Paula Jean Welden

Paula Jean Welden was an American college student who disappeared while walking on Vermont's Long Trail hiking route. The local sheriffs were criticized for their poor investigation, and this led to the creation of the Vermont State Police. Weldon's fate remains uncertain, and was one of several other unexplained disappearances in the same area and the time. Background: Paula Welden was the eldest of four daughters of the well-known industrial engineer, architect and designer William Archibald Welden and his wife Jean Douglas, née Wilson, of Brookdale Road, Stamford, Connecticut. Employed by the Revere Copper and Brass Company, W. Archibald Welden was the designer of many familiar household utensils, as well as stylish cocktail shakers and other objects. Paula was a 1945 graduate of Stamford High School. Bennington College: In 1946, Welden was a sophomore at Bennington College in North Bennington, Vermont. Her college dormitory was Dewey House one of the older dormitories on the college grounds, and which remains to this day. She was an art major but, dissatisfied with the faculty and her progress, was contemplating changing her major[citation needed]; she had discovered a newfound love of botany. Welden, a typical student, was sorting out her own interests from those of her parents and was trying to expand her circle of friends. She and her roommate were quite close and both realized how dependent they were on one another for a social life. Paula started to befriend other students and became involved in square dancing and hiking with groups of friends from Bennington College and Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. Welden worked part-time at the Commons dining hall on campus. On Sunday, December 1 she worked the lunch shift. She decided to find and walk a portion of the Long Trail, a few miles from the campus. Paula knew of the famous trail but hadn't yet had an opportunity to hike it. She tried to get some other students to join her that day, but they were busy. Paula went by herself. Long Trail: After finishing her shift in the dining hall, Welden returned to her room and changed into walking clothes. Her clothing was adequate for the weather that afternoon but not for the anticipated drop in temperature that night. She packed no bag, took no extra clothing, and did not take any extra money. From all appearances, she did not expect to be gone more than a few hours. Welden walked down the campus driveway and hitched a ride from State Route 67A near the college entrance in North Bennington to a point on State Route 9 near the Furnace Bridge between downtown Bennington and Woodford Hollow. Local contractor Louis Knapp picked her up and drove her as far as his house on Route 9, about 2.5 miles (4.0 km) from the Long Trail. From this point, Welden either hitchhiked or walked the rest of the way to the start of the Long Trail in Woodford Hollow. A group of hikers were walking down the trail as Welden was walking up. She approached them and asked them a few questions about the Long Trail. She continued walking in a northerly direction on the road portion of the trail now known as Harbour Road. Welden was on the Long Trail late in the afternoon and darkness was falling as she approached the end of Harbour Road. She may have continued into quickly darkening woods and it was presumed that she must have continued her Long Trail walk along the Bolles Brook valley, although there are no known confirmed sightings of her past the Fay Fuller Camp. Search: Welden did not return to campus. Her roommate thought she must have gone to the library to study for exams, but the next morning, Welden still had not returned. Once the college administrators were notified, they immediately started a search of the campus itself. The Bennington County State's Attorney was notified, and the county sheriff was brought in to help with the search. Over the next couple of days, her visit to the Long Trail was discovered when one of the hikers she had approached identified her from the photo in the Bennington Banner newspaper, where he worked. Weeks of searching ensued. The college closed for several days, and the students and faculty participated in organized searches. Hundreds of volunteers, family members, National Guard troops, students, and firefighters searched for her to no avail. Ground and air searches concentrated on the Long Trail up as far as Glastenbury Mountain (ten miles to the north), the trail's various branches, and along Vermont Route 9 from Bennington to Brattleboro. Most of those searching assumed Paula had gotten lost in the woods. When no clues were found as to her whereabouts, other theories started to be considered. Connecticut State Police investigation: Alternative theories speculated that she had been in unusually high spirits and had decided to run away to start a new life, was going to meet a secret lover and went off with him, or had become injured and suffered from amnesia. Darker theories speculated that Paula was depressed and may have committed suicide, she might have been kidnapped or murdered. At the time of Paula's disappearance, there was no state police organization in Vermont, and the state's attorney, county sheriff and state investigator Almo Franzoni were responsible for the investigation. Paula's father pressed the investigators and the governor to bring in additional professional law enforcement help. Vermont's governor asked Connecticut's governor to lend assistance. Connecticut State Police detective Robert Rundle and state policewoman Dorothy Scoville were assigned to the case. They interviewed every person who saw, or thought they saw Paula, every person who lived along the route she took or who were simply in the vicinity of the Long Trail on that December afternoon. Investigators discovered that one of the last people to see Paula alive was a man who lived along Harbour Road. He was in the midst of an argument with his girlfriend when she walked by. The man stormed off in a jealous rage shortly thereafter and depending on different statements he made, he went to his shack and spent the evening by himself, or he drove his truck up the travel portion of the trail (where Paula was heading). He lied to police on several occasions and was a person of interest in 1946 and again in 1952 when the case was revisited. Reportedly, he told at least two people that he knew within a hundred feet where Paula was buried but later claimed it was just idle talk. When no evidence was found that a crime had actually been committed, no body was ever discovered, and no forensic clues were identified, this avenue of the investigation ended. Aftermath: The manner in which Paula's disappearance was handled was sharply criticized by Paula's father and many others. He pointed out that the lack of a statewide law enforcement organization and the lack of training of local sheriffs contributed to a poorly run investigation. Within seven months of Paula's disappearance, the Vermont legislature created the Vermont State Police. Other cases: In the same general area where Welden disappeared, at least four other unexplained vanishings were reported to have taken place between 1945 and 1950. Due to the strangeness of these events, Vermont broadcaster and author Joseph A. Citro dubbed the wilderness area northeast of Bennington "the Bennington Triangle" – a reference to unexplained disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle. In literature: Author Shirley Jackson was inspired by Welden's vanishing when she wrote her novel Hangsaman (1951), as indicated by Jackson's papers in the Library of Congress. At the time of Welden's disappearance in 1946, Shirley Jackson was living in North Bennington, Vermont, where her husband was employed at Bennington College. Jackson's short story "The Missing Girl," included in Just An Ordinary Day (the 1996 collection of her previously unpublished/uncollected short stories), also references the Welden case.

