Murder

To control-freak Steve Colosi, wives were trophies, adornments to his 111-acre estate on Virginia's Eastern Shore and his 52-foot yacht. When his fourth wife left him, he arranged to have her beautiful face so disfigured that no other man would want her.

by Peter Davidson

Robyn Lynn Rogers was alone in her office on the morning of July 20, 2000, when a man carrying a cup filled with lye walked in and threw it in her face. The chemical -- strong enough to burn through metal -- seared Robyn's face and eyes. It seeped down her throat and burned through her organs.

The willowy part-time model, who worked full-time as a rental agent in a Virginia Beach apartment complex, fell to the floor screaming. The vicious attack left the 29-year-old Eurasian beauty, the daughter of a career Navy officer and his Vietnamese wife – blind and horribly maimed.

Despite eight operations to save her life, including a tracheotomy that left her unable to speak, Robyn died three weeks later from her injuries. The lye had eaten into her aorta, causing her to bleed to death.

Kathleen Foley staged her husband's murder to look like it was part of a robbery, but she left behind one telling detail.

by Peter Davidson

Kathleen Foley tried very hard to convince cops she didn't kill her husband -- and she almost succeeded, but a backwards pair of shorts undermined her efforts to get away with murder.

With no weapon, no witnesses, and few clues, cops and prosecutors had a very difficult case.

Just before 6 a.m. on July 31, 1998, Kathleen dialed 911. "I need help," she told the dispatcher. "My husband won't move."

Police officer Edwood Buchman was the first to arrive at the couple's modest home in Fountain Hill, Pa. Buchman found a gruesome scene: 39-year- old Joe face down in bed in the upstairs master bedroom, his head bloodied by four bullet wounds, his 400-pound body covered with a white comforter and a maroon pillow.

He was wearing only a pair of gym shorts that were on backwards and not pulled fully up. An empty money clip was on the floor beside the bed.

Bothell's Lake Pleasant RV Park

February 5, 1997 would have been Steve Ver Woert's 44^th birthday, but he didn't make it to work on time that day at his job at a cellular phone company in Redmond, Wash., home to software giant Microsoft and many other high-tech firms. When the usually reliable Ver Woert still hadn't made it to work by midday, a co-worker was sent to find out why. When she arrived at Ver Woert's fifth-wheel-type trailer in nearby Bothell's Lake Pleasant RV Park, she found blood just outside the front door and called the Bothell police.

by Gary Boynton

Patrol Officers Lawson and Seuberlich responded to the call and entered the stylish trailer through its unlocked front door. After passing through the kitchen, they found Ver Woert's body lying facedown in a pool of blood in the living room. They checked to make sure that he was dead, then carefully left the trailer, so as not to disturb any possible evidence, before calling in to report what they had found.

Bothell Police Sergeant D.C. Nielsen arrived at the scene shortly. Paramedics soon joined him. They confirmed that the victim, who appeared to have been stabbed in the back and then to have had his throat cut, was indeed dead.

Two Bothell detectives, Ed Hopkins and Denise Langford, were next to arrive, followed by Det. Olsen, who would process the crime scene along with a team from the Washington State Patrol Crime Lab. Dan Christman, a blood-spatter specialist from the Snohomish County Medical Examiner's Office, and Dr. Eric Kiesel, the medical examiner, also came to examine the body.

The investigators noted that an exercise bike had been knocked over near the body and several boxes appeared to have been thrown around, both indicating a possible struggle. A Bible lay open on a nearby table.

 Alex Baranyi Jr.  and David Anderson

On Jan. 4, 1997, two boys were playing in a park in Bellevue, Wash., an upscale suburb east of Seattle, when they spotted what they thought was a pile of clothes concealed by shrubs about five feet off a trail. When the boys returned to the park the next morning they soon realized what they had seen was a body. They ran home; one of their mothers called the Bellevue Police Department.

by Gary Boynton

At 11:30 a.m., Bellevue detectives responded to the scene, where they found the body of a young woman, dressed in blue jeans, a white T-shirt and "waffle-stomper" boots. Although she did not appear disheveled, as if she had been involved in a struggle, there was a cord wrapped around her neck, with which she obviously had been strangled.

