Major Crimes and True Crime

White supremacist executed for killing black man by dragging him behind truck White supremacist John William King was executed on Wednesday, more than 20 years after he killed James Byrd Jr. in a horrifying hate crime. King was one of three white men convicted of murdering Byrd, who was black, on June 7, 1998, near Jasper, Texas. Byrd, a 49-year-old father of three, was abducted, beaten, chained to the back of a pickup truck and then dragged down a country road. He was dragged for nearly three miles and was alive for at least two of those miles, according to The Associated Press. His body was decapitated, dismembered and ditched. King, 44, orchestrated the attack, according to the AP. He was sentenced to death in 1999. The other killers were Lawrence Russell Brewer, who was executed in September 2011, and Shawn Allen Berry, who is serving life in prison. In 1999, Byrd's family founded the Byrd Foundation for Racial Healing, a non-profit organization that works to promote "raci...

Daniel Morcombe, The 13-Year-Old Australian Boy Who Was Kidnapped From A Bus Stop On December 7, 2003, 13-year-old Daniel Morcombe of Queensland, Australia, set out for a local shopping center to buy Christmas gifts for his family. When the bus he was supposed to take broke down, he was stranded at the bus stop until a replacement arrived. Witnesses later recalled seeing two men standing near the boy, and by the time the next bus showed up, Daniel was gone. His family quickly reported him missing when he didn't return home that night, sparking the most extensive police search in Queensland history — but it came up empty. For eight years, Daniel's parents continued to fight tirelessly for answers about what had happened to their son. But it wasn't until 2011 that a man named Brett Peter Cowan confessed to kidnapping and killing Daniel on that December day before dumping his body near a remote macadamia farm in the Glass House Mountains. Cowan then led authorities to D...

Murder Of Pregnant 19-Year-Old Erin Corwin In August 2014, authorities in San Bernardino In August 2014, authorities in San Bernardino County, California were several weeks into a desperate search for a 19-year-old mom-to-be named Erin Corwin. She had suddenly disappeared near Joshua Tree National Park at the end of June, just as she and her husband were starting to patch up their relationship after she'd had an affair that she promised was all over. But after she vanished, investigators quickly grew suspicious of Corwin's lover, Christopher Lee. And when combing the abandoned mines near Joshua Tree, their suspicions were confirmed — when they found Corwin's corpse at the bottom of a 100-foot mine shaft. She had been viciously beaten and then strangled to death with a rebar garrotte over the course of five agonizing minutes before being tossed down the shaft head first. And not only could authorities place Lee in the area on the day Corwin disappeared, they found the making...

How The Mafia’s ‘Pizza Connection’ Pumped America Full Of Heroin With The Help Of Neighborhood Pizzerias In April 1984, federal agents arrested Pietro "Pete" Alfano, the owner of a mom-and-pop pizzeria in the small town of Oregon, Illinois. Locals loved him for his food and because he often donned an apron and baked the pizzas himself. But few knew that Alfano was a crucial figure in an international heroin smuggling ring with ties to one of New York City's largest crime families and the Sicilian Mafia. Known as the "Pizza Connection," this drug pipeline trafficked heroin from Palermo to the U.S. using mob-run pizza parlors as wholesale distribution centers from Long Island to Wisconsin. In addition to Alfano, nearly 40 people were eventually arrested by federal agents in connection with this investigation. The resulting trial became the longest in U.S. history and cost an estimated $50 million to prosecute — but it resulted in a staggering 18 convictions and sh...

Barry Seal, The ‘Most Important Witness’ In The History Of The Drug Enforcement Administration In the mid-1970s, Barry Seal was a successful young pilot with Trans World Airlines — but he had a dangerous secret. In his spare time, Seal smuggled drugs and weapons between the U.S. and Central America. In fact, in 1974, he was fired by the airline for saying he was on medical leave when he was actually trafficking explosives to anti-Castro Cubans in Mexico. Seal then turned his full attention to drug smuggling, and he even started working for Pablo Escobar and the Medellín cartel. He was carrying 462 pounds of Escobar's cocaine when he was caught by the Drug Enforcement Administration and arrested in 1984. But instead of accepting his fate, Seal told the DEA he would work for them as an informant to avoid prosecution. It was Seal who provided the photos to American authorities that exposed Escobar as a major drug kingpin. The pilot testified in front of a federal grand jury abou...

