i can breathe

i needed a decongestant as well as nasal spray. i can breathe better. I've got pollen allergies along WITH a cold. not fun. least i can breathe again.

sprang into action

after i got dunked at my baptism i was getting dressed and my mom ran into help me. i didn't see her till i turned and said "hi mom" as i was unzipping my jumpsuit

Robert Elmer Kleason

Robert Elmer Kleasen was an American who was convicted and sentenced to death in 1975 for the murder of two Mormon missionaries near Austin, Texas. The murders have popularly, albeit inaccurately, been cited as an inspiration for the horror film The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. Kleasen's conviction was later overturned and Kleasen emigrated to the United Kingdom, where he remarried and was eventually imprisoned on gun violations. Kleasen died in the UK while fighting extradition back to the US for retrial on the murder charges. Early life: Robert Elmer Kleasen was born on September 20, 1934 in Buffalo, New York. He was the only child of a store clerk and his wife. Guns and hunting were a passion of the boy as well as his mentally ill father. In 1950, 18-year-old Kleasen stepped on a rusty nail while hunting in the woods and his mother took him to the hospital. While waiting impatiently for doctors to see him, he hit his mother, got a gun from her car, and returned to the emergency room shooting. No one was hurt, but the outburst landed him in a psychiatric facility until 1952. In 1971, a year after gaining a sociology degree, he shot off a man's toe in a dispute. He later jumped bail in the state and moved to Texas. Texas: Upon arrival in Austin, Texas, Kleasen made a multitude of wild claims to his acquaintances, most notably that he was a Korean War veteran and former CIA operative. He also used several aliases, at least one of which has been speculated to have been a dissociated personality. Kleasen was baptized into a local congregation of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In December 1973, he was arrested for rustling bison and became angered when the church didn't send a lawyer to get him out of jail. After his release, members of Kleasen's church became increasingly uneasy with his behavior. Two Mormon missionaries, Gary Darley (20) and Mark Fisher (19), routinely visited Kleasen, who lived in a trailer behind a taxidermist's shop in Oak Hill, on Austin's southwestern outskirts. Despite being warned by their bishop to stop their visits due to Kleasen's behavior, Darley and Fisher decided to see Kleasen one final time. On October 28, 1974, Darley and Fisher disappeared in Oak Hill. Police investigation of the disappearance led to the scenario that the missionaries were shot dead after having agreed to meet Kleasen for dinner. Police discovered Fisher's bloody watch and bullet-punctured name tag in Kleasen's trailer but bodies never were found. Investigators also discovered blood and tissue on a bandsaw in the taxidermy shop where Kleasen worked. Prosecutors at Kleasen's 1975 murder trial alleged he dismembered the victims and buried the remains. Kleasen was believed to have held a grudge against the LDS Church after he felt church members did not support him during a poaching trial. Kleasen was convicted and sentenced to death. But in 1977, after two years on Texas' death row, an appeals court overturned Kleasen's conviction. The appeals court ruled that the search warrant for his home was improper and that key evidence should have been excluded. Authorities opted to not retry Kleasen. Emigration to the UK: After his release from Texas prison, Kleasen relocated to New York, where he was later imprisoned on assault charges. He lived for a time in a Buffalo, New York charity mission. He drew attention from the local media, and police had to be posted near the mission for Kleasen's protection. He only congregated with the other people living in the mission during church services prior to eating. During this time, the local Buffalo TV channels updated the story every night on their news broadcasts. In 1990, Kleasen moved to Barton-upon-Humber, Lincolnshire, England. He married local woman Marie Longley, who he met as a pen pal while living in the US. He ingratiated himself with local residents, and began to amass a huge gun collection. A shooting club member became suspicious of Kleasen's claims of being a decorated military veteran and CIA agent, and confirmed from U.S. military officials that Kleasen had never served in the U.S. armed forces. This information was passed on to police, resulting in a more thorough background check on Kleasen. English authorities learned of Kleasen's U.S. murder conviction, which he had unlawfully omitted from his residency application. The investigation also uncovered several gun law violations. He was given a three-year prison term in 2000 for possession of illegal firearms and munitions and began to serve time in an English prison. His wife found out about his criminal background and at one point, Kleasen threatened her with death if she tried to leave him. Being too scared to leave she stayed for almost a decade, only to come up with an escape plan with a close friend. His wife was briefly considered a missing person, possibly killed by Kleasen, until authorities learned she had fled her home during the investigation into his gun law violations. Extradition battle and death: In 2001 while imprisoned in the UK on the guns violations, Texas authorities began the process of extradition. DNA analysis and other forensic tools were used to obtain new evidence in the 1974 murders of Darley and Fisher, specifically by matching Darley's DNA to blood found near Kleasen's residence. Extradition was agreed in principle subject to the UK requirement of binding assurances not to impose the death penalty. Before he could be extradited, Kleasen died on April 21, 2003 of heart failure. He was 69 years old. Media: -Ken Driggs wrote a book about the murders, Evil Among Us: The Texas Mormon Missionary Murders. The book was published by Signature Books, a Salt Lake City, Utah company that specializes in Mormon-related topics. -Kleasen was the subject of a 2003 British documentary titled The Real Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

The Doe Network

The Doe Network is a non-profit organization of volunteers who work with law enforcement to connect missing persons cases with John/Jane Doe cases. Purpose: The site features cold case disappearances and unidentified decedents, in hopes to create awareness for such cases and to generate potential leads. Those documented have occurred during or before the year 2013. Case files are created for both unidentified and missing persons, detailing physical estimations of the subjects as well as circumstances of the disappearance, sightings and recovery of the unidentified subjects. Images of the missing and unidentified, including forensic facial reconstructions, tattoos, and age progressions are also available for cases. Cases of murder conviction without a body are also listed, although their cases have been solved, as the victim could possibly remain unidentified. The site provides an online form for visitors to submit potential matches between missing and unidentified persons, which are subsequently reviewed by volunteers prior to submission to authorities. After the form is completed by a reader, 16 members of the Doe Network's administrative panel evaluate the importance of the possible match and whether or not to submit it to investigators handling the case. The Web site also works alongside other databases, such as the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System and the NCIC. The Doe Network features worldwide cases and is also presented in various languages. Since the launch of the Doe Network, over 600 people have volunteered. Members are selected after applications are submitted and background information is confirmed. A core team organizes information that is published on the Web site, compiling approved information received from other members. History: The Doe Network was created in 1999 by Jennifer Marra of Michigan as a Web site database for international long-term missing persons and unidentified victims. Marra turned control of the site over to Helene Wahlstrom of Sweden in 2001. Wahlstrom then joined forces with the Cold Cases Yahoo! group headed by Todd Matthews of Tennessee, thereby creating the volunteer group aimed at finding potential matches between missing persons and unidentified victims. Matthews had assisted in the identification of Barbara Ann Hackmann Taylor, previously nicknamed as "Tent Girl," in 1998, which had inspired him to create a website to help solve similar cases. Matthews also co-founded a different organization, known as Project EDAN (Everyone Deserves a Name), which consists of a group of forensic artists. The Doe Network now has members worldwide, including volunteers from all 50 US states. Since the start of the Web site, many have acknowledged the importance of such an organization. The Doe Network lists 74 successful identity resolutions assisted by its volunteers; 36 occurred within the first five years of the group's formation. Resolved cases include Deanna Criswell, found in 1987 and identified in 2015, Samantha Bonnell, and Dorothy Gay Howard, found in 1954 and identified in 2009. Criswell was identified after family members came upon the case file of the unidentified teen and later submitted a possible connection between the two. Samantha Bonnell's mother recognized a reconstruction created by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children on the file of her daughter. Various other cases have been solved in a similar way, often when loved ones or those investigating the disappearance of a missing individual discover a case file on the website that details a case similar to their missing companion or family member. The Doe Network has received criticism, as many officials note that they received significant amounts of information "that can be annoying," as Matthews stated in an interview with National Public Radio in 2008. In popular culture: -The Doe Network, its founders, and history were featured prominently in the book The Skeleton Crew: How Amateur Sleuths Are Solving America's Coldest Cases by Deborah Halber. -The Doe Network was also mentioned in an episode of Forensic Files

Disappearance of Alessia and Livia Schepp

Alessia Vera Schepp and Livia Clara Schepp are missing persons from Saint-Sulpice, a suburb of Lausanne in the canton of Vaud, Switzerland. Mathias Schepp, their father, picked up his twin daughters from his ex-wife's home in St-Sulpice and they never returned. The body of Mathias was later found in Italy, where the authorities presumed that he had committed suicide. The fate of the six-year-old girls has remained unknown since January 30, 2011. Their disappearance led to a police hunt across Switzerland, France and Italy. Background: Alessia and Livia were twin sisters, born on October 7, 2004. The girls were the only children of Irina Mayme Lucidi Schepp, an Italian-born Swiss lawyer, and Matthias Kaspar Schepp, 43, a Canadian-born Swiss engineer. They married on July 2004 in Ascoli Piceno, Italy. They both worked for the tobacco company Philip Morris. One year previously the couple had split up, living in the same village but in separate homes. Possible murder by Matthias Schepp: In February 2011 police investigators said that Schepp sent a letter to his wife suggesting that he had killed the children. The letter was not released to the public. According to CNN, the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera was allowed to publish a single sentence from the letters which said "The children rest in peace, they have not suffered". A search of Schepp's computer showed that in the days leading up to the trip, he searched for information about firearms and poisons, along with the timetables for the ferry.

