Dec. 10, 2012

Mary Rogers

 The disappearance and murder of Mary Rogers in 1841 became a major tabloid story for the New York newspapers. Edgar Allan Poe wrote a mystery story about it, but Mary’s murderer was never identified.         

by Doug MacGowan

Sunday, July 25, 1841, was a hot day in New York City. That morning 20-year-old Mary Rogers left the boarding house owned by her mother to attend services at her church. She returned home later that morning and talked briefly with her mother and with one of the residents, Daniel Payne, who happened to be her fiancé. Payne would later testify that Mary had outlined her plans for the day: visiting her aunt until evening and then returning home. The aunt lived nearby, only a quarter of an hour trip by horse-drawn carriage. Mary asked Payne to meet her at the nearest carriage stop that evening and escort her home.

That afternoon, the city was crippled with a severe thunderstorm. When Payne went to meet Mary at the carriage stop, he found that she had not returned from her aunt's. He surmised that she had wisely stayed at her aunt's in order to avoid the storm, and would return the following morning.

By Monday morning the weather had cleared up, but Mary did not return home. This caused her mother and Payne and Alfred Crommelin (another boarder and, coincidentally, a former beau of Mary's) to set up a search plan. The natural starting place was the home of the aunt Mary had visited on Sunday. But the aunt stated she had not seen Mary on Sunday nor had she expected a visit from her.

The three continued their search Monday afternoon, but with no success. Believing the necessary search needed more than three people, they placed an ad in the New York Sun newspaper asking if anyone had seen "a young lady (wearing) a white dress, black shawl, blue scarf, Leghorn hat, light colored shoes, and parasol light-colored." Anyone who had seen a young woman matching this description was asked to contact her mother because "it is supposed some accident has befallen her."

Mary had disappeared once before. In October of 1838, she went missing for several days. Upon her return, she vaguely stated that she had gone to visit relatives in Brooklyn, although she did not explain why she had not told anyone of this journey beforehand. Her mother now wondered if her second disappearance was a similar episode. Perhaps she would reappear soon.

Dec. 3, 2012

Rachel Nickell, Andre Hanscombe and their son Alex in the park

Not even Scotland Yard’s famed Murder Squad is immune from locking in on one suspect to the exclusion of all others and allowing its conceit to permit a serial rapist and murderer to stay at large for years after the evidence to convict him was in the police’s hands.

by Mark Pulham

In the photograph, her smile is wide and bright. A blue sky is behind her and she squints slightly from the sun as a wisp of blonde hair drifts across her face in a breeze. She seems incredibly happy. In another photograph, she and her boyfriend smile at the camera, bundled up against the chill. Between them is the buggy holding their young son.

Some people just radiate happiness, people who are attractive and put a smile on the face of those who saw them, even if they didn’t know the person.

Rachel Nickell was one of those people. Bright, attractive, and with boundless generosity, she was instantly likeable, and was capable of achieving anything that she set out to do.

Rachel Jane Nickell was born on November 23, 1968 to Andrew Nickell, an officer in the army, and his wife Monica, and brought up in Great Totham, a village near Colchester in Essex.  From a very young age, Rachel was naturally charitable, helping out with the elderly and with the disabled children in the area.

When she turned 11, Rachel went to the Colchester High School for Girls, and in her spare time, she joined the Essex Dance Theatre and took up singing, dancing, and acting. She could have pursued this course, but instead, decided to study and get a degree in History and English.

Rachel Nickell

Rachel got a job at a Richmond swimming pool as a lifeguard, and it is there, in 1988, that she met a young motorcycle courier named Andre Hanscombe. The couple fell in love, and a year later, Rachel gave birth to her son, Alexander Louis. Rachel and Andre never married, and there is no indication that they were even thinking about it.

Rachel decided to stop working, at least for then, and devoted herself to being a full-time mother, even though she had been offered work as a photographic model. Maybe when Alex was old enough, she would pursue her ambition to be a children’s television presenter, an ambition in which she no doubt would have excelled.

The young family moved to Balham, in South London, and life seemed perfect. Wimbledon is also in South London. Known throughout the world for hosting the world’s most prestigious tennis tournament, people flock there in the summer to watch the matches and eat strawberry cream tarts at the afternoon teas in the pavilions.

But tennis is not the only thing the area is known for.

Nov. 28, 2012

This essay is adapted from a presentation J. Patrick O’Connor gave at the Collier County, Florida, Main Library on October 16, 2012.

by J. Patrick O’Connor

The United States operates the largest criminal justice system in the world, incarcerating 2.3 million people in over 5,000 jails and prisons. Another five million Americans are on parole or some sort of conditional release program.  Since the so-called “War on Drugs” was launched during the Reagan administration in the early 1980s along with mandatory sentencing guidelines for drug possession and sales, our prison population has nearly tripled.  Over 50 percent of the people now incarcerated are in on drug offenses, thousands of them for marijuana possession.