Disappearance of Erin Marie Gilbert

Erin Marie Gilbert is an American woman who vanished while attending the Girdwood Forest Fair in Girdwood, Alaska. Gilbert, who had previous resided in California, had moved to Anchorage, Alaska, where she lived with her sister and worked as a nanny. At the time she disappeared, Gilbert was on a first date with a man, David Combs, whom she had met at a bar in Anchorage several days prior. She was last seen at the fairground's beer garden at approximately 6:00 p.m. Despite search efforts of family and Alaska State Troopers, no traces of Gilbert have ever been found. Her disappearance received renewed interest in 2017. Background: Prior to moving to Alaska, Gilbert had lived in San Francisco. In 1994, Gilbert relocated to Alaska, where she resided with her elder sister, Stephanie, and her husband at the Elmendorf Air Force Base. There, Gilbert took a job working as a nanny for a family who were acquaintances of her sister. Disappearance: On July 1, 1995, Gilbert accompanied David Combs—a man whom she had met several days prior at a bar called Chilkwood Charlie's in Anchorage—to the Girdwood Forest Fair in Girdwood, Alaska, a village south of Anchorage. The two left Anchorage at approximately 4:00 p.m. Gilbert was last seen at the fair's beer garden with Combs before they left at approximately 6:00 p.m. At the time, she was wearing a black leather jacket, a black and white shirt, mountain boots, and black jeans. By Combs' account, he and Gilbert returned to his car, but found the battery dead as he had left the headlights on. He claimed he told Gilbert he was going to a nearby friends' home to get help, and walked for around two hours, but was unable to locate his friend's residence. When he returned, Gilbert was no longer at the car. According to Combs, he assumed Gilbert had returned to the fair, and found that he was able to start the car engine. He then returned to the fairgrounds and searched for Gilbert unsuccessfully until approximately 1:00 a.m. Investigation: Stephanie and her family searched the Girdwood Forest Fairgrounds the following morning, July 2, as well as the surrounding woods, after receiving a phone call from Combs inquiring about whether or not Gilbert had made it home the night before. Alaska State Troopers organized a large search utilizing helicopters and search dogs, but were unsuccessful in recovering any sign of Gilbert in the vicinity of the fair. Later developments: In 2017, police lieutenant Randy McPherron commented publicly on the case: "We don't know for sure what happened, if this was foul play or not -- we just don't know. We don't have any witnesses, we don't have any human remains, we don't have a crime scene, we don't have much of anything, so it's gonna be very hard, but like I said, somebody knows something." At this time, a $35,000 reward was offered by Gilbert's family for information regarding her disappearance. Combs refused to speak to press when contacted at the time.

Aguilar de Campoo case

Virginia Guerrero Espejo and Manuela Torres Bouggefa went missing on 23 April 1992 in Reinosa, Spain. Guerrero, then 14, and Torres, then 13, were last seen hitchhiking from Reinosa to their hometown of Aguilar de Campoo, Palencia, when they disappeared. Their case remains unsolved. The case is often linked to that of the Alcàsser Girls, who received significantly more media attention after their bodies were found, and is commonly called the Alcàsser case of Palencia. Last known activities: Manuela Torres was born in Aix-en-Provence, France, to a Parisian mother of Palencian origin, Karima Bougeffa, and José Torres, who was from Málaga of North African or gypsy descent. She and her mother had only recently moved to Spain after her parents' separation. In Spain, she became "inseparable" from Virginia Guerrero, a native of Aguilar de Campoo. On the afternoon of 23 April 1992, Virginia Guerrero had asked her mother, Trinidad Espejo Muñoz, for money to buy a cake for a birthday party she was going to attend. Instead, the two girls apparently took a train to Reinosa (a small town located 32 kilometres (20 mi) north of Aguilar de Campoo) to go to a nightclub, without telling their families. When the party was over, it is believed that they decided to hitch-hike home because no trains were running at night. The last person known to have seen the girls was a woman from Aguilar de Campoo, who was leaving Reinosa in her car to return home when she saw the girls get into a white car on the main street in Reinosa. Investigation: Police followed leads in both Spain and France, but were unable to break the case. Torres' father resided in Marseille, but no connection could be found to his daughter's disappearance. On 9 October 1994, two bags containing human bones were found in the countryside near the Requejada dam (a few kilometres north-west of Aguilar de Campóo), but forensic investigations ruled out the possibility of them belonging to the girls: instead, they belonged to unknown victims of the Spanish Civil War, which was waged between 1936 and 1939. Similarly, two skulls found in 2001 were linked to the case by the media but were determined to be from the Civil War. In 2018, a human jaw found in a reservoir in Cantabria was determined to be unrelated to the case.