Disappearance of Ayla Reynolds

Ayla Reynolds is a 20-month-old toddler from Waterville, Maine, who disappeared on December 16, 2011. She was last seen at 9 p.m. that night, in her bed by a family member, but was not there when her father checked the next morning. The search for Ayla was the largest search for a missing person in the state's history, and the third-largest in United States history. Biography: Ayla Reynolds is the daughter of Trista Reynolds and Justin DiPietro. Neither have been charged in relation to the case; however, State investigators and Trista Reynolds have both expressed that they believe DiPietro has not been forthcoming about his knowledge of Ayla's disappearance. Ayla was declared legally dead on May 30, 2017. Night of Ayla's disappearance: Ayla had been sent for a stay with her father, Justin DiPietro by Karen Small from DHS while her mother Trista Reynolds went to rehab. She was reported missing from her bed on December 17, 2011. According to DiPietro and police, the last time he saw Ayla, she was wearing green polka dot pajamas with "Daddy's Princess" written across them, along with a soft cast on her left arm. There were two people, besides DiPietro, in the house at the time of Ayla's disappearance - his girlfriend Courtney Roberts, and his sister Elisha DiPietro. A news conference was held by state police in May 2012 to discuss recent developments in the case, such as the discovery of blood in her father's house and the number of people who were present at the time of her disappearance. The blood was confirmed to be more than a cupful of Ayla's blood, adjacent to DiPietro's bed. The only comment state investigators made at the time of its discovery was that it was 'more blood than a small cut would produce.' Search efforts: Following Ayla's disappearance, a reward of $30,000 for information leading to her safe return was posted by various Waterville businesses. The reward generated approximately 1,200 leads, many of them from psychics, none of which led to the discovery of any information regarding Ayla. DiPietro, his brother Lance, and a mutual friend collaborated with the Laura Recovery Center to produce t-shirts, buttons, flyers, and other goods to spread awareness of Ayla's disappearance. DiPietro did not speak about his daughter's disappearance for almost three weeks after the story broke. As a result, Ayla's mother accused him of having something to hide. Nearly a full year later, in October 2012, police trawled Messalonskee Stream a second time to look for Ayla's remains, when construction workers repairing a bridge artificially lowered the water level in the stream. Nothing was found. On June 25, 2015, an unidentified toddler, known as "Baby Doe" or Deer Island Jane Doe, was found dead on the shore of Deer Island, Massachusetts. The subject was believed to have been around three to five years old at the time of death, which was somewhat consistent with Reynolds. Many suspected that the unidentified body was Ayla, but she was soon excluded as a possible identity. The Jane Doe was identified in September 2015 as Bella Bond. Aftermath: At the one-year anniversary of Ayla's disappearance, the Maine State Police, Maine Warden Service, and Waterville Police stated that they would not let up on search efforts until Ayla was found. Two searches conducted earlier that month in southern New Hampshire and in Mayfield turned up nothing. A candlelight vigil was held in Waterville to mark one month of Ayla's being missing and was attended by DiPietro. He was also the first to leave the vigil and refused to speak to the media. Trista organized a 4 mile (6.4 kilometers) walk in Waterville called the "Eyes Open" walk, as well as a similar walk in Portland, in May and July 2012, in order to keep media attention focused on the case. On May 17, 2017, Ayla was declared dead by the State of Maine. In popular culture: -In 2012, A local Maine songwriter, Pete Haase, wrote a song about Ayla's disappearance and the effect it had on the community. -In 2013, the Ugandan singer Pallaso released his single "It's Cold" subtitled "Tribute to Ayla Reynolds" accompanied by a music video that highlights the cause of disappeared children.

give coffee

so in the spring my mom was out of town and my brother accidentally overslept. i took a shower and when i got out of the shower, went thru my morning routine and made everything i did i heard noise and i'm like, "hello?" when i didn't get a response i thought maybe i was hearing things. 15 or so minutes later my brother came down. i'm like, "what are you doing here?" he realized he'd overslept. dad gave my brother a ride and as a thank you i gave the left over coffee

January 2015 North American blizzard

The January 2015 North American blizzard was a powerful nor'easter that affected Canada and the Central and Eastern United States, and eventually, parts of Southern Greenland and Western Europe. The nor'easter disrupted transportation, with snow emergencies declared in six states and travel bans enacted in four of these states – Connecticut, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island – as well as in New York City. Most passenger rail service was suspended, and thousands of flights were cancelled. Schools and activities saw weather-related cancellations for one or more days. The storm was also given unofficial names, such as Blizzard of 2015, and Winter Storm Juno. Meteorological history: On January 23, a low-pressure area developed off the Pacific Northwest, before moving over the Canadian Prairies by January 24. The storm system quickly moved southeastward into the Upper Midwest during the evening of January 24, taking a path typical of an Alberta clipper. As it progressed southward, the storm intensified, with frontogenesis occurring the next day. By noon on January 25, the upper-level low was centered near the border between Iowa and Missouri in correlation with a weak shortwave trough. Moisture from the Gulf of Mexico wrapped around the system from the south, resulting in widespread rainfall and snow over the Midwest. Throughout the day, the system traversed eastward along the Kentucky-Tennessee border. Snowfall remained concentrated along a cold front north of the Ohio River. At 09:00 UTC on January 26, the Weather Prediction Center began issuing storm summaries on the developing disturbance while the low-pressure system was centered near Bluefield, West Virginia. At the time, mixed precipitation was occurring over northern Appalachia. As this system tracked eastward, it gradually weakened; however, at the same time, a new low-pressure system formed off the coast of North Carolina and began to track north-northeastward, eventually becoming the dominant low of the storm. Early on January 30, the nor'easter left the East Coast, even as another winter storm began to impact the region. During the next day, the former nor'easter continued to accelerate eastward across the North Atlantic, even as it rapidly weakened. On January 31, the winter storm was absorbed by a much more powerful extratropical cyclone developing over Western Europe. Forecasting controversy: A number of New York City residents criticized New York Governor Andrew Cuomo's decision to shut down the city's subway system; it had never previously been closed due to snow. The nor'easter dropped much less snow in the city than originally expected, totaling 9.8 inches (25 cm) in Central Park. The models were 50 miles off; the storm failed to bring moisture back to New York City and New Jersey. Preparations: On January 25, 2015, blizzard warnings were issued for areas of coastal New England, New York and New Jersey. High winds and heavy snow were forecast for the evening of January 26 and all day January 27, impacting a 250-mile area from New York City to Boston. On January 26, many roads in New York and New England were closed to all vehicles except emergency vehicles due to life-threatening conditions on area roadways. Many churches and other houses of prayer remained open to those in need of a warming center. At the height of the storm, a 300-mile (480 km) stretch of Interstate 95 from northern New Jersey to the Massachusetts/New Hampshire border was closed in conjunction with travel bans in the impacted areas. Portions of Interstates 78, 80, 84, 87, 90, 91 and 93 were also shut down by the storm. Pennsylvania: In preparation for the winter storm, the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation deployed approximately 350 salting trucks to treat major roadways. On January 26, Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf signed a disaster emergency proclamation in an attempt to distribute state resources as quickly as possible. Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter closed municipal offices and schools for January 27 and cancelled trash collection for the day. Meanwhile, SEPTA's bus lines closed while its train system ran 24 hours a day for Monday and Tuesday. According to the Philadelphia Office of Emergency Management, the snow emergency declaration was lifted at 6:00 a.m. Tuesday morning. New Jersey: The South Brunswick Police Department said in a press release on January 25 that additional officers and public works staff would be on duty throughout the storm. The department urged residents to make preparations in anticipation that travel would be impossible for several days. The Monroe Township Office of Emergency Management released a guideline to ensure residents were safe and prepared for the nor'easter. New Jersey Governor Chris Christie declared a state of emergency for the duration of the storm; in a morning press conference, Christie also urged all nonessential personnel to remain off roadways. A travel ban was issued later that day, to be put in effect on January 26 at 11 pm; Amtrak and New Jersey Transit services were also suspended. New York: In a statement on January 25, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo urged residents to take their necessary safety precautions and prepare for the possibility of disrupted commute on Monday and Tuesday. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority deployed extra crews, salting trucks, and chained tires. Delta Air Lines promised full refunds for flights significantly delayed. The State Emergency Operations Center in Albany was expected to be staffed beginning early on January 26 to coordinate with all affected counties. At least 1,806 plows and 126,000 tons of salt were expected to be divided across the region, and the National Guard was expected to deploy more than six dozen personnel and 20 vehicles throughout the region. New York State Police were expected to bring in additional personnel, as well as supply at least 50 4x4 vehicles, 8 all-terrain vehicles, and 8 snowmobiles. At its major transportation facilities, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey readied more than 200 piece of snow equipment at its airports, more than 60 pieces of snow equipment for its bridges and tunnels, hundreds of thousands of gallons of liquid anti-icer chemicals and thousands of tons of solid de-icers, plow-equipped trains, liquid snow-melting agent trains, and a "jet engine" plow. The New York State Thruway Authority activated its emergency operations ahead of the winter storm and is expected to supply 338 snowplows, 18 snowblowers, 55 front-end loaders, and approximately 126,000 tons of salt. The New York State Department of Transportation also activated its emergency operations, mobilizing 162 snow plows and nearly 338 operators to Long Island and the Hudson Valley, totaling to approximately 600 plows and 1,300 operators and supervisors across downstate New York. A total of 1,444 snow plows and 3,629 operators and supervisors would be available statewide. New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio warned of 2 to 3 feet (0.61 to 0.91 m) of snow, and said, "Prepare for something worse than we have seen before." De Blasio ordered all vehicles off the streets by 11 pm on January 26, and declared that, with the exception of emergency and government vehicles, anyone driving in New York City after 11 pm on January 26 would be fined. Services on the New York City Subway, Long Island Rail Road, Metro-North Railroad, and Amtrak were also suspended. Connecticut: Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy announced in a press conference early on January 26 that Connecticut Transit services would be suspended and a statewide travel ban would be effective beginning at 9 p.m EST; he also urged all residents to leave work early and shelter in their homes. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority announced that it would be adding additional trains to accommodate for those who travel by rail. The governor announced that more than 600 crews would be working to pre-treat major roads, while he issued a declaration of civil preparedness emergency to coordinate resources during the storm. Connecticut Light and Power and United Illuminating prepared for a "Level 1" emergency and summoned outside tree and line crews. Later that day, the governor declared a state of emergency. The travel ban was lifted for Fairfield and Litchfield Counties in western Connecticut at 8 a.m. on the 27th, and for the remainder of the state at 2 p.m. that afternoon. Rhode Island: Rhode Island Governor Gina Raimondo urged people to ensure that they had enough food, water, and fuel to last several days for what could be a "very severe and dangerous weather event". She asked residents to keep fire hydrants uncovered and asked that generators used for electricity were located outside of homes and in well-ventilated locations. On January 26, the governor declared a state of emergency and announced that a statewide travel ban would go into effect at midnight. National Grid gathered approximately 1,000 crews to help restore power after the storm passed. Massachusetts: Massachusetts Governor Charlie Baker declared a state of emergency and asked residents to remain safe and off roadways. A statewide travel ban was issued effective at midnight on January 27, and the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority announced that it would be closed that day. In Boston, up to 35,000 tons of salt were prepared and snow farms were readied to store the removed snow following the passage of the storm. Electric companies brought in extra crews. The Fall River, Massachusetts Department of Public Works gathered more than 800 tons of salt and began to treat major roadways in advance of the storm. Atlantic Canada: Environment Canada issued special weather statements to all of the Maritime provinces on January 23, warning of the future developing storm. On January 26 Environment Canada issued Winter Storm Warnings for all of Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and central to southern New Brunswick. These warnings were later upgraded to Blizzard Warnings. Between 6 and 20 inches (15 and 51 cm) of snow was forecast across the Maritimes. On January 27, Snow started early in the morning in southwestern Nova Scotia and continued northeastward. A large wind gust of 80 mph (130 km/h) was measured in Baccaro Point, NS. Meanwhile, in Sluice Point there were gusts exceeding 70 mph (110 km/h) in the afternoon. In Moncton snow totaled near 11.8 inches (30 cm) the most out of all four provinces. The strong winds and blowing snow caused poor traveling conditions across Atlantic Canada. Impact: FlightAware reported that 1,200 flights were expected to be cancelled on January 26. Delta pre-emptively cancelled 600 flights; furthermore, a dozen flights from London Heathrow to New York, Philadelphia and Boston were cancelled on the same date. At least two deaths related to the nor'easter occurred on Long Island, New York. Sean Urda, a 17-year-old student from John Glenn High School, was killed when he struck a light pole while snow tubing with two other people in Huntington. An 83-year-old man with dementia was found dead in his backyard in Bay Shore. The National Basketball Association postponed two games scheduled to take place on January 26, both in New York City. The game between the Portland Trail Blazers and the Brooklyn Nets was rescheduled for April 6, while the game between the Sacramento Kings and the Manhattan-based New York Knicks was rescheduled for March 3. WWE had events scheduled to take place in Hartford, Connecticut and in Boston, Massachusetts, but had to cancel them, instead choosing to air Royal Rumble highlights. Significant flooding was reported in Scituate, Massachusetts, where National Guardsmen were sent to rescue people from the high waters and power was cut to some areas of the town to prevent fires from breaking out. Elsewhere in the state, eighty feet of seawall in Marshfield was washed away by the storm, and a number of houses in the town were condemned. "Virtually all" utility customers lost power on the island of Nantucket and in Provincetown on Cape Cod during the storm. A replica of the USS Providence, maintained by the Providence Maritime Heritage Foundation and designated in 1992 as the flagship and tall ship ambassador of the state of Rhode Island, was toppled and severely damaged by high winds during the storm while in drydock for the winter. Snow from the storm fell as far south as parts of North Carolina, southern Virginia, Washington, D.C., and the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area, where trace amounts were reported beginning on January 26. Schools in some Virginia counties were closed due to the weather. Records: Up to 34.5 in (88 cm) of snow fell in Worcester, Massachusetts, marking the city's largest storm total accumulation on record. The Blue Hill Observatory in Massachusetts observed 30.8 in (78 cm), or the second-largest storm total accumulation on record, while both Providence, Rhode Island and Portland, Maine recorded their fourth-largest storm total accumulations on record, at 19.1 in (49 cm). Boston observed 24.6 in (62 cm) of snow, its largest January storm total accumulation and its sixth largest storm total accumulation on record. Disaster relief funds: In April 2015, President Obama made a federal disaster declaration for the January 26–27 snow, allowing some reimbursement for damages. Massachusetts distributed an extra $30 million to cities and towns for repairs from the winter overall.