Although the U.S. makes up less than 5 percent of the world’s population, we now incarcerate 25 percent of the world’s prisoners. Russia is a distant second. The U.S. justice system now imprisons its citizens at a rate roughly five to 10 times higher than the countries of Western Europe. It isn’t because U.S. citizens are five to 10 times more inclined to commit crimes than Europeans, it’s because our state legislatures have enacted a host of mandatory minimum sentences enhancements that took sentencing discretion out of the hands of judges and juries and placed it in the hands of “get tough on crime” prosecutors.  Over the last 15 years, these “enhancements” have doubled the average prison sentence for a wide variety of offenses. In terms of incarcerating youth, the disparity is far more pronounced. The United States incarcerates 336 per 100,000 youths. Austria incarcerates 25, Germany 23, Italy 11 and Japan 0.1. The second highest incarceration for youth in the world is 69 out of 100,000 in South Africa.

Nov. 26, 2012

Of all the infamous outlaws of the Old West, none has quite the notoriety of “Billy the Kid.”

by Robert Walsh

John Wesley Hardin. Jesse James. Cole Younger. “Curly” Bill Brocius. Gunslingers, killers, thieves, icons of the Wild West. Of all the infamous outlaws of the Old West, none has quite the notoriety of “Billy the Kid.” Questionably accused of killing 21 men (one for each year of his short, violent life), Billy is as much a Wild West icon as Wyatt Earp or “Wild Bill” Hickok in spite of being firmly on the other side of the law. Ask people to name the first outlaw that springs to mind and Billy is often their first choice even now. Well over a century after his controversial shooting by buffalo hunter-turned-lawman Pat Garrett and, in spite of being a New Yorker, he’s still marketed to the tourists as New Mexico’s most infamous son.

Like so many Old West outlaws, Billy’s public image is a constant blurring of fact and fiction. The man and the myth so intertwined as to be almost indistinguishable. To start with, nobody has ever provided his accurate date of birth, we don’t know who his biological father really was, there’s no accurate body count of his victims and stripping fact from fiction is difficult to say the least. We don’t even know for certain what his real name was.

Nov. 23, 2012

The John Carlos Story, with Dave Zirin, Haymarket Books, 2011
Veronica & the Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal as told to Valerie Jones, Xlibris, 2012

Two books – very different and yet with a common thread of courage. If the names do not immediately resonate with you, it is only because time and political circumstances are always changing.

by Lynne Stewart

John Carlos is the man and track star who electrified us when he and Tommie Smith and Peter Norman registered their protest to the USA’s denial of black equality from the winners' podium at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City. Veronica Jones (now deceased) is the witness to the shooting that Mumia Abu Jamal was convicted of, who came forward after lying at his trial, to clear her conscience and the record in 1995. I was struck by the fact that the two subjects, both African Americans, of these books were so different in outlook and upbringing but who in the crunch elected to stand up. Both suffered afterward for their acts of courage and that is an important part of these stories as well.

Nov. 19, 2012

Stephen Farrow

In early 2012 two sadistic, purposeless murders shocked Great Britain like few others have in terms of public revulsion.

by Ben Johnson

The sentencing of a British man who perpetrated two of the most sadistic murders the UK has ever seen took place in Bristol on November 2, 2012. .

At a 10-day trial, the jury heard how a sickening chain of events that led to a vicar being found callously murdered, with pornography and condoms being placed on and around the body.

Stephen Farrow, described as a “psychopath with an intense hatred for religion” was sentenced to whole life imprisonment, the harshest sentence available in the UK for the murders of a retired teacher and the vicar, Reverend John Suddards, during which he arranged their bodies into grotesque and humiliating poses.

This whole life sentence ranks Farrow among such killers as Dennis Nilsen, Steven Griffiths “the Crossbow Cannibal” and “Moors Murderer” Ian Brady in the annals of British crime history.

Nov. 15, 2012

by Denise Noe

Like any other phenomenon, crime does not exist in a vacuum. It is often a kind of warped, mangled shadow of the era and culture in which it arises. Both the forms that crime takes and the manner in which the general population responds to criminal acts shed light – often an unwanted and unflattering light – on the greater society. One book reviewed here deals with crimes peculiar to the American culture devastated by the Great Depression while another deals with the organized crime culture specific to the Mafia. A book about the infamous Lindbergh baby kidnapping shows how a nation reacted to an especially heinous crime committed against a culture hero by a marginalized immigrant. A final book demonstrates how the wildly differing cultures of Great Britain and Japan were thrown together by both crime and the need to deal with it.