Sture Bergwall

Sture Ragnar Bergwall, also known as Thomas Quick in 1993–2002, is a Swedish man previously believed to have been a serial killer, having confessed to more than 30 murders while incarcerated in a mental institution for personality disorders. Between 1994 and 2001, Quick was convicted of eight of these murders. However, he withdrew all of his confessions in 2008, as a result of which his murder convictions were quashed, the final one in July 2013, and he was released from hospital. The episode raised issues about how murder convictions could have been obtained on such weak evidence, and has been called the largest miscarriage of justice in Swedish history. Journalists Hannes Råstam and Dan Josefsson published TV documentaries and books about the murder cases; they claimed that bad therapy led to false confessions. Dan Josefsson claims that a "cult"-like group led by psychologist Margit Norell manipulated the police and talked Sture Bergwall into false confessions. Early life: Bergwall grew up in Korsnäs with his six siblings. He adopted his mother's maiden name, Quick, around 1991. After a history of criminal behavior (molestations of boys and various assaults and drug use), Quick was sentenced in 1991 for armed robbery. He also stabbed a man while in outpatient treatment from a psychiatric facility. Confessions and convictions of murder: After the robbery conviction, Quick was confined to care in an institution for the criminally insane. During therapy, he confessed to more than thirty murders committed in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Finland between 1964 and 1993. The therapy sessions were followed by police interviews. One of his confessions led to the solving of an 18-year-old murder considered to be unsolvable, and another to the informal solving of a murder in Växjö in 1964. This 1964 crime was outside the then 25-year statute of limitations in Sweden, but with the information given by Quick, the case was considered closed. With no eyewitnesses or technical forensic evidence to connect him to the crimes, Quick was convicted solely on the basis of his own confessions while undergoing recovered-memory therapy on benzodiazepines followed by police interrogations. Details in the confessions were wildly wrong and Quick relied on hints and body language from his interrogators to guess the answers expected of him. Bergwall/Quick had been researching unsolved murders on microfilm in the Royal Library, Stockholm when he was on day release and confessing to a murder in Norway led to a Norwegian newspaper writing his story. Quick requested back copies including earlier reports of the story from Norwegian journalists and could include details hitherto unknown to the Swedish police that they concluded only the perpetrator knew. Nine-year-old Therese Johannessen had disappeared from Fjell in Drammen in 1988 and had not been found since. Ten years later Quick was convicted of murdering her. The crucial evidence was the discovery of burnt bone fragments from what should have been a child. In 2012 laboratory tests showed that the supposed bone fragments were composed of wood and glue fused together – probably hardboard. An analysis had not been performed before the evidence was presented to the court. Examination of his answers showed that his initial attempts to provide answers to questions concerning (for example) murder weapons and birthmarks were wrong, leading questions were asked in police interviews, and the initial erroneous guesses edited out of the version presented to the court. The involvement of therapists meant that Quick's early failure to provide anything more than a vague, confused and vacillating picture that gradually sharpened and focused was explained away as the result of repressed memories being retrieved as a result of therapy; e.g. in the judgment for the case of Therese one can read that the psychologist Christianson told the court that "Traumatic events are retained in the memory but there can be protective mechanisms that work in the unconscious to repress their recall." Similar arguments about Quick's "repressed" memories recur again and again in the judgments. The credibility of Quick's confessions was widely debated in the Swedish media. Critics of these confessions, and the trials, including a policeman involved in one of the investigations, wrote that there was no evidence that tied Quick to any of the murders he had confessed, and that until he could show something he had taken that belonged to one of his victims, the probability was that he was a compulsive liar. In a December 2008 television interview with Hannes Råstam, Quick denied taking part either in any of the murders for which he had been sentenced or in the more than 30 murders he had confessed to. Because the only evidence to support the convictions were his own confessions, that he now retracted, and nothing else remained on which to base the judgments, Quick changed his lawyer and the eight murder convictions handed down in six trials were all quashed on appeal, the last one in July 2013. Quick, who now reverted to his birth name of Sture Bergwall, was set at liberty after having been confined for more than twenty years in an institution for the criminally insane, with conditions that he refrain from alcohol and narcotics. Between 1994 and 2001, Quick was convicted of eight murders (in chronological order) at six different District Court trials: -Charles Zelmanovits, Piteå 1976, sentenced in 1994 – no forensic evidence, except for the confession. Sentence quashed: July 2013 -Johan Asplund, Sundsvall, 1980, sentenced in 2001 – no body, no forensics except for the confession. Sentence quashed: March 2012. -The Stegehuis couple, Appojaure (Gällivare) 1984, sentenced in 1996 – no forensics, but Quick gave information regarding facts that had never been disclosed to the public. His confessions were later questioned, as Quick seemed to have been privy to all information before the trial – retrial granted by the Supreme Court. Sentence quashed: May 2013. -Yenon Levi, tourist from Israel, Rörshyttan, 1988, sentenced in 1997 – no forensic evidence, but statements included in Quick's testimony such as his incorrect guesses at the murder weapon (in the police interviews, Quick guessed a camping axe, a spade and a car jack before arriving at the correct answer – a wooden club). The incorrect guesses were not mentioned in court. Sentence quashed: September 2010. -Therese Johannesen, Drammen, Norway, 1988, sentenced in 1998 – bone fragments presented as forensic evidence turned out to be hardboard. Sentence quashed: March 2011. -Trine Jensen, Oslo, 1981, sentenced in 2000 – no forensic evidence. Sentence quashed: September 2012. -Gry Storvik, Oslo, 1985 – no forensic evidence, confession; the semen found in the victim did not belong to Quick. Sentence quashed: September 2012. In Sweden a defendant always gains access to the full police investigation prior to the trial. Quick's lawyer Claes Borgström has been criticised for failing to protect his mentally disturbed client's objective interest in being judged not guilty. Confessions and subsequent withdrawals: In the years following 1990, when Quick was sentenced to closed psychiatric confinement, he confessed to several well publicised unsolved murders. His first murder, according to his own accounts, occurred in Växjö in 1964, when Quick was only 14 years old. The victim, Thomas Blomgren, was described by Quick as being the same age but not as strong and tall as himself. At the time of his confession, the murder was already subject to the statute of limitations which Bergwall/Quick later admitted was a reason for confessing; but later, it transpired that Quick had a watertight alibi. On the day of the murder he was attending his own confirmation with his family at the Pentecostal Church. The second alleged victim was Alvar Larsson, whom Quick claimed to have murdered at Sirkön in the lake Åsnen outside the town of Urshult. According to Quick's sister, Quick never left Falun at the time of the murder. The credibility of Quick's confessions had been widely debated in the Swedish media since 1993, up until 2008, when Quick withdrew all of his confessions. There have been consistent doubts about the reliability of his statements, and some of his confessions have been proven to be fabrications – The two African refugees Quick confessed to murdering in Norway were found to be alive and well. A DNA sample from a crime in Norway was subsequently found to be a mismatch, and there was no technical forensic evidence to link Quick to any of the crimes. Another dubious circumstance is the fact that no witnesses have ever testified to seeing Quick in the proximity of any of the crime scenes, even though more than 10,000 people were interviewed for intricate details. Critics of these confessions and the trials claim that Quick never murdered anyone, but that he is a compulsive liar. Among the critics are the parents of a child he confessed to having murdered in the late 1970s. In response to these accusations, Quick himself wrote an article for the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter in 2001 in which he said that he refused to cooperate further with the authorities concerning all open murder investigations. In November 2006, Thomas Quick's trials were reported to the Swedish Chancellor of Justice by retired lawyer Pelle Svensson on behalf of the parents of a murder victim who wished to have the trials declared invalid. Several principals in the fields of law and psychiatry, among them Swedish criminologist and television crime commentator Leif G. W. Persson and two police officers involved in the investigation of the murders who refused to involve themselves further in the investigations all claim that Quick has a history of mental illness, but it was unlikely he was guilty of any of the crimes to which he had confessed. The handling of the Quick cases has been described as the "most scandalous" chapter of Scandinavian crime history, branding it as glaring incompetence, naiveté, and opportunism within the police and judicial system. Quick withdrew all of his confessions in 2008 during the recording of a TV documentary, made by prize-winning investigative journalist Hannes Råstam, who died shortly before his book version was published. Quick's attorney contended that the prosecution withheld important investigative material from the defence (which the prosecution adamantly denied). Quick's attorney claimed that his client is mentally ill and was being given prescription drugs (benzodiazepine) when he confessed to the killings. These arguments were some of the grounds for quashing all the eight murder convictions in six trials and six appeals. Thomas Quick, now having reverted to his birth name Sture Bergwall, recanted his confessions and requested the Svea Court of Appeal order a new trial for the murder case of Yenon Levi at Rörshyttan. In December 2009, the court of appeal granted a retrial of the Yenon Levi case. In the judgment, the court found that the lower court had heard that Quick correctly identified the murder weapon. However, information had been withheld from the court that initially Quick had made many erroneous attempts to identify the murder weapon before finally giving an account that corresponded with police findings. Quick moved for a judgment of acquittal, and was acquitted in September 2010. Quick's counsel also declared his intention to ask for a retrial of the Therese Johannesen case, claiming that Quick had an alibi for the day when Therese Johannesen was abducted and murdered. SKL (Statens kriminaltekniska laboratorium The Swedish State Forensic Laboratory) found in March 2010 that two exhibits claimed by the prosecution to be bone fragments were, in fact, pieces of hardboard. A retrial was granted, and Quick formally acquitted when the prosecutor dropped the charges. On 30 July 2013, Quick was acquitted of the last of eight murder convictions. Sture Bergwall has been released from Säter's institution for the criminally insane and most of the treatment plan has been made confidential and subject to secrecy. However, from the uncensored portions released to the press, it is apparent that Bergwall has not taken medication for several years and is assessed as not requiring any. Films: A 2015 documentary film, The Confessions of Thomas Quick, recounted Bergwall's life and his murder confessions and retractions, including interviews with Bergwall and other participants in the events. In it Bergwall explained that he made the confessions to gain attention due to profound loneliness. The documentary claims that Bergwall knew little about each murder, but was fed details during questioning, enabling him to build up enough information to persuade people he had carried them out. It also claims that as a result of his confessions Bergwall was given privileged treatment in the hospital, including drugs and therapy on demand, his own office with computer and Internet access, and restaurant meals when going out to visit murder sites, and that this may have encouraged him to continue confessing to more and more crimes. Mikael Håfström’s thriller film The Perfect Patient premiered in Sweden in 2019, with David Dencik as Thomas Quick and Jonas Karlsson as the journalist Hannes Råstam.