Offical

It's official. I've got a panic disorder. Its partially cause by my autism but it's its own separate thing. I don't like to deviate from my schedule and I rarely change things. Of course that's once I get a routine.

on impulse

so when i said i converted due to defending my church as well as taking the idea of converting and running with it. it was on impulse. i originally didn't have a strong enough calling TO convert but i did because i was like fine let's just do it.

Murder of Dorothy Jane Scott

Dorothy Jane Scott disappeared on May 28, 1980, in Anaheim, California. She had driven two co-workers to the hospital after one had been bitten by a spider. While they were waiting for a prescription to be filled, Scott went to get her car and bring it around to meet them. Her car approached them, but it sped away; neither could see who was driving as its headlights had blinded them. They reported her missing a couple of hours later, after not hearing from her. In the preceding months, Scott had been receiving anonymous phone calls from a man who had reportedly been stalking her. He had threatened to get her alone and "cut her up into bits so no one will ever find her". In June 1980, a man called the Orange County Register, a local newspaper that had published a story on the disappearance, and claimed he had killed Scott. Police believe that the caller was Scott's killer. From 1980 to 1984, Scott's mother Vera also received phone calls from a man who claimed that he had Scott or had killed her. The phone calls could not be traced, as the man did not stay on the line long enough. In August 1984, partial remains were found and identified as Scott's. No arrests have ever been made in her case, which has been called one of the strangest disappearances ever. Victim: Scott was a single mother, living in Stanton, California, with her aunt and 4-year-old son. She was a secretary for two jointly-owned Anaheim, California, stores, one that sold psychedelic items (i.e. love beads, lava lamps) and the other a head shop. Co-workers and friends said she preferred staying at home, was a devout Christian, and did not drink or do drugs. Her parents, who lived in Anaheim, babysat their grandson while Scott worked. Scott's father, Jacob, said his daughter may have dated on occasion but had no steady boyfriend that the family knew of. Prior to abduction and murder: Months before her abduction, Scott had been receiving anonymous phone calls at work from an unidentified male. She told her mother she recognized the voice but could not remember the man's name. The caller alternately told Scott of his love and devotion and also threatened to kill her. The man also said he had been stalking her, and provided accurate details of her day-to-day life to prove it. Scott's mother recounted, "One day he called and said to go outside because he had something for her. She went out and there was a single dead red rose on the windshield of her car." Scott's mother said one call especially horrified her daughter. The man reportedly told Scott he would get her alone and "cut her up into bits so no one will ever find her". Because of the calls, Dorothy considered buying a handgun; about a week before her disappearance, she began taking karate lessons. Disappearance and murder: At 9 p.m. on May 28, 1980, Scott was at an employee meeting at work. She noted co-worker Conrad Bostron did not look well and had a red mark on his arm. She and another co-worker, Pam Head, left the employee meeting to take Bostron to the emergency room at UC Irvine Medical Center. Scott then changed her black scarf to a red one and stopped by her parents' house on the way to the hospital to check on her son. Medical personnel determined Bostron had suffered a black widow spider bite and treated him; Head said she and Scott remained in the E.R. waiting room. At no time, Head said, did Scott leave her side. Bostron was discharged around 11 p.m. and given a prescription. Scott offered to bring her car to the exit; she did not want Bostron to walk too far in his condition, as he was still not feeling well. Head said Scott used the restroom briefly before heading out to the parking lot. Head and Bostron filled his prescription and waited at the exit for Scott; when they did not see her after a few minutes they went out to the E.R.'s parking lot. Suddenly, they saw Scott's car speeding toward them; its headlights blinded them so they could not see who was behind the wheel. They waved their arms to try to get Scott's attention, but the car sped past them and took a sharp right turn out of the parking lot. Initially, both thought Scott had an emergency come up with her son. A few hours later, after not hearing from her, Head and Bostron reported Scott missing. At about 4:30 a.m. on May 29, Scott's car, a white 1973 Toyota station wagon, was found burning in an alley about 10 miles (16 km) from the hospital. Neither she nor her supposed kidnapper were anywhere nearby. Discovery: On August 6, 1984, a construction worker discovered dog and human bones side by side, about 30 feet (10 m) from Santa Ana Canyon Road. The bones were partly charred and authorities believed they had been there for two years, as a bushfire had "swept across the site" in 1982. A turquoise ring and watch were also found. Scott's mother said the watch had stopped at 12:30 a.m. on May 29 - about an hour, she said, after Pam Head and Conrad Bostron last saw Scott's vehicle. On August 14, the bones were identified as Scott's by dental records. An autopsy could not determine the cause of death. A memorial service was held on August 22. The motivation for Scott's abduction and murder is unknown. Mysterious phone calls: About a week after Scott's disappearance, her parents received a phone call from an unidentified man who said, "I've got her" and hung up. The same man called every Wednesday and said either that he had Dorothy or had killed her. The calls were usually brief, and usually occurred when Vera was home alone. In April 1984, the man called during the evening; Jacob Scott answered and the calls stopped. After Scott's remains were found in August 1984, the family started receiving calls again. Police installed a voice recorder at the Scott residence. They were not able to trace the calls, however, because the man never stayed on the line long enough. A possible motivation in Scott's murder surfaced June 12, 1980. An unidentified man called the front desk at the Orange County Register (the paper had run a story that day about the case). A managing editor told police the man said, "I killed her. I killed Dorothy Scott. She was my love. I caught her cheating with another man. She denied having someone else. I killed her." The editor also said the caller knew Conrad Bostron had suffered from a spider bite the night of May 28. He also knew that Scott had been wearing a red scarf; she had changed her black scarf to a red one after the employee meeting. Neither of these details had been published in the June 12 article. The caller also claimed Scott phoned him from the hospital that night. Pam Head disputed that claim, saying she had been with Scott the entire time and she had not made a phone call. Investigators believe the anonymous caller was responsible for Scott's death.

