Denise Noe

June 25, 2010

Dr. Sam Sheppard

At his second trial, with young F. Lee Bailey as his defense attorney, Dr. Sam Sheppard was acquitted of his wife’s terrible murder. The famous case continues to fuel speculation more than a half century later.

by Denise Noe

Beaten to Death

Many points in the Sam Sheppard case remain in dispute but this is certain: in the wee hours of the Fourth of July in 1954, Marilyn Sheppard was beaten to death in her suburban bedroom.

Four months pregnant, pretty, brown-haired Marilyn Sheppard, 31, was married to her high school sweetheart, successful neurosurgeon Dr. Sam Sheppard, 29.

The couple resided in the Cleveland, Ohio suburb of Bay Village in a two-story house set on a high cliff overlooking Lake Erie.

Sam Sheppard is backed up by neighbors and close friends Spencer “Spen” and Esther Houk in his claim that he called their home at 5:40 that morning.

“My God, Spen, get over here quick!” Sam shouted. “I think they’ve killed Marilyn!”

December 12, 2004

Charles Manson

Thirty-five years after the Tate-LaBianca murders, it's time to demystify the would-be messiah that Vincent Bugliosi portrayed in the best-selling true-crime book of all time, Helter Skelter. The real Charles Manson was a semi-literate, petty criminal – car thief, check forger, pimp, drug dealer – so insecure about his ability to cope in the real world that on the day of the parole that plunged him into infamy he begged prison officials not to release him.

by Denise Noe

Charles Manson is the most famous common criminal in the world, his name a synonym for evil. Thirty-five years after the infamous Tate-LaBianca murders, he continues to be regarded as one of the most devilish cult figures in U.S. history, the possessor of a charisma and sexual magnetism so extraordinary that he ruled a "Family" of fanatically devoted followers willing to kill at his command. This is the Charles Manson that prosecutor, Vincent Bugliosi, popularized in the best-selling true-crime book of all time, Helter Skelter.

Manson was an unlikely candidate for the role of the would-be messiah that Bugliosi sold first to Manson's jury and then to a feckless national media enthralled by the cult-tinged horror of the Tate-LaBianca murders. At the time of the murders, Manson was a destitute parolee living a hand-to-mouth existence at Spahn Ranch, a place that had once served as a movie set for cowboy flicks and was then functioning as a dude ranch. He and 15 to 20 other drifters with whom he associated had been allowed to live on the premises by its 80-year-old owner, George Spahn, in exchange for helping out with chores like shoveling horse manure, and sexual favors freely provided by some of the young women. The group habitually ate food that its females cadged from dumpsters. A combination of panhandling, petty thievery, and drug dealing also helped them survive and support their primary pastimes: smoking marijuana and dropping acid, making music, and idly conversing.

May 1, 2003

(photo courtesy salmineo.com)

Residents of New York City's crime-ridden Hell's Kitchen neighborhood predicted that Salvatore Mineo Jr. would come to a bad end. The slight boy they called "Junior" in elementary school was a playground brawler, thief, and gang member, according to Marvin J. Wolf and Katherine Mader in Fallen Angels. The biographers wrote that acquaintances predicted he would wind up on the wrong end of a knife.

by Denise Noe

"He'll end up with a knife in him."

But questions cluster around the beginning of Sal Mineo's life as they do around the tragic end to it. John Seger, owner of Sal Mineo's official website (www.salmineo.com), says that "According to Sal's family, Mineo was never arrested. The entire juvenile-delinquent angle was something made up for publicity."

Mineo was born Jan. 10, 1939 to Salvatore Mineo Sr., a coffin maker from Sicily, and his wife Josephine. He was the third child and third son. His sister was born four years later.

Mineo took dancing classes as a prepubescent and the people who saw him dance then knew the boy had talent and that he loved dancing. But, according to biographer H. Paul Jeffers, there was a downside to being a dancer in his macho neighborhood. The other boys in his gang no longer wanted him with them and taunted him as a "sissy." Outraged, Junior fought the teasers with his fists.

The dancing lessons paid off, landing Mineo a gig on a local TV program called "The Ted Steele Show."

At 11 years old, Mineo won a part in The Rose Tattoo, a Tennessee Williams play appearing on Broadway that starred Eli Wallach and Maureen Stapleton. Mineo had a single line: "The goat is in the yard."

February 29, 2004

Richard Loeb with his arm around Nathan Leopold.

Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold were as unlikely a pair of cold-blooded murderers as ever appeared in U.S. history. Privileged, brilliant, and coddled, they conjured up the perfect crime – just for the hell of it – and then executed it quite imperfectly. Only Clarence Darrow's virtuoso courtroom performance saved these remorseless, self-styled "supermen" from being hanged.

by Denise Noe

In 1924, 18-year-old Richard "Dickie" Loeb and 19-year-old Nathan "Babe" Leopold of Chicago had reason to think of themselves as "superior" people who could easily outwit the ordinary folk who enforced the law. Both were exceptionally intelligent and had academic careers in which they skipped several grades. Loeb, with an I.Q. estimated at 160, had already graduated from the University of Michigan, to which he had transferred after a year at the University of Chicago, completing his B.A. degree in two and a half years. Likewise, Leopold was a child prodigy, entering the University of Chicago at age 14. When he graduated four years later, earning Phi Beta Kappa status, he was among the youngest graduates in the elite university's history. Leopold's I.Q. was estimated to be stratospheric: over 200. There was much else remarkable about Leopold. He had already studied 15 languages and spoke at least five fluently. He had also developed a strong interest in ornithology and had collected nearly 3,000 bird specimens. According to the website, "Nathan Leopold and Ornithology," the teenage Leopold "kept about 3,000 bird specimens in the third-floor study of his home . . . lectured on the subject at the nearby Harvard [Preparatory] School and taught, as an unpaid volunteer, a 'bird class' to girls from the University Elementary School." In October, 1923, Leopold delivered a paper on a rare songbird called the Kirtland's Warbler to the annual meeting of the American Ornithological Union."

November 27, 2006 updated 3/12/07

Emmett Till

The brutal murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955 galvanized the fledgling civil rights movement like no other killing of a black by white racists before it. After an all-white, all-male jury acquitted Till's two killers, the case festered for 49 years until the U.S. Justice Department reopened it in 2004. In late February of 2007, a Lefore County, Miss. grand jury declined to issue any new indictments, effectively bringing the case to an abrupt and ignoble end. 

by Denise Noe

Mississippi Is Not Chicago

People in the Chicago neighborhood where Emmett "Bobo" Till lived knew the 14-year-old as an attention-getter. Despite the stutter left by a bout with polio in his infancy, he had a confident, even cocky, personality and relished pranks and jokes. In an interview that appeared in the PBS documentary, The Murder of Emmett Till, childhood acquaintance Richard Heard recalled how Emmett entertained his schoolmates one day in gym: "I remember Emmett raising his shirt up to about his navel and making his belly roll, waves of fat rolling and it just broke us up. The whole gym went crazy."

In early August 1955, Emmett's great-uncle, Moses "Preacher" Wright, traveled to Chicago from Mississippi and asked Emmett's mother, Mamie Till Mobley, if her son could spend the summer with his family. Wright also invited two of Emmett's Chicago cousins to come on the trip.

Mamie agreed to let Emmett go but worried about how he would behave in the South. Although Chicago was racially segregated, its racism was not of the Jim Crow stripe.

March 14, 2005

Leo Frank (photograph c. 1915)

Virulent anti-Semitism led directly to the arrest, prosecution, conviction, and lynching of the innocent, but Jewish, Leo Frank. Police and prosecutors fabricated evidence to win a death by hanging verdict. When the governor of Georgia commuted Frank's sentence to life in prison, a resurgent Klan mob stormed the prison and re-imposed the original sentence.

by Denise Noe

At approximately 3 a.m. on Sunday, April 27, 1913, the night watchman of the National Pencil Company in Atlanta discovered a girl's brutally battered body in the factory's basement. Covered with sawdust, her skull was caked with dried blood, her eyes were bruised, her face scratched and bruised and some of her fingers out of joint. A piece of rope, along with a strip taken from her own underpants, encircled her neck.

She was soon identified as 13-year-old Mary Phagan, the child of a working-class family. She had been employed at the factory putting metal tips on pencils. She had recently been laid off because the factory had run out of the metal required for her job. On Saturday, April 26, 1913, Confederate Memorial Day in Atlanta, she planned to see the parade but first wanted to stop off at the factory to collect $1.20 in wages owed her.

The killing captured the Monday headlines and news about it would appear on the front pages of Atlanta newspapers for more than a year afterward. Much of Atlanta suffered a paroxysm of grief over this murder. About 10,000 people showed up at the morgue and over 1,000 attended her funeral. Those grieving over this stranger were nicknamed ''Mary's People'' while she became known as ''the little factory girl.''

Dec. 1, 2003 Updated Jan. 25, 2006

Father John Geoghan

Father John Geoghan sexually molested young boys for over three decades with the full knowledge of the Archdiocese of Boston. By the time Cardinal Bernard Law got around to having him defrocked in 1993, Geoghan had become the poster boy for the priest-pedophilia scandal that racked every Catholic diocese in the United States.

by Denise Noe

The perception that child molesting was a rare crime perpetrated by a small number of raincoat-clad misfits crumbled in the 1970s and '80s when studies disclosed the astonishing prevalence of this crime and the outward ''normalcy'' of its perpetrators.

''One out of three girls and one out of seven boys will be sexually abused by the time they reach 18,'' Ellen Bass and Laura Davis reported in their book, The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse. Feminists were at the forefront of publicizing the prevalence and damage caused by these crimes. In both incest and non-family child molesting, the perpetrators were almost always men, the victims about 90 percent female. Feminist writers such as Florence Rush and Judith Hermann believed these statistics reflected an imbalance of power between the sexes. They thought the traditional family, with its ideology of male headship, led many men to treat children as property.