Manslaughter of Flora Prior

Flora Prior was an Australian woman who was raped and killed by three men on the banks of the Fitzroy River in Rockhampton, Queensland on 25 February 1947. 18-year-old lad porter Ernest Joseph Davidson, 21-year-old station hand Roy Joseph Howard and 20-year-old labourer Mark Mathieson Dean were convicted of Prior's manslaughter. The case drew attention from the national press due to the sexual and violent nature of Prior's death, but also because of the actions of Judge Frank Brennan during the trial, including his angry response to those sitting in the public gallery and his subsequent ban on members of the public viewing the trial. The sentence Brennan imposed on the three men responsible, which Brennan acknowledged was lenient, also prompted anger from the victim's family, the press, and the public. A successful appeal by the Attorney-General of Queensland more than doubled the original sentence. Investigation: A man walking along Quay Street discovered a woman's body on the riverbank between William and Denham Street, less than 150 metres from the Commercial Hotel in the city centre at approximately 8:15am on 26 February 1947. Initial police investigations indicated the woman had been suffocated, possibly by a hand placed over her mouth and fingers closing her nostrils. Police believed she had been murdered on 25 February 1947, just before midnight. Police found the body belonged to 25-year-old Flora Prior, who had been staying at the People's Palace in Denison Street, Rockhampton, and who had been employed as a domestic servant for Alpha cattle station owner Carrie May Everingham. Originally from Cooktown, Prior had arrived in Rockhampton from Alpha six weeks prior for a holiday, but had recommenced working for Everingham upon Everingham's arrival in Rockhampton. Prior's funeral was held on 28 February 1947. Fifty people gathered outside the funeral parlour on the corner of Alma and Archer streets to watch the hearse and mourning coach leave for the funeral, with a group also gathering to watch the vehicles cross the Fitzroy Bridge on their way to the North Rockhampton Cemetery where Prior's body was buried. Court proceedings: Davidson, Howard and Dean were arrested and charged with wilful murder. They appeared in the Petty Session Court on 6 March 1947, with 100 people peering through windows and doors of the courthouse attempting to view the proceedings. The three men were remanded in custody until 13 March 1947, despite opposition from the men's defence counsel. In court proceedings at Rockhampton Petty Sessions Court on 13 March 1947, police presented a statement written by Davidson which included confessions to Prior's rape by the three men who had been walking throughout the city, visiting various local hotels, at around 11pm on 25 February 1947. According to testimony, Davidson spoke to Prior and the two went to the riverbank where they "had relations" before being joined by Dean and Howard. Davidson confessed that when Prior had screamed, Dean held a handkerchief over her mouth while Howard and Dean sexually assaulted her. In his statement, Davidson said when Prior collapsed, he believed she had fainted and did not know until the next morning that she had died. A detective alleged that when he saw Davidson, Howard and Dean together, they each admitted to raping Prior and holding a handkerchief over her mouth, while Howard also admitted to hitting Prior after she began pulling his hair. A detective also testified that after locating Dean and Howard in an empty house in Rossmoya, Dean confessed to meeting up with Howard and Davidson after having seen Davidson and Prior "struggle" across Quay Street to the riverbank. Dean also said when he saw the girl stop struggling during the sexual assault, he removed the handkerchief from her mouth to feel for breath, but Davidson told him that she had only "passed out". The detective told the court Dean said the men attempted to revive Prior but were unable to do so and left her body on the riverbank. Several witnesses testified that they had seen the men with Prior, prior to her death. A doctor testified that a great amount of violence would have been necessary to cause Prior's injuries and that the condition of her body was consistent with a woman who had been raped. Following several days of evidence, the three men were committed to stand trial in the Rockhampton Supreme Court for the wilful murder of Flora Prior. The trial of commenced on 12 May 1947 and concluded on 14 May 1947, during which a number of witnesses were called to give evidence in front of a 12-person jury. Public gallery ban: During the trial, Judge Frank Brennan lost patience with the large number of people in the courtroom's public gallery, admonishing all those who came to observe the trial. Brennan ordered them to go home to "busy yourselves with some useful and necessary employment or occupation rather than remain in court and steep your minds in low, sexual depravity", banning all members of the public from the court and ordering police officers to admit only those closely associated with the case and members of the press. Brennan later accused the public of having "warped minds" and said they should not be allowed to "satisfy their morbid curiosity". This was the second time in three months Brennan had lost patience with members of the public in his courtroom. Brennan had taken issue with members of the public gallery during a separate non-related rape case the previous February. On a previous occasion, Brennan lectured those in the public gallery stating "this is a filthy case - one of rape. Young girls should be home doing housework and the young men might be better employed cleaning up the backyard." When only a handful of people left, Brennan ordered police to clear the gallery, and those remaining showed reluctance to leave, Brennan angrily exclaimed, "so you won't go? What must morals be coming to. Clear the gallery!". The gallery was eventually cleared of members of the public and the case proceeded. Verdict: At the conclusion of the trial, the jury was advised that there was insufficient evidence for a verdict of wilful murder, with only murder, manslaughter or acquittal being permissible. The jury found all three men guilty of manslaughter. After the jury's verdict was read, Brennan said that because the jury had chosen to be lenient, he too must be lenient in his sentencing, and sentenced the men to seven years imprisonment. Sentencing criticism: Brennan's decision to pass a lenient sentence despite the violent nature of Prior's death was met with widespread criticism from the victim's family, the community and the press. This included a scathing editorial in Brisbane's Courier-Mail newspaper, which prompted a rebuke from the defence counsel. The ensuing anger at the lenient sentence prompted an appeal by Attorney-General David Gledson, after which the sentences for all three men were increased to 15 years imprisonment following a unanimous Court of Criminal Appeal decision. Chief Justice Neal Macrossan said he agreed with the opinion expressed after the trial, and that it could only be dealt with by sentences which were much more severe than those imposed by Brennan. Brennan left Rockhampton four months later, after having served as a judge in Rockhampton since 1925.