Disappearance of Diane Suzuki

Diane Suzuki was a nineteen-year-old dancer and student at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa who disappeared on July 6, 1985, and has since been the focus of one of the most notorious modern criminal investigations in the history of the state of Hawaii. The Diane Suzuki investigation was the first instance in which the Honolulu Police Department used luminol and other technological advances in forensic science. Suzuki was a female resident of Halawa, 4 feet 11 inches tall, 109 pounds, with a slim build, and of Japanese descent. Suzuki was last seen at about 5 p.m. on July 6, 1985, outside the Rosalie Woodson Dance Academy in Aiea, where she was employed as a dance instructor. During the same time period in Hawaii, there were the unsolved killings of at least nine women on Oahu. The deaths of Lisa Au, Regina Sakamoto, and others all over the island. Five, including that of Sakamoto, in which the victims were found with their hands tied behind their back, were attributed to an unidentified serial killer known as the Honolulu Strangler. However, Suzuki's disappearance did not fit that profile. The discovery of blood evidence at the site led to legislation that overhauled Hawaii's harassment laws to include stalking, and changed the status of TRO violations to a class C felony (with a maximum penalty of 5 years in jail) in the hope of preventing further violence against women. In 1993, Keith Kaneshiro, who was then prosecuting attorney for the City and County of Honolulu, attempted to re-open the case, but after more than 300 hours of grand jury testimony and thousands of dollars spent on the investigation, no charges were filed. The case remains unsolved. Media: Retired Honolulu Police Department Major Gary Dias wrote a book entitled Honolulu Cop including details on his investigation into the Au and Suzuki murders.

National Missing and Unidentified Persons System

National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, abbreviated as NamUs, is a clearing house for missing persons and unidentified decedent records in the United States, a part of the Department of Justice. NamUs also provides free DNA testing and other forensic services, such as anthropology and odontology assistance. History: In 2005, the National Institute of Justice assembled for a national strategy meeting regarding missing persons in the United States; they called the meeting "Identifying the Missing Summit." Forensic scientists, policymakers, victim advocates and law enforcement officials discussed the challenges and strategies for solving missing person cases and identifying unidentified decedent cases. From there the Deputy Attorney General created a task force, The National Missing Persons Task Force, and encouraged the U.S Department of Justice to find prominent tools that will help solve these cases. NamUs was created, subsequently. The NamUs database was created in three phases; in Phase III, released in 2009, the system became fully searchable and open to the public. Through NamUs, users will have access to three databases: Unidentified Persons database, Missing Persons database and an UnClaimed Persons database. In the database users can search by state, date last seen, circumstances, physical/medical characteristics, clothing and accessories, sex, ethnicity, race and more, in order to locate or search for a potential match or personal profile. Each missing person and unidentified person have their own four digit code number. If a potential match is found, users can notify and submit the potential match to case managers, local law enforcement agencies or NamUs regional administrators. If a potential match has been ruled out it will appear on the unidentified person's profile, under the section "exclusions." Number of Unidentified Remains in the United States: The issue of unidentified remains in the United States has been coined "the Nation's Silent Mass Disaster." There are approximately 40,000 unidentified human remains that have been buried or cremated before being identified. Furthering the problem of identification, in 2004, less than half of the nation's medical examiner's offices had policies for retaining DNA, x-rays, or fingerprints of unidentified persons. Another issue that has left remains unidentified has been the reporting of missing persons. Those who go missing over the age of 18 are not required to be reported - reporting them is voluntary. Consequently, there has been a low rate of reported adult cases through NCIC (the National Crime Information Center). Ultimately NamUs is working together with the public and national level databases to incorporate the records of missing persons and meet the challenges of non-reporting. Currently, there have been 16,080 missing person cases on file through NamUs. As of 23 February 2014, 60.46%, or 9,723 of them remain open and unsolved. Of the closed cases, 665, or 10.46%, have been closed through the aid of the NamUs database. Furthermore, there have been 10,714 unidentified persons cases on filed through NamUs. As of 23 February 2014, 88.66%, or 9,500, remain open and unidentified. Of the closed cases, 285, or 23.495%, have been closed through the aid of the NamUs database.

