Jamie Leigh Jones Jamie Leigh Jones sounds like the name of an A-List actress. Instead she was a girl with no particular name or fame, until events in Iraq thrust her into the spotlight. She’s a tragic figure whether you believe every word she’s ever said, or almost no word she’s ever said. Whether you […]
Once before, in 1968 as the world focused eyes on Mexico as the site of the Olympics, were troublesome college-age youths wiped out by the dozens. Probably, on orders of the President of the Republic. No one was ever truly held accountable. That massacre has never been forgotten, nor should it be. Now, nearly a […]
For millennia, humans and dolphins have had a special connection. Stories go back to the time of the Romans, and beyond, the dolphins who assist the stranded sailor or the drowning child. We’re fascinated by them, and they seem to like us back. The affinity we have for these mammals cuts across eras and cultures, […]
It seems that nowadays, sexual harassment charges follow you almost to the grave. Rolf Harris, the retired Australian and British media personality and man who’ll be ninety years old in a couple of years, still fends them off in court. The most recent charges against him, dating from the 1970’s and 80’s, fizzled as a […]
The red “spot” is only a spot in relation to the surface of largest planet that circles the sun. In sheer size, it dwarfs such things as the great land masses of Russian, or China, for that matter than planet Earth, far larger than any spot your dermatologist has ever had to treat. And articles […]
It was stunning television in all senses of the word, the on-air suicide of WXLT-TV reporter Christine Chubbuck in Sarasota, Florida in 1974. Just as a stand-alone event, such a dramatic suicide by a lovely young woman, it’s always captured the public imagination. Now the film, starring the uber-talented Rebecca Hall, puts human contour, and […]
He wriggled out of that, somehow, but where is he now? A sort of international James Bond with a bit less allure for the ladies, and a whole lot more connection to money, and the double and triple-faced dealings that could keep him close to it. The list of the things this guy Didn’t Do […]
She had only been abroad in a small town in central Italy, for a few months, as a foreign student. The babble spoken all around her was just starting to sound like something intelligible, Italian. In fact she’d started a comfortable romance with an Italian guy, and life was looking up. Meredith Kercher Until disaster […]
In the evening of November 5, plutonium-239 was found on Karen Silkwood’s hands. Silkwood had been working in a glovebox in the metallography laboratory where she was grinding and polishing plutonium pellets that would be used in fuel rods. At 6:30 P.M., she decided to monitor herself for alpha activity with the detector that was […]
THE UNIQUE, UNPRECEDENTED CRIME SCENE Let’s start with the fact that the case, as a supposed break-in-kidapping-pedophile-murder, presented unusual features not seen before or since. FBI agents observed to local officials that kidnappers of children are either motivated by perversion, or monetary reward, but never in their experience both in the same package. Thus, a […]
We need to know – Featured this week… The case of Michelle O’Connell, from our Crime and Disappearance Section: Michelle’s case, a death on Sept. 2, 2010, was officially ruled a suicide by medical examiners but remains complex and controversial: 1. We need independent testing of the weapon used. What are the results of firing it […]
Daphne Caruana Galizia Our guess is that the 2 or 3% of the U.S. American public who were aware of this murder back in October of 2017 have now long forgotten it. In Europe, the percentage who might remember this is surely higher, slightly, that is. How quickly we forget about tragedies that aren’t ours. […]
Liu Yongbiao He feels “relieved” to be arrested now, in fact, to “finally be free from the mental torment” of knowing the day might come. He doesn’t dispute, after all, that he killed four people years ago, for nothing more than the worth of their measly possessions. He’s always known those murders might come home […]
Perhaps especially in death penalty cases, a jury’s subjective read on a person’s face was writ large. The correlation between a face judged untrustworthy and imposition of the death penalty was unmistakable, according to the scientists. Mind you, many of those “untrustworthy” faces belonged to defendants later proved entirely innocent by forensic science. We’ve never […]