Murder

May 16, 2011

Kathleen Marshall

Andrew Fitzherbert was convicted and sentenced to life in prison on the basis of DNA evidence alone.  His case shows that it is often not the technology or the science but the supervising biologist’s subjective interpretation of the results that is the crucial factor in assessing whether a suspect sample and a crime-scene sample “match.”

 by Mary Garden

 On Friday, February 27, 1998, between 4 p.m. and 8 p.m., veterinarian Kathleen Marshall (subsequently dubbed the “Catwoman”) was murdered in the downstairs clinic of her home in Wilston, on Brisbane’s northside. Her decomposing body with 52 shallow stab wounds was not discovered until Sunday afternoon when two directors of the Cat Protection Society of Queensland (CPSQ), of which Marshall was president, visited her home. Sixteen cats and three dogs, unfed and distressed, were upstairs.

The police investigation initially focused on members of the CPSQ where power struggles and infighting had been a common occurrence, intensifying during the six months before 52-year-old Marshall’s death. In April, however, Ken Cox, a forensic biologist from the John Tonge Center, announced that he had found male blood in the crime-scene samples. Investigators decided to eliminate every male person involved in the deceased’s life, beginning with male members of the CPSQ and any male connected to a female member.

Feb. 2, 2011

Crime Scene Photo

In woods not far from Philadelphia, the body of a young boy was found in a box in 1957.  An autopsy showed the 4-to-6-year-old child had died from a blow to his head and had sustained numerous bruises.  A widespread, prolonged investigation failed to even determine the boy’s name. 

by Mark Pulham

It had rained heavily the night before, and there was still some rain and cloud cover that Wednesday morning. It was November

11, 1998, and a crowd of around a hundred had gathered at the Ivy Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia for the funeral service. Just in time, the rain cleared and the clouds broke apart to reveal the sun, leaving a blue sky for the ceremony.

The service began exactly at 11 a.m. A lone piper played “Going Home” from Dvořák's “New World Symphony” on the bagpipes.

November 22, 2010

Robert Diaz (photo from San Quentin warden's office)

Robert Diaz, the nurse who killed by injecting elderly patients with Lidocaine, evades the lethal injection execution awaiting him by dying at age 72.

by Ronnie D. Smith

Over the years I had thought how ironic it would be when they executed “Lidocaine Killer” Robert Rubane Diaz by lethal injection. On August 11, 2010, Diaz, 72, died of natural causes on California’s death row. Dying of natural causes was a luxury he never afforded the dozen, helpless old people he murdered in their hospital beds by injecting them with lethal doses of the heart drug Lidocaine three decades ago in Riverside County.

I first made contact with Diaz in May 1981 when he was a 43-year-old registered nurse and I was a reporter for a daily newspaper in Riverside, California. I had gotten a tip that investigators searched his home in the Mojave Desert town of Apple Valley, California -- known then for its most famous residents, cowboy movie stars Roy Rogers and Dale Evans.

I didn’t know as I stood at the front door of the ranch-style home Diaz had rented from a county politician that six months later the soft-spoken, cardiac care nurse would be charged with twelve first-degree murders in a case that made national headlines and plunged Southern California into a health care crisis.

November 22, 2010 Updated Jan 8, 2013

Rodney Alcala

A registered sex-offender, Rodney Alcala got his 15-minutes of fame as a successful contestant on "The Dating Game" in 1978.  Before that appearance, he had already been convicted of raping an 8-year-old girl and had murdered four women. He would go on to murder a 13-year-old girl.

Update: On death row at San Quentin since 1979, Rodney Alcala, now 69, was sentenced in New York Supreme Court on January 7, 2012 to two concurrent 25 years to life in prison sentences for raping and murdering two women in New York in the 1970s. In 1971, Cornelia M. Crilley, a 23-year-old TWA flight attendant, was raped and strangled in her Upper East Side apartment. Seven years later, the body of Ellen Jane Hover, 23, an aspiring orchestra conductor, was found at the Rockefeller estate in Westchester County. Alcala pled guilty to the two murders on December 14. He will now be returned to death row at San Quentin. Since 2006, there has been a court-ordered moratorium on executions in California over the lethal-injection controversy.

By Denise Noe

Bachelor Number One

Airing in the 1960s and 1970s, “The Dating Game” was a popular show about singles finding romance. Usually, a young woman would be on one side of a partition asking a series of quirky and often sexually suggestive questions of a trio of bachelors on the other side of it. Without seeing them, and not being allowed to ask their names, occupations, ages, or incomes, she would think over their answers during a commercial break and then select one of the three for a date.

Occasionally, the roles were reversed and a man would do the selecting from a group of three “bachelorettes.” The show did not use the term “spinsters” for its unmarried female guests probably because that word, so strongly associated with starched gingham and hair-in-a-bun prudishness, would have been out of place in the time period.

“The Dating Game” was hosted by Jim Lange who began every episode by stepping through a flower-speckled partition that suggested the “flower power” that would become a cliché in that hippie era.

In 1978, a program aired in which Lange introduced “Bachelor Number One” as “a successful photographer who got his start when his father found him in the darkroom at the age of 13 – fully developed.”  Lange paused while the audience laughed appreciatively at the double entendre. Then the host continued, “Between takes you might find him skydiving or motorcycling. Please welcome Rodney Alcala.”

The audience saw Bachelor Number One, a handsome, dark-haired young man with a ready smile.

JonBenet Ramsey

On this page you will find: 1)  The resignation letter of Det. Steve Thomas; 2)   Letters 1 and 2 from Fleet White calling for an independent prosecutor; 3) The complete autopsy report.

Nov. 8, 2010

An excerpt from Dan Zupansky’s true crime book Trophy Kill: The Shall We Dance Murder which Prohyptikon Publishing-Toronto released in April 2010. All rights reserved. www.TrophyKill.tv

By Dan Zupansky

Winnipeg in the province of Manitoba is a cosmopolitan city with a rich history, the capital of the province and the eighth largest city in Canada. Situated in the Red River Valley in the geographical center of North America, it covers over 145 square miles. The population in 2003 was almost 700,000 people, comparable in size and population to the city of Seattle, Washington, without Seattle’s vastly more populated surrounding suburban area.

For decades the license plate for the province read “Friendly Manitoba” and for many years running, Winnipeg has held the distinction of having the highest per capita murder rate in Canada.

Nov. 1, 2010

Johann "Jack" Unterweger

With the help of future Nobel Laureate Elfriede Jelinek and other prominent Austrian literati, Jack Unterweger wrote his way out of a lifetime sentence for murder. Paroled in 1990, and now a famous crime writer himself, he embarked on a wide-ranging killing spree, murdering women in Austria, Czechoslovakia and Los Angeles. 

by Mark Pulham

Vienna. People sitting in cafés eating Sachertorte, listening to the music of Mozart and Strauss, walking through the Vienna Woods, and if you are a film buff, thinking about The Third Man. Vienna is synonymous with culture. It is not the first place anyone thinks of when you mention serial killers. Yet in the spring of 1991, particularly in the red-light district, the fear of a killer on the loose gripped the city.

It began on April 8, 1991, when a young prostitute named Silvia Zagler vanished. When last seen, she had been standing on her regular corner around 10:30 p.m. Sabine Moitzi worked in a bakery during the day. At night, unknown to her husband, she occasionally boosted her income by working as a “secret prostitute,” which meant that she was not, as is required by the laws of Vienna, registered with the Office of Health. Eight days after Zagler’s disappearance, Sabine’s friend, Ilse, dropped the 25-year-old woman off near the rail yard of the West Train Station. A short while later, she disappeared.