Murder of Pamela Werner

On the morning of 8 January 1937, the severely mutilated body of Pamela Werner was found near the Fox Tower in Beijing, just outside the city's Legation Quarter. The only child of Sinologist and retired British diplomat E. T. C. Werner, she had last been seen by acquaintances just before leaving a skating rink the previous night. No one was ever charged in the case. Though British and Chinese officials cooperated in the investigation, it was hampered by official resistance and the city's general chaos: Beijing at the time was crowded with war refugees, there was upheaval elsewhere in China and Europe, and Japanese troops were on the verge of occupying the city. They focused on some members of the city's expatriate community, but the case was officially closed with the finding that the mutilation suggested a Chinese killer, before they could be sure of any suspects; the Japanese occupation foreclosed any further efforts to reopen it. Some British diplomatic records pertaining to the case were later weeded; Werner, whose chequered career with the Diplomatic Service in China had alienated many of his former colleagues who oversaw the investigation, later used his own resources to identify American dentist Wentworth Prentice as the likely killer. A subject of considerable media attention at the time, the case drifted into obscurity with the ensuing outbreak of the Second Sino–Japanese War, which soon grew into World War II, and the Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War leading to the establishment of the People's Republic of China a short time afterwards. Interest in the case was revived with the 2011 publication of Paul French's bestseller Midnight in Peking, which endorsed Werner's conclusions and won several awards. However, a website set up by some of Prentice's descendants argues that documentary evidence from the time contradicts that conclusion and casts doubt on many of French's assertions. Background: Pamela Werner was a British citizen with an unusual background. At the time of her death she was living in an increasingly tense and teeming city. Beijing in the late 1930s: At the start of 1937 Beijing (then referred to in Western languages as Peking) and its 1.5 million residents, both Chinese and foreign, knew that they were living in the end of an era. While the city was the third-richest in China, it was no longer capital of the Republic of China. Despite the success of the Northern Expedition, Kuomintang leader Chiang Kai-shek had retreated to Nanjing. Originally his aim was to better consolidate his political power and military position against Mao Zedong's People's Liberation Army, which sought to establish a Communist state; but after the December 1936 Xi'an incident, where Zhang Xueliang had held him hostage for two weeks, he had agreed to Zhang's demand that he seek an alliance with the Communists to better defend China against the Japanese. Chiang had left General Song Zheyuan in charge of Peking, to do what he could to hold off both the northern warlords who still remained and, increasingly, the Japanese, who having successfully taken Manchuria over the previous six years were now camped within a few miles of the onetime Chinese imperial palace, the Forbidden City, and controlled almost all the routes in and out of the city. Planning to use Peking as a base for their eventual conquest of China, the Japanese were working to undermine the city's resistance. They covertly encouraged the drug trade and staged regular military provocations. Chinese residents of the city believed that Chiang was prepared to abandon it to the Japanese if he could just be assured of retaining all of China south of the Yangzi River. "The end was coming," Paul French wrote in 2011, "it was just a question of when." Many residents assumed that that end would be death at Japanese hands, either by starvation as they besieged the city, or massacred the survivors afterward. The city's population had swelled as refugees flocked to it. Many were Chinese, fleeing the wars and disruption elsewhere in the country. But a sizable portion had come from Europe, primarily Russian Whites, left stateless by the Communist victory in the Russian Civil War and subsequent establishment of the Soviet Union. Others were Jews, leaving behind the worsening conditions in Nazi Germany and elsewhere in Europe, joined by those who also felt at risk from the advancing tide of fascism. They were joined by military deserters evading capture, fugitives from justice in their homelands, and travelers who had either been stranded in China or decided to stay. Most of the European refugees had come to China penniless, and worked menial jobs, or sometimes engaged in criminal activity, to get by. The city's foreign diplomats and businessmen looked down on them as a threat to European hegemony in the city and hoped they would eventually find their way to Shanghai. They were sometimes joined in this assessment by the expatriates, many of them businessmen who dealt with the Chinese, or those who had moved to China for better economic prospects serving the expatriate community. The disparate exchange rate between strong Western currencies such as the pound sterling and American dollar and the Chinese silver dollar, as well as lower costs of living in China, made it possible for expatriates to live better than they could in their native countries for the same amount of money. American journalist Edgar Snow, then finishing his book Red Star Over China, the first Western account of Mao and his Communist army, and his wife Helen were able to own a racehorse on their earnings as reporters, for example. The Werners: Edward Theodore Chalmers Werner was a New Zealand-born British citizen whose wealthy Prussian father took the family travelling around the world in his own youth. He had returned to England to attend Tonbridge School. Due to his father's death in his teens, Werner had to find employment after finishing, and after passing the Foreign Office's cadet exam he was sent to Beijing to learn Chinese. Werner took readily to the country's language and culture, which he studied avidly while serving the Diplomatic Service in a variety of positions over the next decades, including at one point as consul. However, his interest in the country where he served was coupled with poor personal skills, and many of his postings were remote locations, meant as punishments for volatile disagreements with superiors and sometimes those the consular officers served. He nevertheless married a socially prominent woman, Gladys Ravenshaw, and the couple stayed in Beijing after his 1914 retirement, where he continued his studies. In 1919 the Werners adopted a two-year-old girl, whom they named Pamela, from the orphanage run by Portuguese nuns at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, or South Church, in Beijing. Pamela's biological parentage was not known, although her fair complexion and grey eyes suggest that she was, like many of the other orphans at the South Church, the offspring of exiled Russian Whites. After Gladys died of what was said to have been a drug overdose while being treated for meningitis in 1922, Werner devoted much of his life to Pamela, teaching her Chinese to the point that she was fluent from a very early age; later she would emulate her father by traveling around the city on her bicycle, often unaccompanied. Outside of the home he wrote books and articles about China, researched the language and its many dialects on long walks around Beijing, and occasionally lectured at Peking University. The Werners lived, like a growing number of foreigners, outside the city's heavily secured Legation Quarter, a cramped two acres (8,100 m2) that was the only extraterritorial portion of the city, in contrast to the more populous treaty ports of Shanghai and Tianjin. Among their neighbors in the hutong where they lived in a modernized siheyuan, or courtyard house, were American journalist Edgar Snow and his wife. Werner sent Pamela to the private schools that catered to the city's more affluent foreigners. At the end of 1936, she was on holiday from Tientsin Grammar School in what is now Tianjin. In the wake of some incidents there that may possibly have involved Sydney Yeates, the school's headmaster, making sexual overtures to her, Werner was preparing to send her back to England to continue her education, a move Pamela did not welcome. He feared his growing daughter was maintaining too active a social life for a woman her age and was also worried about some of the young men who had attempted to court her. He had hit one of them, a young Chinese man, with his cane in front of the house during a confrontation. Disappearance and death: On the last day of her life, Pamela went to a dental appointment in the morning and then returned home to write letters. She left the family home in the late afternoon. Ho Ying, a servant who typically went out to purchase food around 3 p.m. daily, informed her at the time he was doing so and asked her if, as was often the case, she wanted him to buy sweetmeats when he did so. She declined, saying she herself would be leaving within the hour, although she indicated she would return by 7:30 for dinner, asking Ho to prepare meatballs and rice. When he returned she was gone; the family's gatekeeper had seen her leave with her bicycle. After leaving, she met Ethel Gurevitch, a younger friend, the daughter of Russian émigrés, whom she had known for five years, at the Wagons-Lits Hotel, a popular gathering place for the city's foreign community, per an agreement the two had made the day before; Pamela told Gurevitch she had been there earlier and left briefly before returning to meet her. Afterwards they went back to the Gurevitch home where Ethel's mother served the two tea, buttered bread and cake; Pamela ate very little, saying she was not hungry. The young women then went out to an ice skating rink operated by a French company, arriving around 6 p.m., where they skated with a third friend, Lillian Marinovski, another Russian. The three remained together for most of the time they were there except for one brief period when Pamela went to speak to another girl. Around 7:30 p.m. Gurevitch recalled that Pamela said she had to go home for dinner. They asked her if she felt comfortable returning home alone at night; she told them she always went by herself and that "nothing can happen to me here in Peking." Marinvoski saw her bicycle away, with her skates over her shoulder. It was the last time anyone is known to have seen Pamela Werner alive. By 8 p.m. Pamela had still not returned home; although her father had. Around 10:30 he asked Ho to go to the skating rink and see if she was there; by the time he arrived the rink had closed and workers were cleaning up for the evening. They could not tell him anything specifically about Pamela as, they said, there had been around 200 people skating at the rink over the course of the evening. Ho returned to the Werner home, where E. T. C. told him to go home for the night. By the older man's later testimony, he went out himself with an electric torch to look for his daughter, returning at 1 a.m. and going to bed; later he would claim he had spent most of the night looking for her. Discovery of body: Shortly after 8 a.m. the next morning, two rickshaw drivers near the Fox Tower along the city's old walls noticed a group of wild dogs showing interest in a bundle lying in the ditch near the wall, all that remained of the canal that had formerly run along it. An elderly man saw this too, and went down to take a closer look. After finding it was the severely beaten and stabbed body of what appeared to be a young European woman, he ran to the nearest police box, a quarter of a mile (400 m) away, to report it. They secured the scene, keeping the dogs away, and covering the body with a bamboo mat to discourage curious onlookers until detectives could arrive. Col. Han Shih-chung of the Peking police supervised the investigation. At first he presumed the decedent to have been yet another of the many Russian Whites who, overwhelmed by despair and/or out of options, had ended their own lives; the preceding night having been Christmas in the Russian Orthodox calendar lent some support to this. But the wounds seemed more extensive than those a suicide might inflict. Aware that the possible killing of a wealthy foreign woman just outside the Legation Quarter might be of interest to the foreign authorities there, even though the Chinese had jurisdiction, Han called W.P. Thomas, the Legation Quarter's police commissioner, to the scene. Uncertainty over the woman's identity ended when E. T. C. Werner stumbled across the scene a short while later. After resting at his home, he had resumed his search for his daughter in the morning light and left a note about her disappearance with Thomas's office. When he saw the body, he shrieked "Pamela!" and collapsed next to the body. He had apparently recognised the clothing and jewellery she was wearing; later a constable with the Foreign Legation who also knew Pamela confirmed the identification. By the evening the crime scene had been secured and processed, and Pamela's body was taken to Peking Union Medical College to be autopsied. Investigation: There were plenty of deaths to investigate in Peking at that time. Each morning several bodies were routinely collected from the streets. Most were suicides or natural causes. Homicides were harder to resolve as they could have been either due to routine criminal activity and disputes, or Japanese provocations, or (increasingly) political assassinations carried out by the Kuomintang of its enemies both internal and external. General Song was also having some of the drug dealers he caught summarily executed, particularly if they were not Chinese or Japanese. Both Han and Thomas knew that the investigation into Pamela Werner's death would be unusual. While the Chinese had jurisdiction because of where her body had been found, it was entirely likely that it would be necessary to investigate her death by questioning members of the foreign community, some of whom might enjoy diplomatic immunity or at least reside in the Legation Quarter, where the Peking police had no authority. That aspect of the investigation would be better conducted by law enforcement officers who did have jurisdiction. Given Pamela's social standing, the case would likely attract not only the attention of the press but official interest. The British diplomats would probably not want to see the case solved in any way that would adversely impact the British image in China. Thomas proposed to Han that the Peking police exercise their right to name the official who could serve as a envoy for the investigation, and suggested that that official be Detective Chief Inspector Richard Dennis, a Scotland Yard veteran who was chief of police in the British concession in Tientsin. He could not be as easily pressured by the Diplomatic Service since he was not under their authority. Han agreed, and the two would work together to try to solve the case, a binational cooperation unusual for the time. Pamela's body, and where it was found, had already yielded some clues. The expensive platinum jewelry that had helped confirm the corpse's identity had not been taken, suggesting robbery was not the motive. Pamela's wristwatch had been stopped shortly after midnight, suggesting that was when she had died. There was no blood at the scene other than that on her clothes, suggesting she had been killed elsewhere and dumped there. Nearby was her membership card for the skating rink, with some blood on it (however, her bicycle and skates have never been found). Autopsy report: The autopsy yielded additional information of interest. Pamela had died from a brain hemorrhage caused by several blows to the head, possibly inflicted with a smooth-surfaced piece of wood or stone, blows strong enough to fracture her skull. From the proximity necessary to inflict those blows, and their directness, the pathologists performing the autopsy concluded she had been killed by someone she knew. A similar blunt force trauma injury to the right arm was believed to have been inflicted after death because there was no hemorrhaging around it. Likewise, the low amount of blood released from the stabbings and slashings suggested those, too, were post mortem. They had been inflicted with a knife, likely with two edges to the blade although possibly not equally sharp, at least 4 inches (10 cm) long. Within the body, muscles had been severed cleanly. Through two slits in the abdomen, most of Pamela's internal organs had been removed and her blood drained. The skill required to do this as cleanly and quickly as it had been done suggested to the pathologist that whoever had done so had considerable skill, perhaps that of a surgeon or anatomist. The dogs that had been showing interest in the body could not have