May 14, 2012

Franklin Benjamin Gowen

Patrick H. Campbell makes the case that the death of industrialist Franklin Gowen was a murder, not a suicide. His long investigation into this case was detailed in his book Who Killed Franklin Gowen?  Copies of that book may be purchased by sending $20 to P.H. Campbell, 82 Bentley Avenue, Jersey City, NJ 07304 ($25 in Canada, $30 for any other country).

by Patrick Campbell

On June 21, 1877, a group of 10 Irish union activists named the Molly Maguires (Mollies) were executed in Pennsylvania in a mass execution of trade union members and their sympathizers. One of those executed was Alec Campbell, the author’s grand uncle.

These executions were organized by Franklin Gowen, president of the Reading Railroad and Coal Company. Gowen sent 10 more union members to the gallows in the two years that followed. All of the Molly Maguires were members of the Workers Benevolent Society (WBA), the miners’ union.

After publishing a book entitled A Molly Maguire Story, which focused on Gowen’s war on the Workers Benevolent Association, I decided to investigate the death of Franklin Gowen, who was found dead in 1889 in a Washington D.C. hotel bedroom with a bullet in his head and a gun by his side. The investigation was published in a book entitled Who Killed Franklin Gowen? The following is an excerpt from this book.

Who Killed Franklin Gowen is an analysis of the death of Franklin Gowen, whose death in a Washington D.C. hotel room in December 1889 was characterized by James Wormley, owner of Wormley’s Hotel where the body was found, as a suicide. Robert Linden, the manager of the Pinkerton Detective Agency who investigated the death of Gowen, agreed with him, and so did Francis Innes Gowen, Franklin’s nephew and business partner. William Patterson, the Washington coroner, who had been out of town when the death was discovered and had not examined the body at the scene of the death, went along with the conclusion of the other three men and pronounced Gowen’s death a suicide.

But Gowen’s wife and daughter claimed that Franklin Gowen would never have committed suicide, and the deputy coroner and senior members of the Washington Police Department stated that the circumstantial evidence clearly pointed to murder, and demanded a full investigation. The coroner, however, still insisted that the death was suicide, and the suicide verdict stood in spite of the public dispute with the police and the huge media coverage which was claiming that the Molly Maguires had got even with Franklin Gowen.

May 14, 2012 Special to Crime Magazine

This is an excerpt from The Kalinka Affair by Joshua Hammer. The full ebook single is available for sale from The Atavist, through Kindle Singles, iBooks, The Atavist app,and other outlets via The Atavist website. When André Bamberski’s daughter died 30 years ago, he was helpless to save her. Suspicions of murder began to surround her stepfather, a German doctor named Dieter Krombach, but Bamberski could only hope the truth would prevail. But when the authorities gave up their pursuit, he knew he had to act. So against the odds, Bamberski embarked on an obsessive quest to capture and punish his daughter’s killer.

by Joshua Hammer

The abduction of Dr. Dieter Krombach began in the village of Scheidegg, in southern Germany. His three kidnappers punched him in the face, tied him up, gagged him, and threw him in the back of their car. They drove 150 miles, crossing the border into the Alsace region of France, with Krombach stretched out on the floor between the seats. The car stopped in the town of Mulhouse. An accomplice called the local police and stayed on the line just long enough to deliver a bizarre instruction: “Go to the rue de Tilleul, across from the customs office,” the anonymous caller said. “You’ll find a man tied up.” 

A few minutes later, two police cars arrived at the scene, their red and blue patrol lights illuminating the street. Behind an iron gate, in a dingy courtyard between two four-story buildings, Krombach lay on the ground. His hands and feet were bound and his mouth was gagged. He was roughed up but very much alive. When the police removed the covering from his mouth, the first thing he said was “Bamberski is behind it.”

May 7, 2012

Dennis Lynn Rader, "The BTK Killer"

Over the years, thanks to movies like The Silence of the Lambs, public perception about serial killers has become more mythical than factual.  In reality, there is no real profile for this rare breed of killer.

by Erin Geyer

Charles Manson once said “Look down at me and you see a fool; look up at me and you see a God; look straight at me and you see yourself.” These words give us a glimpse into the psyche of a killer. It is hard to say why certain serial killers develop such a tremendous public interest and following in the media. Public perceptions about serial homicide have become more mythical than fact. I will examine the common misconceptions about serial killers, and how the media affects the public’s opinion on this issue. I have always been interested in criminal law, and movies based on murder, mystery, and suspense. Serial killers both disgust and captivate me. Though I could never fathom committing such heinous crimes, I am intrigued by those who do.