Barbara Newhall Follett

Barbara Newhall Follett was an American child prodigy novelist. Her first novel, The House Without Windows, was published in January 1927, when she was twelve years old. Her next novel, The Voyage of the Norman D.w, received critical acclaim when she was fourteen. In December 1939, aged 25, Follett reportedly became depressed with her marriage and walked out of her apartment, never to be seen again. Career: Barbara Follett was the daughter of critic and editor Wilson Follett and children's writer Helen Thomas Follett. She was schooled at home and began writing poetry by age 4. In 1923, when Follett was only eight years old, she began writing The House Without Windows as a birthday present for her mother using the small portable typewriter she had been using since early age. Though later that year her manuscript burned in a house fire, Follett rewrote the entire story and her father, an editor at the Knopf publishing house, supervised its publication in 1927. With the help and guidance of Follett's father, The House Without Windows was accepted and published in 1927 by Knopf to critical acclaim by The New York Times, the Saturday Review, and H. L. Mencken. Follett's next novel, The Voyage of the Norman D., was based on her experience on a coastal schooner in Nova Scotia. It was published a year later in 1928, also receiving critical acclaim in many literary publications. However, in the same year, Follett's father abandoned her mother for another woman. The event was a devastating blow to Follett, who was deeply attached to her father. Despite being only 14, she had reached the apex of her life and career. My dreams are going through their death flurries. They are dying before the steel javelins and arrows of a world of Time and Money. Subsequently, her family fell upon hard times. By the age of 16, as the Great Depression was deepening, Follett was working as a secretary in New York City. She wrote several more manuscripts, including the novel-length Lost Island and Travels Without a Donkey, a travelogue (the title plays on Robert Louis Stevenson's Travels with a Donkey). Disappearance: In late 1933, Follett married Nickerson Rogers. The couple traveled throughout Europe and the U.S. before eventually settling in Brookline, Massachusetts. The marriage was initially happy, but Follett soon came to believe that Rogers was being unfaithful to her and became depressed. According to her husband, on December 7, 1939, Follett left their apartment after a quarrel with $30 in her pocket ($528 in 2017). She was never seen again. Rogers did not report Follett's disappearance to police for two weeks, claiming that he was waiting for her to return. Four months after notifying police, he requested a missing persons bulletin be issued. As the bulletin was issued under Follett's married name of "Rogers", it went largely unnoticed by the media, which did not learn of her disappearance until 1966. In 1952, thirteen years after Follett disappeared, her mother Helen began insisting that Brookline Police investigate the matter more thoroughly. Helen had become suspicious of Rogers after she discovered that he had made little effort to find his wife. In a letter to Rogers, she wrote: "All of this silence on your part looks as if you had something to hide concerning Barbara's disappearance. You cannot believe that I shall sit idle during my last few years and not make whatever effort I can to find out whether Bar is alive or dead, whether, perhaps, she is in some institution suffering from amnesia or nervous breakdown." Follett's body was never found, and no evidence indicating or excluding foul play was ever produced. The date and circumstances of her death have never been established. Bibliography: -Follett, Barbara Newhall. (1927). The House Without Windows & Eepersip's Life There. New York, London: Knopf. OCLC 870940 (Reprinted 1968, New York: Avon Camelot.) -Follett, Barbara Newhall. (1928). The Voyage of the Norman D.. New York, London: Knopf. OCLC 3561118 -Follett, Barbara Newhall. (1934). Lost Island: A Romance. Lost Island -Follett, Barbara Newhall. (1934). Travels Without a Donkey.

