Major Crimes and True Crime

The Gruesome Crimes Of Martha Place, The First Woman To Die In The Electric Chair The Gruesome Crimes Of Martha Place, The First Woman To Die In The Electric Chair Martha Place brutally murdered her 17-year-old stepdaughter Ida with acid in 1898 and was executed by electric chair the following ye On February 7, 1898, Martha Place and her husband, William, got into a heated argument inside their Brooklyn home. William eventually stormed out and an enraged Martha went to speak to his teenage daughter, Ida, who had taken her father's side during the fight. When Ida slammed the door in Martha's face, she grabbed a bottle of acid from William's desk and threw it in the 17-year-old's face. Then Martha smothered Ida to death with her bedding, grabbed an ax, and waited for her husband to come home. “The last woman condemned to die in this State went to the gallows shrieking and fighting,” the San Francisco Call noted in the coverage of Martha’s execution, “but Mrs. Place hardly...

The death of Elisa Lam. Though the footage isn’t exactly  horrifying , but along with the entire story it’s quite chilling. I’ll just be writing a condensed version of the case. Elisa Lam was a 21-year-old Canadian woman who was on a trip to South California and was staying at the Hotel Cecil in downtown Los Angeles. She was a simple girl who loved travelling and blogging. (Elisa Lam) (Hotel Cecil) On January 31st, 2013, the day she was supposed to check out of her hotel, the hotel authorities realised Elisa was missing. The LAPD was involved in the search. The last time Elisa was seen, on the day of her disappearance, was recorded by the hotel’s elevator’s security camera. The LAPD released this video [1]  prior to the discovery of the body. (Link to the footage is given below.) In the footage, Elisa is seen exiting and re-entering the elevator, talking and gesturing in the hallway outside, and sometimes seeming to hide within the elevator, which itself appears to be malfunct...

On April 9, 1943, the Germans murdered a young Jewish couple and the woman who was hiding them, Anna Niepsuj, a mother of eight children. During the German occupation in Klikowa, now part of the city of Tarnów, a tragedy occurred that shocked the local community. The origins of this crime are connected to Operation Reinhardt, a German operation launched in 1942 aimed at exterminating the Jewish population in the General Government (GG). In Tarnów, the first displacement operations, combined with mass executions, took place in June of that year. However, beforehand, Jews, on German orders, had to register and have their work cards stamped. Survivor Blanka Goldman recalled after the war: "On June 9, 1942, street announcements suddenly appeared about the gradual, planned relocation of Jews to other towns for work. It was noted that stamps were required for this purpose, and that those Jews assigned to work in Tarnów would remain there, while the rest would be resettled." It is e...

Joseph and Lotte Isenberg were desperate to escape the Nazis when they agreed to become farmers in the Caribbean, leaving the comforts of Luxembourg behind. The Jewish couple found refuge in the Dominican Republic as a result of the Evian Conference, which began #OnThisDay in 1938. The Evian Conference hoped to address the growing refugee problem in Nazi-controlled Europe. However, of the 32 countries in attendance, only the Dominican Republic agreed to expand immigration quotas to accept more Jewish refugees. The country welcomed 645 Jewish refugees, but the offer had not solely been a humanitarian one. The dictator General Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina wanted to improve his reputation following his government's massacre of Black Haitians in 1937 and to bring more white people to his country, whom he assumed would be wealthy.  Joseph and Lotte settled in Sosuá, where the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee had established a Jewish agricultural settlement. While the sett...

Henia Lewin was just a toddler when her parents placed her in a suitcase and smuggled her out of the Kovno ghetto. After Nazi Germany invaded their hometown in summer 1941, Henia and her parents were forced into the Kovno (Kaunas) ghetto in Lithuania. Meanwhile, German authorities and their Lithuanian collaborators began to carry out mass killings of Jews. Henia's parents faced a difficult choice—try to get Henia out or stay together. As regular mass killings continued, her parents made their decision—Henia was sedated and successfully smuggled out of the ghetto. Henia's mother saved many other children this way too. For the next two years, Henia lived with a Lithuanian family. After the war, she was reunited with her parents, who had escaped the ghetto and survived the Holocaust in hiding.  Photo: USHMM, courtesy of Henia Wisgardisky Lewin.  Continue reading

Samuel Willenberg set out to destroy the Treblinka killing center. But could he succeed?   Samuel and other Jewish prisoners seized what weapons they could find at Treblinka #OnThisDay in 1943. They attacked the guards and set buildings on fire, but their revolt didn't go as planned. In the confusion, hundreds of prisoners stormed the main gate.  Dodging gunfire, Samuel miraculously escaped. He was one of the very few survivors from Treblinka—925,000 Jews were killed there, most in the gas chambers. While Samuel didn't destroy Treblinka, he kept fighting the Nazis and shared his story with the world. He was the last known living survivor of the revolt when he died in 2016. Photo: USHMM, courtesy of Shmuel and Ada Willenberg.  Continue reading

The biographies of over 200 SS women serving at Auschwitz death camp and their 'after work parties' have been published online in an effort to show the world that it wasn't just men involved. Entitled 'Women working for the SS', the project from the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum documents the women's lives from birth and how they ended up serving Adolf Hitler. One of the women was Maria Mandl, a senior SS guard in Auschwitz from October 1942 to October 1944 who was nicknamed 'The Beast' by prisoners Born in 1912 the daughter of a shoemaker, she first started work in a Nazi concentration camp in Lichtenburg  Germany  in 1938 before being transferred to the camp for women in Ravensbruk, also in Germany. In 1942 she was sent to Auschwitz where she became infamous for her sadism and sending 'an estimated half a million women and children to their deaths in the gas chambers.' In 1942 she was sent to Auschwitz where she became infamous for her sadism...