Forget Hannibal Lecter. The movie portrayal of serial killers as deranged loners with unusually high IQs is dangerously wrong and can hinder investigations. According to the FBI, serial killers are much different in real life. For years, law enforcement investigators, academics, mental health experts, and the media have studied serial murder, from Jack the Ripper in the late 1800s to the sniper killings in 2002, and from the “Zodiac Killer” in California to the “BTK Killer” in Kansas. These diverse groups have long attempted to understand the complex issues related to serial killers. In 2005, the FBI hosted a symposium in San Antonio, Texas. This report contains the collective insights of a team of experts on serial murder. The symposium’s focus was actually two-fold: to bridge the gap between fact and fiction and to build up our body of knowledge to generate a more effective investigative response.

Much of the general public’s knowledge concerning serial murder is a product of Hollywood productions. Story lines are created to heighten the interest of audiences, rather than to accurately portray the criminal. Law enforcement professionals are subject to the same misinformation from a different source: the use of circumstantial information. Professionals, such as investigators, prosecutors, and pathologists may have limited exposure to serial murder. Their experience may be based upon a single murder series, and the factors in that case are generalized to other serial killers. As a result, stereotypes take root in the police community regarding the nature and characteristics of serial murders.

A growing trend that compounds the fallacies surrounding serial murder is the talking heads phenomenon. A talking head is a person who claims to have an expertise in serial murder. They appear frequently on television and in the print media and speculate on the characteristics of the killer, without being privy to the facts of the investigation. Unfortunately, inappropriate comments may spread misperceptions concerning serial killers and impair law enforcement’s investigative efforts. The rarity of serial murder combined with inaccurate information and fictional portrayals of serial killers have created seven main serial killer myths. I discussed these myths in a survey given to students in a rural college community.

May 7, 2012 Special to Crime Magazine

“Shadow People” — the term refers to hallucinogenic figures glimpsed by methamphetamine addicts after days without sleep. But, in reality, it’s the addicts themselves who are living in a shadow, growing in numbers, becoming an alarming subculture on the periphery of rural America, engaging in crimes that are having devastating impacts on places where traditional life is valued most. Between May 2010 and October 2011, award-winning journalist Scott Thomas Anderson worked as an embedded reporter with law enforcement agencies, partnering with officers on night patrols, accompanying detectives on warrant searches and probation sweeps, observing SWAT operations and spending hundreds of hours with attorneys and victims’ advocates in small-town courtrooms. The result is Anderson’s new book, Shadow People: how meth-driven crime is eating at the heart of rural America. The following excerpt from Chapter 5 of Shadow People follows several cops and prosecutors in Amador County, California, during a hot week in July, 2010. Available on Amazon.com

by Scott Thomas Anderson

Chapter 5

Jackson, California: June 13, 2010

Mike Collins pounds the accelerator. The voice calling for backup over his radio belongs to a police officer in Sutter Creek, Jackson’s sister city to the north. To Collins, it sounds like a fellow cop is approaching two burglary suspects caught in the act; and he’s confronting them utterly alone. Mosquitoes are swarming as the Jackson cruiser drives under the bloodshot silhouette of a mine frame, ridges and rooftops below swept by a champagne curtain of light. The car moves through an intersection, past a white, plaster slum structure with rusty air units and bed sheets hung for drapes: Carrion eaves, cracked Spanish arches, its condemned walls flash by the veteran’s eye in an instant. Radio traffic advises Collins that the policeman has his suspects cornered in a cemetery. By now, the cruiser has pushed through two staggered intersections to an upper gateway to Sutter Creek. For an instant Collins can see down the rolling vista to a basin of houses and yards a magazine once deemed “the city without crime.” 

It’s all in the eyelids — the burglar’s are low, ruby flaps of half-hung skin. Below them, two pupils shutter into postmortem windows, wobbling and wandering on the salmon-white glaze of his corneas. The eyes are vacant, deeply chiseled into a gaunt, shaven skull. The burglar’s agitated. Trembling. He can barely speak. Moments before, he had no problems pattering to the Sutter Creek officer in front of him, even joking that the reason he and the emaciated woman at his side were spotted creeping out of garages was because they’d been taken by the carnal urge. Laughing, he’d quickly dropped the line that they were just looking for an impromptu place to satisfy it. But two black bags lay near a headstone, and Collins is watching as his fellow officer searches through them, discovering twenty-one stolen items hidden under knotted clothes and a bottle of Hennessy. The last thing the officer pulls out is a roll of toilet paper. Securing his gloves, he moves his fingers up inside its cylinder to discover a crystal pipe loaded with methamphetamine.   

