You’ve seen that warning sign below hundreds of times and already know pirating eBooks and similar stuff can get you five years in prison stripes plus a $250,000 fine. But I bet you weren't aware that almost all the authors and artists bei
Though the Smiley Face Killers have enough forensic smarts to know it’s better to dump a body in water where evidence washes away than leaving it on land to fester and implicate, it’s not impossible to distinguish an authentic drowning from
Serbian-born Szilveszter Matuska pulled off four train wrecks in Hungary and Austria in the 1930s that killed 22 people and injured hundreds of people. He said God made him do it. Was he a revolutionary or a mad man?
by Chuck Lyons
“I like to see people die,” Szilveszter Matuska said at his trial. “I like to hear them scream.” For a two-year period during the early 1930's, Matuska did his best to make that happen, eventually killing 22 people and listening to the screams of hundreds in Hungary and Austria. He just picked a strange way to do it.
He engineered train wrecks.
The Serbia-born Matuska is credited with engineering four such wrecks, though there may have been others. After his capture he revealed that he enjoyed witnessing the crashes and sometimes experienced a sexual release as the metal tore and fire burst from the engines, throwing screaming passengers from the wreckage.
But questions remain even today about his motivations. Were they political or sexual or something else altogether? Was Matuska a revolutionary or a madman?
On the night of November 29, 1988, near the impoverished Marlborough neighborhood in south Kansas City, an explosion at a construction site killed six of the city’s firefighters. It was a clear case of arson, and five people from Marlborough were duly convicted of the crime. But for veteran crime writer and crusading editor J. Patrick O’Connor, the facts—or a lack of them—didn’t add up. Justice on Fire is OConnor’s detailed account of the terrible explosion that led to the firefighters’ deaths and the terrible injustice that followed. Also available from Amazon
