May 20, 2013

DNA and the transgender Gypsy super-criminal.

by Paul Buchanan

On the afternoon of April 25, 2007, Michele Kiesewetter, a 22-year-old police officer in the German city of Heilbronn, drove with her partner to the parking lot of the local Theresienwiese, a sort of fairground along the east bank of the Neckar River, used for Oktoberfest. The two parked there for a lunch break. Witnesses in the area reported hearing gunfire at around 2 p.m.

Police units arriving on the scene found Kiesewetter lying dead outside her BMW 5-Series patrol car from a single gunshot wound to the head. Her partner, Martin A., had also been shot in the head. He would emerge from a coma weeks later, with no memory of what had happened.

Both the officers’ service handguns were missing, as were their handcuffs. The crime scene and the victims’ patrol car were scoured for forensic evidence. Minute traces of DNA were recovered from the car’s center console and from its back seat. The DNA samples were found to belong to an unidentified woman, a person of interest who would come to be called Die Frau ohne Gesicht, or The Woman without a Face.

May 16, 2013

With good reason, conspiracy theories abound about the shooting deaths of oil scion Ned Doheny and his companion/secretary Hugh Plunkett at the fortress-like mansion Greystone in Los Angeles.

by Benjamin Welton

On the night of February 17, 1929, two would-be writers converged together in order to make history in Los Angeles, America’s fabled land of never-ending sunshine and raw economic opportunity. These two men—Leslie White and Raymond Chandler—did not knew each other that night, nor were they writers yet. They would learn and apply that craft in the 1930s in the various pulp magazines of the day, with White taking the lead while Chandler was busy drinking himself out of a job at the Dabney Oil Syndicate. The hardboiled and cynical worldview that these men shared captured the zeitgeist of the Depression, but the seeds of this bitter harvest were planted in the late 1920s, right before America’s decade-long party came crashing down. In the era before James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, the seedy world of Southern California was rife with corruption and an almost expressionist tapestry of nihilist violence and amorality.

In the same way that the double murder that occurred on February 17, 1929 foreshadowed darker things to come (at least in the literary world), the events of that night were partially based on an even greater scandal of that age. President Warren Harding, America’s 29^th commander-in-chief, is often placed near the cellar of the historical rankings of U.S. Presidents, and much (if not all) of that is due to the Teapot Dome Scandal that consumed his entire administration, even after his sudden death in San Francisco in 1923 (which is another crime for another day). Between the years of 1920 and 1923, President Harding’s Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall took and pocketed bribes in order to lease U.S. Navy petroleum reserves (which were then primarily located at Teapot Dome, Wyoming, as well as California) to private oil companies.

May 13, 2013 Special to Crime Magazine

An excerpt from George Hassett’s just released Gangsters of Boston, which is published by Strategic Media Books (www.strategicmediabooks.com). Gangsters of Boston is available at Amazon, bookstores, as an e-book and at special discount price at the Strategic Media Books web site       

by George Hassett

In 1960, when Attorney General Bobby Kennedy launched his historic crackdown on organized crime he had to overcome resistance from the FBI and its director J. Edgar Hoover. For decades, Hoover had vehemently denied the existence of a national network of gangsters.

Privately, he knew that organized crime investigations made for bad statistics – lots of man hours resulting in a relatively small number of arrests. He also knew that mixing wealthy gangsters with underpaid agents – the FBI starting annual salary in the mid-1950s was a pitiful $5,500 – could undermine his FBI’s cherished reputation of incorruptibility.

But the Kennedy brothers would not let up. They had pressured Hoover to fight the Italian mob since John F. Kennedy was senator. Now that he was president and named Bobby his attorney general the campaign intensified.

May 9, 2012

 Michael Cassius McDonald

Long before Al Capone stormed into Chicago, a violent little Irish-American ruled the mean streets of Chicago.

by Kelly Pucci

Though long-forgotten by many, latecomers like Capone, Torrio and Colosimo owe a debt of gratitude to Michael Cassius McDonald, the man who brought togethercriminals and elected officials, setting the stage for organized crime in Chicago. During a 50-year career in the underworld, journalists, gangster, mayors and even one president of the United States took orders from Chicago original crime boss.