“That’s insulin,” the burglar assures everyone.

Handcuffs slide out of a leather sheath. The Sutter Creek officer moves in, but his suspect suddenly wants out of the graveyard at all costs. The wiry man locks his fists as a frail snare line rattles through his elbows. The much larger officer wrenches the burglar’s forearms. The meth is good for one more push, a trapped tugging and some wordless defiance. Collins is ready to step in and help when the Sutter Creek officer, in one motion, forces his suspect down on the hood of the patrol car.

April 30, 2012

Fidel Castro and Richard Nixon

A “Top Secret” CIA report accuses then Vice President Nixon of shaping U.S. foreign policy to benefit a wealthy campaign contributor, a right-wing zealot who championed the assassination of Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

by Don Fulsom

One of Richard Nixon’s vice presidential secrets surfaced only in recent years.  And it’s a doozy: a “Top Secret” CIA report accuses Nixon of shaping U.S. foreign policy to benefit a wealthy campaign contributor, a right-wing zealot who championed the assassination of Cuban leader Fidel Castro. This CIA document—completed in 1983—is known as “Official History of the Bay of Pigs Operation, Volume III: Evolution of CIA’s Anti-Castro Policies, 1951- January 1961.”  (The CIA declassified only Volume III of the five-volume history in 1998.  It was discovered in the National Archives by Villanova professor David Barrett in 2005, and first posted on his university’s Web site. This volume is now posted on the Web site of the National Security Archive, which is suing the CIA for the release of the other volumes.)

Of course, it would not be the first nor the last time that Nixon—one of the stickiest fingered politicians in modern times—would be caught doling out favors to fat cats. 

Yet this declassified document exposes something even seamier than Nixon’s run-of-the-mill pay-for-play illegalities. Seamier, for example, than soliciting congressional campaign funds from L.A.’s top gangster; or keeping a secret senatorial slush fund rounded up by rich businessmen; or widespread presidential financial corruption – including the sale of ambassadorships; soliciting bribes from billionaires; or a go-easy attitude toward the ultra-generous Mafia godfathers and their thuggish Teamster allies.

These fresh revelations involve war and peace, life and death.  They lie buried among 295 pages of a CIA critique of the failed 1961 invasion of Cuba by CIA-trained Cuban exiles.  Written by a CIA historian, this document provides rich new details on Richard Nixon’s central role in plotting the invasion of a foreign country, Cuba, and the attempted assassination of its leader, Fidel Castro. It faults Nixon for taking risky anti-Castro actions, in large part, to satisfy a well-connected Castro-loathing U.S. plutocrat, William Pawley.

Historian David Kaiser, in his book The Road to Dallas, notes that Pawley worked closely with the CIA “on building anti-Castro organizations both inside and outside of Cuba.  He was, in effect, an informal (CIA) case officer.”  As such, it is almost certain that Pawley was aware of the recommendation, in early January of 1960, by CIA heavyweight J. C. King for Castro’s “elimination.”

April 16, 2012

Laxmibai Karve, a 45-year-old widow from Poona, was poisoned by her doctor on the train to Bombay.

by Randor Guy

The slow-crawling passenger night train from Poona to Bombay pulled into Victoria Terminus, Bombay after a weary stop-at-every station journey soon after dawn.  A middle-aged man, Anant Chintaman Lagoo, a Poona-based doctor, arranged for a stretcher to carry a 45-year old widow.  She was unconscious and obviously needed immediate medical help. Lagoo raced towards G. T. Hospital, some distance away, where the woman was admitted.  It was about 5:45 a.m.

Lagoo told the hospital doctors that the lady whom he had not known before had travelled in the same compartment with him on the Poona-Bombay night train.  He had gathered from the usual train journey chat that her name was Indumati Paunshe and she had a brother G. B. Deshpande, living in Calcutta.  She took ill during the journey and became unconscious on board.

The lady was treated for diabetic coma.  Glucose and insulin were administered along with other drugs, but she did not respond to the treatment.  Nor did she regain her senses and she passed away at 11:30 a.m.

She had neither jewelry nor ornaments on her.  No money either.  Except the clothes she had on her person, there was nothing.  She seemed a destitute.  And nobody came to claim her body nor did anyone turn up to see her, of course, besides the Good Samaritan Poona doctor, Lagoo.