Disappearance of Etta Riel

Etta H. Riel was an American woman who disappeared November 22, 1934 from Worcester, Massachusetts. Her case remains unsolved. Case- Disappearance: In early 1934, Etta Riel was living with her family in Oxford, Massachusetts and attending nearby Worcester State Teachers College. In May she had filed a paternity suit against a local man, Henry Sawin, who she named as the father of her unborn baby. She and Sawin were dating at the time they graduated from Oxford High School in 1932. Sawin moved to Maine to attend Bates College, but he and Riel remained in contact. In September, Riel gave birth to a baby girl. On the evening of November 21, Riel and Sawin spent several hours alone together. Early in the evening, Riel's hairdresser saw her talking with Sawin and, around midnight, an Oxford police officer observed Sawin's car parked in front of the Riel family home. Shortly after midnight, Riel informed her sister that she and Sawin had decided to marry. Stating that they were traveling to New York City that night, she packed a small travel bag and said she would return later in the week to retrieve her baby. She left in Sawin's car. On November 22, the day of the scheduled paternity hearing, Riel's sister encountered Sawin, who denied making any marriage or travel plans with Riel and stated that he dropped her off at Worcester's Union Station hours before. When questioned by police, Sawin said that Riel had admitted to falsely accusing him of paternity and had expressed apprehension about the day's court proceedings. He said he was unaware of where she intended to travel that night and that she may have been suicidal. Sawin's claims seemed supported by letters Riel wrote to friends in October in which she expressed a desire to commit suicide. On December 2, Riel's attorney received a telegram ostensibly signed by Riel directing him to withdraw the paternity case against Sawin. Police later discovered the telegram was ordered from a pay telephone in New York City by a caller who provided a false address. The identity of the sender was never determined. In 1935, several witnesses claimed they had seen or spoken to Riel in the weeks and months following her disappearance, but police were unable to confirm any sightings of Riel subsequent to November 22. Investigation: Early in the investigation, police discovered that between 2 and 4 a.m. on. the day of Riel's disappearance, the Worcester train dispatcher and station master received three telephone calls to the station's unlisted numbers. The callers, one of whom claimed to be the Oxford switchboard operator, requested that Riel be located and prevented from boarding the train. Searches of the station that night failed to locate Riel. Subsequent police investigation showed that no such calls were placed from the Oxford telephone exchange and the callers were never identified. While Sawin remained a person of interest throughout the investigation, police also questioned several other people who they believed were connected to Riel's disappearance. Early in 1935, police investigated a Putnam, Connecticut man who had corresponded with Riel and had traveled to Florida with an unidentified companion around the time of her disappearance, but they later ruled out any further connection with the case. In August, police questioned a woman who claimed to have shared an apartment with Riel in Boston, but that witness was later committed to a psychiatric hospital. The Massachusetts State Police conducted extensive searches for Riel's body, which continued for years after her disappearance. In the belief that Riel may have been clandestinely buried in an Oxford cemetery, police exhumed several graves in 1935 and 1937. In April 1935, police carried out a ground search for Riel in locations across Worcester County, including numerous ponds and areas in the nearby Purgatory Chasm. Also in 1935, police interviewed a local mystic who claimed that Riel was being held captive in the area by an unknown woman. Three years after Riel's disappearance, a detective assigned to the case stated that he believed Riel was alive. Aftermath: In 1990, Riel's daughter, Alma Conlon, filed a paternity suit against Sawin, reviving the police investigation into her mother's disappearance after nearly 60 years. Conlon asked a probate judge to declare Sawin as her legal father, but her case was thrown out in 1993. Publicity: Riel's case received wide publicity in New England in the 1930s and was covered by national wire services. In March 1937, "The Disappearance of Etta Riel" was the subject of New York's WOR radio Mystery Stories program.[30] In May of that year, Liberty magazine published a feature-length article on the case. A 1948 article about the disappearance of Paula Jean Welden from Bennington College cited the Riel case, along with the 1925 disappearance of Alice Corbett from Smith College, as examples of other mysterious disappearances of New England college women.

