Mary Kay Letourneau and Vili Fualaau
On May 20, 2005, ex-teacher and convicted pedophile Mary Kay Letourneau, marries her former victim and the father of two of her children, Vili Fualaau. Just nine months earlier, Letourneau had been released from prison after serving a seven-and-a-half year sentence for raping Fualaau.
Oscar Wilde
On May 19, 1897, writer Oscar Wilde is released from jail after two years of hard labor. His experiences in prison were the basis for his last work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898).
Chief Satanta
On May 18, 1871, Kiowa Chief Satanta joins with other Indians to massacre a wagon train near the Red River in northeastern Texas. One of the leading chiefs of the Kiowa in the 1860s and 1870s, Satanta was a fearsome warrior but also a skilled orator and diplomat. He helped negotiate and signed treaties with the U.S. establishing a Kiowa reservation in Indian Territory (modern-day Oklahoma), but Satanta remained resistant to government efforts to force the Kiowa to abandon their nomadic ways.
The famous S.L.A. publicity image of new member Patty Hearst
On May 17, 1974, Los Angeles police surround a home in Compton where the leaders of the terrorist group known as the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA) are hiding out. Several months earlier the SLA had kidnapped Patricia Hearst, heiress to the Hearst family publishing empire. Police found the house in Compton when a local mother reported that her kids had seen a bunch of people playing with an arsenal of automatic weapons in the living room of the home.
May 16, 2013 MSN
ELIZABETH, N.J. — A homeless, hatchet-wielding hitchhiker who became an Internet celebrity earlier this year was arrested Thursday for allegedly beating a New Jersey lawyer to death inside his home, authorities said.
Caleb "Kai" McGillvary, who became known as "Kai the Hatchet Wielding Hitchhiker" after intervening in an attack on a California utility worker, was arrested at a Philadelphia bus station, according to Union County Prosecutor Theodore Romankow.
McGillvary was charged with the murder of Joseph Galfy, Jr., a Clark, N.J. attorney found dead in his home on Monday.
McGillvary will be processed in Philadelphia and sent to back to New Jersey in to coming days, Romankow said. His bail is set at $3 million.
May 16, 2013 KWTX
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Police in Albuquerque, N.M., say a woman who saw her 5-year-old being abducted chased the kidnapper down and crashed her vehicle into his car.
Police say the incident unfolded Wednesday evening after the woman saw her child being forced into a car in Albuquerque's North Valley.
She jumped into her vehicle and gave chase for about seven miles, unaware the man had pushed the girl out of the car shortly after grabbing her.
The girl was not injured.
The mother followed the kidnapper and finally rammed into his car near an intersection.
Andrew Johnson
On May 16, 1868, the U.S. Senate votes against impeaching President Andrew Johnson and acquits him of committing high crimes and misdemeanors. In February 1868, the House of Representatives charged Johnson with 11 articles of impeachment for vague "high crimes and misdemeanors."
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