Michael Cassius McDonald arrived in Chicago just before the Civil War. A teen-aged runaway from Upstate New York, McDonald knew no one in Chicago. His childhood friend and fellow freight train jumper, Henry Marvin, died en route and was buried by McDonald without fanfare.

In the 1850s Chicago became the nation’s railroad hub opening the city to a flood of eager young men with big ideas. Young men like Marshall Field, who opened a retail emporium in downtown Chicago, and George Pullman, creator of the eponymous sleeping and dining cars that made travel by train comfortable and later carried President Abraham Lincoln’s body on a final journey from the White House to Springfield, Illinois.

But when Mike McDonald rode the rails in the 1850s, passengers sat on hard wooden benches as they stared at an unchanging landscape through sooty windows. With little to occupy bored passengers after consuming lunches brought from home, passengers eagerly welcomed the sight of boys called “candy butchers” who trudged through the aisles. In exchange for a few pennies and free transportation to Chicago, runaways and orphans clad in ragged clothing peddled goods for the railroad. Sympathetic passengers, mistakenly believing that the boys received their fair share of profits, bought poor quality goods from the candy butchers. And Michael Cassius McDonald was the most successful candy butcher of his time.

May 6, 2013

 From the cold case files: the 1965 murder of Jean Welch in Cumberland, Maryland

by James Rada, Jr.

Jean Welch carried her basket of wet laundry outside to dry on the clothesline behind her apartment. May 17, 1965 was a sunny, spring day in Cumberland, Maryland, and besides warm to hang clothes on the line, Jean had trader her winter clothes for shorts a short-sleeved blouse.

Cumberland had once been the second-largest city in Maryland. Located in the Appalachian Mountains in western Maryland, the city had boomed with the coal and railroad industries. As those industries struggled and declined, the city's population had peaked in 1940 and had been falling since then to around 31,000 in 1965. Because it was such a small city, it contained neighborhoods that looked more as if they belonged in the suburbs rather than a city. Jean Welch and her family lived in one of these neighborhood on Cumberland's south side.

Jean was an attractive brunette and looking at her, one might find it hard to believe she was 33 years old, let alone the mother of three children. And someone was looking at her as she hung the clothes. A witness would later tell police she had seen Jean hanging the laundry around 1:30 p.m.

 May 2, 2013

 “Surrender had played out for good with me…” Jesse James.

When the Ford brothers assassinated Jesse James on April 3, 1882, the longest-running outlaw saga in American history was over.

 by Robert Walsh

Confederate bushwhacker, desperate outlaw, bank robber, political terrorist, gang leader, multiple murderer, folk hero. Jesse James was all of them. One thing he wasn’t (as much as his latter-day apologists like John Newman Edwards would like you to think) was some sort of Robin Hood who stole from the rich and gave to the poor. While he made great play of continuing to fight for the Confederate cause (when he wasn’t claiming to represent poor, dispossessed Missourians against rich Northern carpetbaggers) he was out for himself.

There was certainly an element of political thought behind his actions (Northern banks and businesses often being prime targets) but most of what he stole stayed in his pocket and, while violence was always going to be a part of his life and career, he also killed even when there was no need for bloodshed.

April 29, 2013

Screenshot from the motion picture Black Hawk Down

Specialist 4 John “Stebby” Stebbins won the Silver Star for his heroics at the Battle of Mogadishu in 1993. Since 2000 he’s been serving a 30-year sentence for raping his 6-year-old daughter.

by David Robb

You may have seen the movie Black Hawk Down. It was one of the biggest box office hits of 2001, and earned its director an Oscar nomination. The film, based on Mark Bowden’s nonfiction book of the same name, told the story of the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu. One of the real life Army heroes of the battle was Specialist 4 John ‘Stebby’ Stebbins, who was shot three different times – and thought dead each time – but recovered from his wounds and received the Silver Star, the third-highest military honor.

A former baker from upstate New York, Stebbins served as the company clerk for an elite unit of Army Rangers. His fellow soldiers referred to him as “chief coffee maker” and “paper pusher.” But when thrown into battle, his heroics surprised everyone.

“He was a changed man, a wild animal, dancing around, shooting like a madman,” Bowden wrote in his book.