, the control group, developed high fevers with no relief. She also sterilized prisoners.  Oberheuser claimed that her work was humane because the women chosen for experiments otherwise would have been murdered. She was sentenced to 20 years in prison in August 1947 but only served a handful of years. After Oberheuser was released, she returned to worki...

The Nazis said that Johann Frehse died while imprisoned in the Dachau concentration camp. In reality, he was killed as part of a secret program that gassed ill and exhausted prisoners.  Johann was initially arrested by the Gestapo for anti-Nazi activities in 1934. When he was arrested for a second time in 1939, he was imprisoned at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp and then transferred to Dachau near Munich. As part of a program called “Operation 14f13,” Johann was eventually brought to Hartheim Castle. Inside its walls, the Nazis had carried out the mass murder of people with disabilities under the Nazi “euthanasia” program. After 1941, “Operation 14f13” used Hartheim's gassing operations to kill camp prisoners like Johann. Johann’s death certificate never mentioned Hartheim or “Operation 14f13.” Gassings of camp prisoners would continue at Hartheim until December 1944. Thirty thousand people were gassed at Hartheim; of that number, at least 5,500 prisoners were killed there as...

When German occupiers ordered Jews in the Kovno ghetto to turn over all of their books in February 1942, some residents—including 13-year-old Solly Ganor—decided to resist. "Nearly everyone ... began delivering their precious books to the assembly point. My mother had tears in her eyes as she helped me load her beloved books by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Turgeneyev [sic], and Pushkin onto my homemade sled," remembered Solly. He never went to the assembly point. Instead, he and a friend hid the books in an abandoned house—and even began collecting additional books for their clandestine library. They allowed other children in the ghetto to exchange or borrow books. Other residents buried books underground or smuggled them out of the ghetto in wagons. Some of these books were retrieved after the war. Saving or hiding books was highly dangerous and punishable by death. However, Solly later wrote: "It was a risky business, but life wasn’t worth living without books." Photo 1: ...

In 1937, Robert Wagemann was born in Germany with a shattered hip. He was about five years old when his mother, Luta, received a summons to come to the university clinic in Heidelberg with her son. By law, doctors and midwives were ordered to report young children with mental or physical disabilities to public health officials as part of the Nazis' child "euthanasia" program—a secret killing operation targeting disabled children. Robert was also in danger of Nazi persecution because he was a Jehovah's Witness. “I had two strikes against me: being a son born to Witnesses and also having a defect,” he later recalled. At the clinic, Luta overheard doctors discussing murdering Robert. During the doctors' lunch break, Luta grabbed her son and fled the clinic. They then went into hiding at Robert's grandparents' home.  Robert survived in hiding until the end of the war, but about 10,000 German children with disabilities were murdered as part of this Nazi program...

When she was in her early 20s, Jeanne Daman became the unlikely headmistress of a Jewish kindergarten in German-occupied Belgium. Jeanne, a Roman Catholic, taught children who were banned from public education. When the Gestapo came to her school and asked for three children by name, Jeanne felt she had no choice but to comply. She dressed the children, the youngest of whom was three years old. "I put them in the truck myself, delaying the moment when the Nazis would touch them," she wrote. The children were used to lure their parents out of hiding. That day changed Jeanne. "I was anti-Nazi by conviction before. Now I wanted to strike back myself, to damage them,” she wrote. Jeanne was eventually forced to close the school because it posed too much danger for the young students who were facing deportation. After the school closed, Jeanne joined a clandestine rescue network to find hiding places for innocent children across Belgium. Later, she helped the Belgian resistanc...

At the Sobibor killing center, Chaim Engel and Selma Wijnberg were among the few selected for forced labor. They met while working together in the clothes-sorting area—and attempted to pocket food and valuables, including any possible weapons, for an uprising. On October 14, 1943, Chaim was part of a small group of prisoners that revolted. As chaos ensued, the young Jewish couple ran into the woods. With money they had taken from separating clothing, the couple paid a farmer to allow them to hide in his barn. While close to 300 prisoners escaped, only about 50 would survive the war—including Chaim and Selma. At least 167,000 Jews were killed at Sobibor. Click the link in our bio to learn more about Sobibor. First photo: Selma and Chaim are pictured here, center, with their child and two other couples in Odessa, circa May 1945. USHMM, courtesy of Selma Wijnberg Engel Second Photo: Selma Wijnberg Engel. USHMM, courtesy of Selma Wijnberg Engel Third Photo: Chaim Engel. USHMM, courtesy of ...