inflicted those wounds. Her heart was also missing, with the ribs surrounding broken from the inside to do so, a task requiring a considerable amount of force. A knife had also been used to repeatedly penetrate her vagina, to the point that it could not be determined whether Pamela had been sexually assaulted either before or after she was killed. One of the few internal organs that remained was Pamela's stomach. It was found to contain some partially digested Chinese food. Since she had not been known to have eaten anything other than the bread, cake and tea she had had at her friend's house, this along with the time her watch stopped suggested she had been alive for several hours after leaving the ice rink. The time of death was placed between 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. Pamela's skirt was loose. Her silk stockings had been torn, and her underwear was missing. However, her overcoat and scarf were still with the body, along with shoes and some other personal effects. This further argued for the killing having taken place elsewhere, and the body being dressed afterwards. It was concluded that the killing had been sexually motivated, "not the work of an ordinary sexual sadist", according to an obstetrician-gynaecologist who participated. Han and the doctors who performed the autopsy believed that the intent had been to dismember Pamela after her death but that whoever was doing so was unable to complete the task and hastily dumped the body. Colonel Han made sure distribution of the autopsy report was limited as he did not want the details of Pamela's mutilation widely reported in the press since it would make the case harder to solve. He kept the only copy in his desk. Interviews and leads: Han knew that, as a practical matter, he had 20 days to solve the case, after which his superiors and the press would lose interest in it and other crimes would likely demand his attention. Dennis arrived in Peking by train, preceded by two of his subordinates who would also work with him for a few days. The two began their investigations at once. Many leads poured in, most of them false. One, a rickshaw puller who had been seen washing a bloodied seat cushion near where Pamela's body was found, turned out to have been cleaning up the mess from a fight between a Russian and an American marine. The two interviewed the friends that Pamela had last been seen with; their stories corroborated each other. E. T. C. Werner himself, though grief-stricken, told them of his last afternoon and an overnight search through the city after Pamela had failed to return. Some others in the foreign community, including many of the British diplomats he had clashed with during his career, seemed to think he might have been responsible. He did admit to officers that he had confronted a young Chinese man outside the house whom he accused of being too interested in Pamela, breaking the man's nose with his cane, a move he called an overreaction. The elder Werner told Dennis that he was sending Pamela back to Britain for continued schooling, due to some unspecified incident at Tientsin Grammar, a development he was surprised the detective was unaware of. In retracing Pamela's steps the afternoon and night of 7 January, the detectives did learn one new piece of information. Between 3 and 4 p.m., she had gone to the concierge at the Wagons Lits and asked about renting a room, going so far as to check out the hotel's brochure. Why she did was not known—she could have been preparing for a visit by a boy from her class at Tientsin Grammar whom she had expressed interest in, or preparing to leave her father's home on a more long-term basis. Although Han would not confirm any reports about the extent to which Pamela's body had been mutilated in his first press conference about the investigation, or Dennis's participation, he admitted that the police had no solid leads at that point, two days afterward. Speculation filled the gap in reporting. The Fox Tower was long believed to be haunted by evil spirits, and there were some theories that settled on that explanation for the killing. Some of the expatriates suggested Werner himself might have killed his daughter in a fit of rage. While his fits of temper were well known, and indeed had adversely affected his diplomatic career, Dennis ultimately believed he was innocent. Helen Foster Snow, one of the Werner's neighbors, told the detective that it might have been possible that Kuomintang assassins had mistaken Pamela for her, since the two looked similar. she knew that Chiang's government had not been happy with the things she and her husband Edgar had said about them, especially in contrast with their sympathetic portrayal of the Communists. Dennis considered that theory plausible due to the strong resemblance between Snow and Pamela Werner—in the dark the two could easily have been confused. But the political assassinations carried out by Dai Li's Blue Shirts Society and its more elite counterpart, the Military Statistics Bureau, were much tidier affairs. Their targets were usually shot once in the head and dumped somewhere, not extensively mutilated after death. Han ordered police to canvass the areas Pamela might have traveled through, particularly the area known as the Badlands just outside the Legation Quarter, a neighborhood of hutongs where the bars and brothels that served and employed many of the emigrés and refugees in the city were located. Since Pamela's body must have been moved, possibly with a vehicle, he ordered officers to find and check every registered automobile in the Peking area, even though those records had not been kept consistently. A week after the crime a Russian landlady in the Badlands told police about finding a bloodied dagger and cloth in the possession of a tenant of hers. Suspect arrested and released: The man, known by the name Pinfold, was taken into custody by Han's officers and held at headquarters on Morrison Street (today Wangfujing). Dennis not only attended the interrogation but actively took part, despite orders given him in secret to confine his role in the investigation to the Legation Quarter. Pinfold, later identified by Canadian diplomats in the city as a deserter from the Royal Canadian Army who had fled first to the U.S., where he had acquired a criminal record, and then to China, where he worked as a bodyguard to one of the warlords for several years, before falling into low-paying jobs, refused to talk. Despite being held overnight, Pinfold would not say anything. He smoked heavily and fidgeted nervously, suggesting he was entering the early stages of withdrawal from the opiate addiction widespread among the city's less affluent foreign population at the time. One officer recognized him as a man he had seen lingering a little longer than other passersby when he passed the crime scene, piquing detectives' interest further. In his personal effects they found a business card for an establishment at 27 Chuanban Hutong, a bar run by a Russian emigré that, like many other such businesses in Peking at the time, doubled as a brothel. Canadian officials indicated he had often been seen at 28 Chuanban Hutong next door. The address was in the middle of the Badlands, a neighborhood where most of the refugees had settled, replete with hastily constructed buildings and activity on both sides of the law. Pamela ordinarily avoided the area at night, according to her friends, but it was possible that, in her haste to get home for dinner, she might have chosen the more direct route, which would have taken her right past Nos. 27 and 28. Han had a squad of officers raid 28, while he and Dennis chose the more discreet route of visiting 27 themselves. The raid got press coverage but yielded no new clues—patrons who had been shown pictures of Pamela did not recognize her as having been there on the night of 7 January, which had been crowded due to the holiday. However, at 27 Chuanban, the manager, a former U.S. marine named Joseph Knauf, knew Pinfold and said he worked as security at the neighboring bar. He also told the detectives that Pinfold had been present at weekend nudist gatherings at a cottage in the city's Western Hills, where participants also hunted in the surrounding woods, although that was getting more difficult to do with the increasing Japanese presence. Armed with that information, Han and Dennis returned to reinterview Pinfold, whereupon Dennis informed him that they knew about the nudist gatherings. Pinfold's reticence evaporated, and he admitted he had been at the events but only as a security guard (sometimes recruiting women to dance naked for attendees). He claimed to not have known Pamela. He refused to say where the blood on his dagger and clothes had come from. The nudist weekends: At this point Dennis was suddenly recalled to Tientsin for a meeting with the British consul there. At it he was briefed on why Werner had abruptly withdrawn his daughter from Tientsin Grammar: apparently Pamela had alleged that the headmaster, Sydney Yeates, who also oversaw the house where she boarded while school was in session, had made sexual overtures to her. Yeates had agreed to leave his post and return to England at the end of the school year; in the wake of the murder, for which Yeates had an alibi, that departure had been preponed to the following week. Dennis was told to make sure the murder investigation did not result in any public disclosure of this potential scandal as it would be injurious to British prestige and standing in China at this very difficult time. Werner also caused problems with the British authorities in Peking. They offered a reward of a thousand Chinese dollars, roughly ten times what the average Chinese family lived on per year at the time, for information that would help resolve the case. Werner complained, to no avail, that the reward flyer should be printed in Chinese as well as English, and the money made available via a bank account so that the successful informant could claim it anonymously. Since many Chinese distrusted any governmental authorities, whether their own or foreign, he believed this would make it easier for a local informant to come forward. Back in Peking Dennis learned from Han that Pinfold would have to be released. The pathologists had found that the blood on his knife and clothing was animal, not human, and there was no other evidence he could have been held on. A second pair of keys in his possession had been found to unlock a second residence of his in the Legation Quarter, meaning the authorities there would have to permit him to face charges, and the British consul, Nicholas Fitzmaurice, who was also by law presiding over the inquest as coroner, declined to do so as he did not believe there was sufficient evidence to secure a conviction (nor was he eager to set a precedent that would allow Legation Quarter residents to answer to Chinese courts so easily). After his release his whereabouts are unknown although he is believed to have left Peking. Pinfold's arrest did, however, yield a new lead. Dennis and Han began focusing on the nudist weekends. The Canadian had told them that they were organized by Wentworth Prentice, an American dentist whose patients were mostly wealthy expatriates and diplomats. He had originally settled in China with his wife and children after graduating from Harvard's dental school in 1918, but in 1932 she had returned to the U.S. with the children. His file at the U.S. consulate suggested that at least one person there had been concerned for the safety of one of his children, but did not explain why. Dennis and Legation Quarter police commissioner E.D. Howard went to interview Prentice at his flat in the quarter. It was located right next to the ice rink where Pamela had last been seen. When they arrived Prentice had the windows open, because, he explained, his landlord had decided to repaint the walls despite it being wintertime. He said he had never treated Pamela and that he had been at the movies the evening she disappeared. In the next day's English-language newspaper, George Gorman, an Irish reporter known to be strongly sympathetic to the Japanese, criticized the police for even considering Prentice a suspect. He vouched for Prentice's character, and suggested the real killers were Chinese, not Western. When Dennis spoke with him he learned that Gorman, too, participated in the nudist weekends. Gorman's wife also told him that the night of 6 January, Pamela had visited their house and taken tea with her and her daughter. Conclusion: The investigation became more complicated at this point. Werner, unhappy with the progress or lack thereof of the case, held a press conference of his own on the steps of the British Legation. He decried the lack of information on why Pinfold had been released. Drawing on his considerable knowledge of Chinese culture, he noted that there was absolutely no Chinese religious or folk tradition that involved the harvesting of organs, suggesting to him instead that contrary to widespread rumour his daughter's killer or killers were not Chinese but Western. To the existing reward he added the offer of 5,000 gold Chinese dollars, most of his life savings, an amount triple what an average Chinese family of the time could earn in their lifetimes. His actions annoyed the authorities enough that they told Dennis and Han not to talk to Werner anymore, since he was so obviously overcome by grief. Contrary to what he had suggested, the killers were likely one or more of the many sexually frustrated young Chinese men abounding in Peking at the time. Dennis, suffering from a nagging respiratory ailment since he had come to Peking, had been told by his superiors in Tientsin that he had to return there soon. After some negotiation on his part, they agreed he could stay as late as that year's Chinese New Year, on 7 February. He and Han knew that as a practical matter time was running out for them to solve the case even before then. They vainly sought to learn where Pamela's blood might have been, knowing that the location where she was killed was the only possible lead they had left. On 29 January the inquest was reconvened. After hearing testimony from Pamela's friends and some of the investigating officers, Fitzmaurice recessed the proceeding for lunch and then announced, over reporters' protests, that in the afternoon he would hear from the doctors who had performed the autopsy in camera. At the conclusion of the day, he rendered his verdict that Pamela's death was an unlawful killing, but left it open to a later hearing as to who might have committed the crime. Despite Fitzmaurice's precautions, the newspapers were able to obtain details of the autopsy report and published them the next day. The details of the mutilation scandalized readers and made the foreign population even more fearful. It also made it that much more unlikely that the investigation would be able to find a suspect since the details of the killing were now widely known, and Han began to express doubt that the killer or killers would ever be found. The Chinese New Year of 1937 was raucously celebrated in Peking by Chinese and foreigners alike; many believed this might be the last such holiday for them and the city. After nothing turned up or happened that might have shed new light on Pamela Werner's killing, Dennis returned to Tientsin to attend to pressing matters there, and Han moved on to other cases as well. The Japanese provocations were getting increasingly bold, with tanks being driven through the city and Zeros flown overhead at low altitudes as part of what the Japanese generals still claimed was routine military maneuvering even as they steadily increased their presence outside Peking. At the end of June Fitzmaurice officially concluded the investigation into Pamela's death. By then the news had long vanished from the newspapers; a few freelance reporters attended in the hope of getting a short story. Werner, Fitzmaurice said, had been murdered by person or persons unknown, possibly Chinese. After the announcement, he boarded a ship to return to England for his customary long summer holiday. Two weeks afterwards, the Marco Polo Bridge Incident south of Peking finally led to war; the Japanese took Peking and Tientsin by the end of July. Fitzmaurice retired rather than return. Werner's investigation: E. T. C. Werner remained in Peking despite the occupation, continuing to live in his siheyuan even as many of the city's other foreigners clustered in the Legation Quarter, save the stateless Russian Whites, on the advice of their governments who said they would not be safe outside it. His research activities curtailed by the occupation, he devoted his energies to persuading the Foreign Office to reopen the case. He supplemented his requests with information he had obtained on his own, using his still-considerable financial resources. They were considerably helpful in a city where both inflation and