College Student Fatally Stabs Roommate After ‘Doing Cocaine With The Devil’ Luisa Cutting was on Xanax, Adderall, cocaine, alcohol, mushrooms, and marijuana when she butchered her college roommate. They were best friends living in an off-campus apartment together— until a night of drugs and alcohol ended in “doing cocaine with the devil” and murder. Luisa Ines Cutting and Alexa Cannon weren’t just compatible college roommates.  They were best friends living in an off-campus apartment together— until a January night of drugs and alcohol ended in “doing cocaine with the devil” and murder. Twenty-one-year-old Cutting, a Radford University student, pled guilty to second-degree murder on Monday and has since been sentenced to 20 years in prison. According to Yahoo, police were called to her residence at 7.45 a.m. Upon arrival, the police heard a woman “making reference to a knife” and were met at the door by a woman “covered in blood.”  “The female turned around, placed her h...

Inside The Bloody Story Of Defenestration, One Of History’s Wildest Execution Methods The definition of defenestration comes from the Latin word de, meaning “out of” or “from,” and fenestra, meaning “window.” But its origin comes from an incident in Prague in the Kingdom of Bohemia (part of today’s Czech Republic) in 1419. Humans have invented countless ways to execute criminals, political rivals, and enemy combatants throughout history. But one of the most bizarre execution methods is also one of the most simple: throwing people out a window. Also known as "defenestration," this practice dates at least as far back as the 9th century B.C.E. — when the Israelite Queen Jezebel was thrown out of her palace window as punishment for banishing all the prophets of Yahweh from the kingdom. But it wasn't until the Middle Ages in Europe that the practice really took off, particularly in Bohemia, where some 20 leaders were defenestrated over 200 years.   Go inside the str...

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 ha...

Mob Hit List in Philadelphia-South Jersey Area With AM-Mob Arrests, Bjt Rocco Marinucci (1952-15 March 1982) was a Philadelphia crime family associate. He was responsible for planting a bomb under Philip Testa's porch, killing the boss, and Testa's son Salvatore Testa avenged his father by killing Marinucci in 1982. Rocco Marinucci worked as Peter Casella's chauffeur and bodyguard within the Philadelphia crime family, and he was recruited into the conspiracy to whack Philip Testa. On 15 March 1981, he planted a bomb on Testa's porch, killing him. Testa's son Salvatore Testa was ordered by Nicky Scarfoto kill those responsible for his father's death. Marinucci was killed by Testa on 15 March 11982, and body was found on Federal Street in Southwark,  Philadelphia, Pennsylvania with bullet wounds to the neck, chest, and head. His mouth was stuffed with three firecrackers. Rocco Marinucci (1952-15 March 1982) was a Philadelphia crime family associate. He w...

He became the worst serial killer in US history FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — (TNS) Samuel Little, a 79-year-old man with a penchant for storytelling and drawing chalk pastel portraits in his California prison cell, was recently labeled by the FBI as the United States’ most prolific serial killer. Over the past two years, Little has confessed to charming, beating and strangling more than 90 women between 1970 and 2005 _ at least a dozen in Florida. About 50 of these murders have so far been confirmed by the FBI and local state detectives, but nine still are unsolved in southern and central Florida.  The vast majority of Little’s victims were homeless, runaways, drug users or prostitutes _ women so on the fringes of society that many investigators struggled to figure out their real names. Their bodies were found half-buried in wooded areas alongside highways or stuffed into dumpsters. Without the technology to perform DNA analysis, their deaths often were wrongly attributed as ac...

This picture ran in the Las Vegas Sun newspaper on January 10, 1966, and is entitled "Killer Collapses." It shows Richard Eugene Hickock moments after confessing to the vicious murder of the Herbert Clutter family at their farm house in Holcomb, Kansas., flanked by Kansas Bureau of Investigation agents Clarence Duntz and B. J. Handlon.   On December 30, 1959, the Las Vegas Police Department captured two of the most notorious criminals in the history of our nation. The event was later immortalized in Truman Capote's famous novel In Cold Blood. The book, which was later made into a movie thriller, profiled the vicious murder of the Herbert Clutter family at their farm house in Holcomb, Kansas. Las Vegas Police had received information that the suspects were in a stolen car and had fled towards the west coast. On December 30, shortly after 5:00 PM, two LVPD patrolmen, Ocie Pigford and Francis Macauley, spotted the stolen 1956 Chevrolet twenty minutes after it arrived in ...