Irena Sendler, a young Polish woman involved in aiding Jews, was arrested by the Gestapo 80 years ago this month. Using her position as a social worker, Irena supplied food and offered financial assistance to Jews imprisoned in the Warsaw ghetto in German-occupied Poland. But her efforts didn't end there. By early 1943, she had joined newly formed "Żegota," the Polish Council to Aid Jews, a clandestine rescue organization that was funded by the Polish government-in-exile. Irena would later become head of its children's section. Under the alias "Jolanta," she helped smuggle several hundred Jewish children out of the ghetto and found hiding places for them in orphanages, convents, and private homes. In fall 1943, Irena was arrested by the Gestapo and imprisoned in Pawiak prison. She was later released from prison thanks to a bribe organized by her fellow rescuers. Despite the danger, she assumed a new identity and went back to working for Żegota. In 1965, Iren...

Growing up in Nazi Germany, Susan Warsinger felt the effects of antisemitism in her everyday life. "I was there when they boycotted my father’s store. I was there when we were not allowed to walk through parks without being accosted. I was there when we were not allowed to go to public schools. I was there during Kristallnacht when our neighbors broke down our glass front door," remembers Susan. While many of the details of her childhood are painful to remember today, Susan still recalls one memory with “tenderness.” Four-year-old Susan and her father were walking through a park where they lived in Bad Kreuznach, Germany. “There was an ice cream cart nearby,” Susan remembers. “A middle-aged lady from behind beckoned to me to come closer.” As Susan walked up to the cart, the woman smiled and offered her some ice cream. Though she was young, Susan knew that this was risky. “I felt a pulse in my throat and understood that this lady made a choice to sell her ice cream to a Jewish...

Elie Wiesel was forced on a death march out of Auschwitz 80 years ago #OTD. He and his father, Shlomo, were made to walk miles on foot in the freezing cold. "I was putting one foot in front of the other mechanically. I was dragging with me this skeletal body which weighed so much," Elie wrote in his book "Night." "If only I could have got rid of it! In spite of my efforts not to think about it, I could feel myself as two entities—my body and me. I hated it." With Soviet forces approaching and the German army in retreat, SS guards sent more than 60,000 prisoners away from Auschwitz, westward into Germany in mid-January 1945. A smaller number of prisoners, most of whom were too sick to move, remained behind.  Elie and Shlomo were later placed in open freight cars, which rolled through German towns and past German civilians. “They would stop and look at us without surprise,” Elie wrote. “One day when we had come to a stop, a worker took a piece of bread out o...

As families hugged goodbye and people hastily wrote letters to loved ones, photographer Mendel Grossman captured their final moments in the Łódź ghetto. In January 1942, German authorities began deporting Jews from the Łódź ghetto to the Chełmno killing center. By the end of September 1942, they had deported approximately 70,000 Jews from Łódź to Chełmno. Though personal photography was banned in the ghetto, Mendel secretly documented these scenes. Mendel did not survive the Holocaust. After the ghetto's final liquidation in 1944, he was deported to Königs Wusterhausen, a subcamp of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Mendel likely died on a death march during the camp's evacuation in 1945. Photo: USHMM, courtesy of Leopold Page Photographic Collection #Holocaust #History less

Hannah Szenes risked her life to return to Nazi-occupied Europe and try to aid her fellow Jews.  Hannah had left her home in Budapest in 1939, but, during World War II, she refused to stay safely on the sidelines.  Hannah joined the British Army along with a group of young Jews and parachuted into German-occupied Europe in March 1944. Their mission was to organize resistance against the Nazis and help rescue Allied personnel.  Hannah landed in Yugoslavia and later crossed into Hungary, where she was captured with a radio transmitter. She was held and tortured for nearly five months but refused to give up the transmitter's code. Hannah was eventually executed 80 years ago #OTD.  Photo: USHMM, courtesy of Beit Hannah Senesh less