unemployment had risen sharply as a result of the occupation, and he found many people willing to share information with him, including some former Peking police officers whom the Japanese had let go from the force as politically unreliable. His investigation increasingly led him to the brothel at 28 Chuanban; its owners had apparently closed it the day after the murder and left Peking for Tientsin or Shanghai. Likewise, Pinfold, following his arrest, had gone to Tientsin and asked a friend for help hiring a lawyer; the Canadian had also asked if Prentice had been arrested yet. He also had in his possession a receipt from Prentice for straightening some of Pamela's rear teeth about five weeks before the murder, orthodontic work so minor it would not have been noted as recent, and perhaps not at all, by the pathologists. This contradicted Prentice's assertion to Dennis that he had never treated Pamela. Werner's agents eventually led him to the rickshaw puller who had briefly been held the day after the body was discovered. He told Werner a different story of how the blood got on his vehicle's cushion than what Han had told Dennis. He, too, had visited 28 Chuanban late that night, where he had picked up two men and a young European woman wrapped in a white sheet who seemed to him to have trouble moving on her own. It had been her blood on his cushion; Han's account of an unrelated fight was untrue. Werner tried on that basis to persuade the British diplomats to reopen the case, even taking the man with him on one visit, but they felt that the puller was not a credible witness. After repeated requests, the police returned Pamela's clothes and effects to her father. He learned that many of them had not been checked for fingerprints nor properly preserved, leaving them useless as evidence. But in Pamela's diary he learned that during summer 1936 she had gone on a weekend visit to the Western Hills with Gorman and his family, where he had apparently made a sexual overture to her that she rebuffed. That suggested to Werner another connection to Prentice, and a possible motive for the killing. Throughout 1938 and into 1939, Werner continued his investigations. His repeated efforts to get British officials to reopen the case, which many of them saw merely as a pretext to attack them personally over old grudges or what he perceived as their initial failures in the investigation, led to such strain on his relations with them that they ultimately banned him from the Legation Quarter. Despite this, he was able to work with some of the other legations. The American consulate provided him with information on the criminal past of one of the former operators of 28 Chuanban, and later the Japanese, eager to embarrass the British, were able to get some witnesses to speak with him. But after the Tientsin Incident in summer 1939, in which the Japanese blockaded that city after Dennis had refused to turn over two Chinese assassins who had sought refuge from their likely execution in the British concession there, even that cooperation ended. Ultimately Werner theorized that Prentice, Knauf and their associates from the nudist weekends had lured Pamela to 28 Chuanban under the ruse of a Christmas party in order to have sex with her. When she refused, a struggle ensued, during which someone struck the fatal blows to her head, possibly with a fragment of a chair that had broken earlier (Werner had managed to visit the brothel himself, and noticed a wooden chair where a broken leg had been replaced by a piece of metal). After her death, they transported her body to the Fox Tower, because it was dark and unpatrolled, where they mutilated it with the hunting knives they regularly carried, which former employees of 28 Chuanban said they frequently displayed, sometimes accompanied by threats. By the time police got around to asking any of them about what might have happened, they had arranged for the absence of key witnesses and coordinated their stories of what happened that night. Werner was finally forced to leave his house and move back into the Legation Quarter in late 1941 after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor along with other British and American bases around the Asian Pacific turned the Second Sino-Japanese War into World War II between Japan and those countries. Even there he continued his efforts, writing long requests to the Foreign Office, which were not always delivered due to the difficulties of wartime. An unknown reviewer of one of the letters wrote in an attached memo, dated 1943, that the case deserved further examination than it had got up to that point, but nothing appears to have come of it. Aftermath: In March 1943 the Japanese removed all the remaining European residents from the Legation Quarter, including Prentice and Werner, and elsewhere in the city. After being marched to the train station before residents who were required to watch the spectacle, they were put on a train to the Weihsien internment camp in Shandong, where they spent the remainder of the war. According to other survivors of the camp, Werner sometimes confronted Prentice about the killing, although he was not the only person the older man accused. The outset of hostilities was even more trying for Dennis. Two weeks after Pearl Harbor, the Japanese relieved him of his duties as police chief in the concession and imprisoned him, along with other members of the police force, in apparent retribution for his stand against them two years earlier. After months of solitary confinement and torture that culminated in Dennis signing a confession in Japanese to unknown alleged crimes, he was freed by the intervention of the Swiss consul and returned to England, where he worked a desk job with the British Army for the remainder of the war. Afterwards he returned to China and took part in the war crimes prosecutions of some of the officials who had overseen his imprisonment; he returned to England and lived there until his death in 1977. Han had been forbidden by his superiors from talking to Werner during the initial investigation, but during a chance encounter with Werner on the street in 1938, apologised to him for his failure to resolve the case. The following year, he was forced out of the police by the Japanese for what they felt to be insufficient zeal in investigating an assassination attempt on Wang Kemin, whom they had installed as president of their puppet state. After that his fate is unknown. Following the liberation of Weihsien at the end of the war in 1945, Werner returned to his home in Peking. There he resumed pressing British officials about the case. The index of Foreign Office records in The National Archives shows one communication in 1945 that raises the subject of reopening the case, with the possibility of some connection to the Japanese, but the document itself has been weeded so its contents are unknown. Beyond that it appears Werner's appeals were unsuccessful. Werner remained in Peking through the end of the Chinese Civil War and the establishment of the People's Republic under Mao in 1949. Two years later, he finally returned to England, where he died in 1954. Pamela and her mother were buried in the English Cemetery, now under the pavement of modern Beijing's Second Ring Road. Midnight in Peking: E. T. C. Werner's lengthy obituary in The Times noted Pamela's murder in passing, in a short paragraph about his family. That would be the last time the crime was mentioned in any prominent published source for the remainder of the 20th century. In the 2000s, British writer and business consultant Paul French, who had moved to China for his work after studying Chinese at the University of London, came across a footnote in a biography of Helen Foster Snow briefly discussing her fears in the wake of Pamela's murder that she had been the intended victim, as well as some of the other rumours sweeping foreign Peking at that time. He woke up the next morning wanting to know more about the case, and eventually felt a responsibility to tell the story in some form. During later research at The National Archives in Kew, rain led him to extend his visit. He looked through a box of 1940s records from the British embassy in China, wondering if any of them would have anything about Pamela Werner's killing. There were many, including a 150-page letter from her father documenting what his private efforts had uncovered about the case, a letter whose conclusions, implicating Prentice and the circle of fellow nudists around him, French accepted as the likeliest resolution. Midnight in Peking, French's account of the case, was published late in 2011 and became a bestseller in many of the countries in which it was published over the next two years. It won the 2013 Edgar Award for Fact Crime Writing and the Crime Writers' Association Non-fiction Dagger Award for the same year. For a time after publication French led walking tours of the areas of present-day Beijing's Dongcheng District where the investigation unfolded. Kudos Television bought the rights to adapt the story into a television serial shortly after the book's publication. Criticism: A group of people, including two descendants of individuals who played prominent roles in French's account, set up a website casting doubt on Werner's conclusions and French's presentation of them, in response to the success of his book. They posted photographs of many original documents referred to in the book, primarily contemporary newspaper articles, book excerpts and the archived communications of British diplomats discussing the case. Werner's reliability: Primarily, they argue, Werner had credibility issues. French's account of Werner's diplomatic career generally downplays the extent to which his difficulties getting along with his colleagues were due to his own inability to get along with them—a "constant series of frictions", John Jordan, then British ambassador, wrote to him in 1913. And specifically, French does not mention an incident that year in which Werner struck a customs official with a whip while British consul in Fuzhou, an incident which led the Foreign Office to invoke the Superannuation Act 1887 and forcibly retire him, one of only two times it did so with its diplomats in China during the treaty port era. In his response to statements by witnesses to those incidents the site authors reproduce a letter to Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey in which Werner refused to accept blame for the incident and instead focused on the perceived injustices done to him by Jordan and others, a pattern they say is also reflected in his handling of his daughter's murder investigation. Likewise, Werner's 1928 memoir Autumn Leaves presents the incident untruthfully, in a manner greatly favourable to Werner, they say. The site authors say Werner's dubious credibility should be kept in mind when considering the claims made in the lengthy letters to the Foreign Office on which French relied heavily for Midnight in Peking, claims that would be hard to substantiate and rely in part on unreliable or dead sources, in many cases possibly further tainted by the money Werner offered for their accounts. Many of Werner's assertions about Prentice and other suspects are not mentioned in any other accounts of the investigation, not the Foreign Office correspondence nor newspaper articles. Two of Werner's most important claims against Prentice are actually disproved by documentary evidence: Newspaper records show there was a later cinema show the dentist could have attended on the night of Pamela's murder, and the receipt for Pamela's dental work is actually dated six years earlier than Werner claimed. Inadequate sourcing by French: French comes in for criticism on his own for his poor sourcing. In an Asia Times interview, the authors note, he implied he had relied on the police and autopsy reports from the case but never cited them in his own footnotes for the book. They question whether French really saw them, since archivists at the Rockefeller Archive Center, which keeps all of PUMC's prewar records since the school was established with that family's money, have found no report from an autopsy performed later than 1933. Likewise, any police records from that era did not survive the war years. Most of French's reconstructed account of the investigation comes entirely from Werner's letters. Likewise, any police records from that era did not survive the war years. Werner himself, the site authors note, did not always hew strictly to his theory that Prentice and the nudists were responsible. Just before war with the Japanese began in December 1941, he wrote Ambassador Sir Archibald Clark Kerr that, instead of Prentice, he now suspected the Chinese student whose nose he had broken after accusing him of having had relations with Pamela. French also cited an account of the murder and investigation written by Fulton Oursler, under his "Anthony Abbot" pseudonym, anthologized in his 1948 volume These Are Strange Tales, originally written for True Police Cases magazine, based entirely on what Oursler learned while talking to reporters in a Shanghai bar on a visit there and then reviewing newspaper articles about it in his hotel, never coming any closer to Peking. Not only is it the apparent source for French's depiction of Pamela's last words before leaving the skating rink, much more fanciful than what her friends recalled her actually saying, it also sets forth Abbot's theory that the murder was possibly committed by a visiting American who had similarly raped, killed and disemboweled young virgins at home, a theory French never mentions as an alternate to Werner's. Japanese involvement and other theories: The authors furthermore note that besides the idea that Pamela had been mistaken for Helen Foster Snow, French fails to mention yet more alternate theories of the crime. Werner himself noted that Dennis was convinced that the murderer was a former school acquaintance of Pamela. Snow herself wrote of some ancient Chinese practices involving the harvest and ingestion of human organs for medicinal purposes. The mutilation of the body also suggests the possibility of a serial killer, a possibility that cannot be explored since records of crimes against Chinese residents of Peking at that time are missing if indeed they were kept at all. There is also some evidence, according to the site authors, suggesting that Pamela was killed by the Japanese, supposedly as revenge against Fitzmaurice for his refusal to prosecute the Sasaki incident, in which two British legation guards had allegedly killed two Japanese officers the previous summer. The consul had declined to pursue the charges for lack of evidence. British officials reported to London that the Japanese never even showed them any bodies, and the uniform fragments offered as proof of British involvement were more consistent with those worn by U.S. Marines than any British military personnel. In 1938 Sir Edmund Backhouse, another British Sinologist of the era, told Peking consul Allan Archer that his contacts among the Japanese had told him quite openly that the murder was committed by two of their countrymen as revenge for Sasaki. Archer was impressed enough that he wrote Sir Robert George Howe in Shanghai about it, saying he thought this was finally the truth and dismissing Werner's theories about Prentice and Pinfold, the only time those theories are mentioned anywhere in British official correspondence regarding Pamela's murder other than Werner's letters. However, Backhouse, whose major scholarly work was exposed as fraudulent years after his death, appears to have been trying to ingratiate himself with British authorities in the hopes of becoming valuable to them as a source of intelligence, as there are many implausibilities in how he claims to have come by this information. However, Backhouse was not alone in his belief that the Japanese killed Pamela as revenge. Two other British diplomats in Peking at the time told historian P.D. Coates several decades later that it was theorised among them that the Japanese, unable to get to Fitzmaurice's wife since she rarely left the heavily guarded Legation Quarter, settled instead for killing Pamela since she was the daughter of a former British consul who was less secure. "As you will know," one of the former diplomats told Coates, by way of explaining the mutilation, "there are traditions of this sort of thing in Bushido", the Japanese warrior code. The theory of Japanese involvement seems to have persisted within British diplomatic circles to the end of the war. In 1945, an unknown official with the consular office wrote a memo about possibly reopening the case. The index of Foreign Office papers from that year at Kew summarises its subject as "Murder of Pamela Werner by Japanese in 1937". However, the actual document was weeded years ago and its content is not known or referred to in any other paperwork from the era.