Identification on the body indicated that the victim was Kimberly Wilson, age 20, and that she lived only a few blocks from the park.

After securing and processing the crime scene, Det. Jeff Gomes, an investigator from the King County Medical Examiner's Office, and Senior Prosecutor Patti Eakes proceeded to the victim's home. Gomes, although he'd been a cop for 23 years, was dreading informing Wilson's family of her death as he knocked on the front door of the white, two-story, wood-frame house.

Even though there were three cars parked in front, and the outside Christmas lights were on, the inside of the house appeared dark. When no one answered, Gomes went to a sliding-glass door on the side of the house. Finding it unlocked, he opened it, leaned into the house and called out. Again receiving no reply, Gomes drew his gun and stepped inside.

Robert Cosgrove "Bobby" Greenlease, Jr

A sensation of 1953, $300,000 of the $600,000 paid in ransom has never been recovered.  Two police officers and a gangster are commonly thought to have stolen the money -- but did they?  

by J. J. Maloney

One of the more tragic and fascinating crimes of the mid 20^th century was the kidnapping and murder of 6-year-old Bobby Greenlease in 1953, and the subsequent disappearance of half the $600,000 ransom his family futilely paid for his release.

Bobby was the son of Robert C. and Virginia Greenlease. His 71-year-old father was one of the largest Cadillac dealers in the nation. The Greenleases lived in Mission Hills, Kan., the most elite suburb in the Kansas City area.

The kidnappers – Carl Austin Hall and Bonnie Brown Heady – had both known privilege earlier in their lives. In fact, it was at military school that Hall met Paul Greenlease, the older, adopted brother of Bobby Greenlease. Hall later inherited a substantial amount of money from his father, but blew it failing at a number of business ventures. For robbing a number of cab drivers – his total take was $38 -- Hall was sent to the Missouri State Penitentiary. In prison he dreamed of making "the big score" – a score that would allow him to once again live in luxury.

He later said that kidnapping was the only crime where he could strike once and retire for life.

October 07, 2007

Main street, village of Villeneuve-sur-Yonne. It was here that Dr. Petiot murdered for the first time.

Sixty-one years after Dr. Marcel Petiot, dubbed "Dr. Satan" by French newspapers, was guillotined for the murder of 26 people, he remains France's most prolific murderer.

by Marilyn Z. Tomlins

"Gentlemen, don't look, this won't be very pretty." It was one minute before five on a spring morning in Paris. Marcel Petiot, a physician by profession, was living his last few minutes on earth. The men he had addressed those words to gave no indication that they had heard him. They had come to watch, to witness the guillotine make him pay for his crimes. They were wishing that they were elsewhere, anywhere, but not there in the front courtyard – the cour d'honneur or ceremonial courtyard, as it was known - of La Santè prison on Paris's Left Bank.

Some of the men had been on the prosecution team that had decided that "Dr. Satan," as the media had dubbed Petiot, was to die; others had been on his defense team. Present also were a couple of prison warders, a couple of uniformed policemen, the prison chaplain, and Paris's chief medical examiner and autopsy surgeon, Dr. Albert Paul. The latter would have to verify, after the guillotine's lethal caress, that the recipient had not survived. Dr. Paul would never tire of saying that he found having to do that such an unnecessary thing – as if anyone could survive the guillotine.

It was May 25, 1946: a Saturday morning. Dr. Petiot, 49, had stood trial at the Assize Court at the Palais de Justice for the murder of 27 people. He had been found guilty of the murder of 26. The police had thought, though, that he had murdered many more: 200 was the number they suggested. "To be on the safe side, I'll settle for 150," one of the police investigators had said.

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."