Fred Flatow was just ten years old when Nazis burned down his synagogue in Königsberg, Germany, during the violent riot known as Kristallnacht—the "Night of Broken Glass”—in November 1938. Kristallnacht was the culmination of anti-Jewish harassment and violence that followed Fred throughout his childhood. Just a few years before, Fred had been subjected to antisemitic bullying by his non-Jewish classmates at a German public school. The synagogue became a refuge for Fred after he transferred to a Jewish school there. After Kristallnacht, Fred squeezed through a hole in the fence next to the destroyed synagogue and visited the ruins.  “Why I went [back], I cannot recall,” Fred reflected. “It was maybe to say goodbye to the synagogue that had been such a home to us … . One day when I was in there, I found a small children's Torah.” In the summer of 1939, Fred’s father, Erich, had a close call: one of his employees framed and denounced him to Gestapo. The Gestapo officer gave Eric...

When the Benninga family fled the German-occupied Netherlands in 1940, they thought they were leaving the horrors of World War II behind. They were among just a couple hundred European Jews who managed to escape to the Dutch East Indies, a Dutch colony comprising present-day Indonesia. Chana Arnon Benninga was less than two years old when her family arrived in Batavia (present-day Jakarta).  The war, however, caught up to them when Japan (Nazi Germany's ally) occupied the Dutch East Indies in March 1942. The Japanese occupation was harsh. In addition to their mistreatment of Indonesians, the Japanese interned Europeans. Eventually, Chana’s father was arrested and imprisoned. Chana, her mother, and her grandmother spent the remainder of the war in a number of internment camps. The camps were overcrowded, water and food were scarce, and disease was rampant due to poor nutrition and lack of sanitation. During her time in the camps, Chana found comfort in children’s books. Her mother r...

OnThisDay in 1945, top Nazi officials were led into a courtroom in Nuremberg, Germany. The International Military Tribunal (IMT) was in session. "The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been ... so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated," declared US Chief Prosecutor Robert H. Jackson in his opening statement. The 24 defendants were charged with crimes against peace; war crimes; crimes against humanity; and conspiracy to commit these crimes. They were to answer for these crimes in front of a panel of judges from each of the four major Allied countries—France, Great Britain, the Soviet Union, and the United States.  Nineteen defendants would be convicted.  In the following years and with the support of the IMT, US military courts conducted 12 more trials in Nuremberg. Hundreds of other trials were carried out in the Allied zones of occupation and in nations that fought in World War II. Howe...

"That was second nature with me—singing, dancing, clowning around. And that helped me tremendously when I was deported." Before starring in the 1960s TV hit "Hogan’s Heroes," playing a French POW, Robert Clary survived several concentration camps.  In 1942, Robert, born to a Jewish family in France, was deported to the east along with his parents. He was just 16. In Nazi forced labor camps, Robert’s singing talent became a means of survival. He remembered performing for inmates at one camp he was sent to and having the SS come to watch at another. Robert concluded that maybe “they had such a terrible life hitting us and killing us that they wanted to be entertained too." Following a days-long death march, Robert was eventually evacuated by train to the Buchenwald concentration camp.  After liberation in April 1945, Robert reunited with some of his siblings. He later learned that his parents had not survived. In 1949, he immigrated to the United States. In 1965,...

In 1941, Ester Bachar’s parents, Yaffa and Blagoye, placed their infant with her grandparents in Kosovo for safety while they joined the partisans. Ester's life was about to change completely.  In early March 1942, when Ester was less than two years old, the German forces arrested all the Jews in their town. Ester and her grandparents were interned in a transit camp. While they were in the transit camp, Ester’s grandparents asked Hajrija Imeri-Mihaljic, a Roma woman who had worked in their household for many years, to take Ester. Hajrija smuggled her out of the camp and changed Ester’s name to Miradija. Ester lived with the family for several years, speaking only the Roma language. After the war, Hajrija was told that Ester’s family had all died. Hajrija planned to raise Ester as one of her own children, though she had told Ester about her true name and history. When local police discovered that the Imeri-Mihaljic family was sheltering a Jewish child, representatives from the Jewis...