Atlas Vampire

The Atlas Vampire was an unknown assailant who committed the unsolved "Vampire Murder" (also known as the Vampire Murder Case) in Stockholm, Sweden in 1932. On May 4, 1932, a 32-year-old prostitute, Lilly Lindeström, was found murdered in her small apartment in the Atlas area of Stockholm near Sankt Eriksplan. She had been dead for 2–3 days before police broke into her apartment; she had suffered blunt force trauma to her head. Lilly was found completely naked and faced down on her bed. According to reports sexual activity had taken place, with a condom found to still be protruding from her anus. The detectives noted that a gravy ladle was found at the scene and on further inspection of the body, they realized her body had been drained of all of her blood. Police suspected the implement was used by the perpetrator to drink Lilly's blood. Various clients fell under suspicion but after a lengthy investigation, none were charged with her murder. The murder remains unsolved.

Murder of Chrissie Venn

Chrissie Clare Venn was a 13-year-old Australian girl whose unsolved murder outside the village of North Motton (or Mutton) near Ulverstone, Tasmania, Australia was a sensation of the day. The murder: Venn was the daughter of George Arthur and Eva May (née Chilcott) Venn. At approximately 5 p.m. on 20 February 1921, Venn left the family home on Allison Road to run some errands in the village of North Motton—a distance of approximately three miles—and never returned home. A search was mounted but it was not until the morning of March 1st that Venn's mutilated body was found in a hollow tree stump located close to the road where Venn would have travelled as she walked to North Motton. Another source gives differing details: The murder purportedly occurred on 26 February 1921. The body was not mutilated and Venn had been either been suffocated or strangled. George William King was tried for the crime in a trial that commenced 2 August 1921. The trial had been moved from the North West Coast of Tasmania to Hobart, the first change of venue ever requested and approved for a trial in Tasmania. George William King was defended by Albert Ogilvie, who went on to become Premier of Tasmania. King was acquitted of the murder. George William King: King had been a member of the search party. He became a suspect in Venn's murder due to marks on his hands that he ascribed to an accident during the search for Venn. King, a 35-year-old former miner and policeman, was arrested on 8 March and charged with her murder. King's trial started in Hobart during June and on 11 August he was acquitted. Burial and ghost: Venn was interred at the North Motton Methodist Cemetery. Her ghost is claimed to haunt the area of her murder.

horribly embarassing

it'll be a little embarrassing that my mom is insisting i bring a store bought thing when i could make something home made for a party i'm going to. i want to bring things but i usually want to bring home made things.

feeling better

i'm hoping i'll be ok tomorrow. i'm possibly going into a soak in a tub.

Sick and in pain

I didn't think joint pain could get worse until I got a cold and I'm still in pain if not more pain. Oh well

serial killers

i'm doing a speech on serial killers, something i'm pretty knowledgeable about. i love forensic science. this is 1 distinctive thing about me since the church knows i love it and recommended i go do that rather than being in Sunday school.