Disappearance of Susan Smalley and Stacie Madison

Susan Renee Smalley and Stacie Elisabeth Madison were two young women from Carrollton, Texas, of the United States who disappeared on the morning of March 20, 1988. Disappearance: Stacie Madison worked as a receptionist and had plans of studying business at the University of North Texas. On the evening of March 19, 1988, her good friend, Susan Smalley, was staying overnight at her house. The pair left the house together for a short while in Madison's 1967 Ford Mustang convertible, a car that was painted in the emblematic colors of their high school and that Madison had recently bought with the earnings from her two jobs. Later, the girls were seen attempting to purchase alcohol at a 7-Eleven, but the clerk did not sell it to them since they were minors. Madison and Smalley returned to the house, where Madison phoned a friend at around midnight. The girls left the house again shortly after the call, with Madison's car no longer to be seen parked in front of the house where the girls were staying. The last time anyone saw the girls, they were at The Steak and Ale, the same restaurant where Smalley worked as a waitress. An employee at the establishment told investigators that Smalley had been talking to another co-worker while Madison waited for her in the parked car. Smalley and Madison were reported missing the next morning. The Mustang that they had been driving the previous night was found abandoned in the parking lot of a Dallas shopping center, together with personal belongings of both girls inside. When last seen, Madison was wearing white cotton pants and a white long-sleeved sweatshirt with a logo of pink and orange and white tennis shoes; Smalley was wearing a white sweater and blue jeans and was carrying a shoulder bag of navy blue with camel trim as well. Investigation and aftermath: Several months after the two friends went missing, Smalley's last boyfriend vaunted to a girl whom he was dating that he had killed Smalley and Madison by his own hand and then dumped their bodies in a local cemetery. After the girl shared this with police, Smalley's boyfriend underwent and passed a polygraph. He later relocated to Florida, moving from town to town in that state for over a decade and with attempts to contact him proving unsuccessful. For lack of better avenues to pursue in the case, detectives once consulted a psychic, only to be told that the girls were murdered by a blond-haired white male with glasses who was between 28 and 34 years old and who had dumped them near Grapevine Lake. However, a search of that area failed to turn up anything of value. The Susan Smalley and Stacie Madison case is still active. In 2009, a book entitled This Night Wounds Time: The Mysterious Disappearances of Stacie Madison and Susan Smalley was self-published by Shawn Sutherland who grew up in Carrollton and was twenty-four when the girls mysteriously vanished. According to Sargent Joel Payne, who is the lead detective with Carrollton police, the book caused the investigation to be renewed "starting from scratch" not only in Carrollton but in neighboring Denton County as well.

Murder of Kelly Ann Tinyes

The murder of Kelly Ann Tinyes occurred on March 3, 1989. Tinyes was a thirteen-year-old Valley Stream, New York resident who was strangled, stabbed, and mutilated. Her body was discovered in the basement of her neighbor, twenty-one-year-old bodybuilder Robert Golub, who was charged with and convicted of her murder. Golub was convicted based on DNA evidence that showed that he matched the genetic markers found in a blood sample discovered on evidence. The trial was the first case in New York state to have a case won by DNA forensic evidence. The case was re-opened on March 3, 2009 to investigate the possibility of an accomplice. Murder: On March 3, 1989 Kelly Tinyes was babysitting her younger brother Richard when he answered a phone call from someone identifying himself as "John" and asking to speak with Kelly. Shortly after speaking with the other person on the phone, Tinyes told her brother that she was going to go to a friend's house and that she would return shortly. After waiting a short period of time, Richard went to the friend's home and was told that Kelly had not been there. A neighbor child told Richard that he had seen Kelly go into the Golub house. Attempts by Richard to call the Golubs and to knock at their home were unsuccessful. His parents arrived home around 5pm and also attempted to locate Kelly, but were unsuccessful. A friend of Kelly's, Sharon Stonel, also commented that she had seen Kelly go into the Golubs' house. Two detectives visited the Golub house the following day and interviewed several members of the Golub family. The detectives later returned to the house and requested permission to search the property. After gaining permission from the senior John Golub, the detectives searched the home and found the body of Kelly Tinyes in the house's basement. Arrest, trial and incarceration: Robert Golub was charged with the murder of Kelly and brought to trial in late 1989 after a bloody handprint matching Golub's was discovered. His brother John Golub was suspected of being involved in the murder, but was never formally charged. During the trial Golub's lawyer Salvatore Marinello raised questions over the police search, saying that it was an improper and unlawful search, as well as questioning the DNA evidence's accuracy. Marinello argued that the DNA testing was unreliable, and that the testing process performed on the blood samples might be in question. A supervisor for the testing facility Lifecodes Corporation stated that "the tests on the blood samples were accurate, and asserted that the chances of the blood belonging to someone other than Robert Golub were 1 in 707 million." On April 7, 1990 Golub was found guilty of second-degree murder and was sentenced to 25 years to life in prison. Golub attempted to appeal the decision, but was turned down. On November 18, 2013, while nearing completion of the 25 year minimum sentence for the crime, he had his first parole hearing. On November 25, he was denied. The parole board said releasing him early would be "incompatible with the welfare of society." Robert Golub maintained his innocence as recently as 2009 in an interview with Newsday calling himself "tragedy #2" with Kelly Tinyes being "tragedy #1." In a parole hearing in November 2013 Golub admitted responsibility for Tinyes' death and stated that he had accidentally knocked Tinyes down the stairs, causing her to fall unconscious, then subsequently beating her and finally stabbing her to death. Golub's parole was denied in 2013, 2015 and 2017. He is eligible for parole consideration again in November of 2019. Civil suit: The Tinyes family later brought a civil suit against the Golub family in July 1990, stating that the Golubs had "failed to supervise their son properly" and were responsible in part for the murder of Kelly Tinyes. The Tinyes sought $602 million in damages. Media: -Author Ronald J Watkins wrote a book about the murder, Against Her Will: The Senseless Murder of Kelly Ann Tinyes, which was published on April 19, 2000. -The murder was featured on a 1990 episode of Geraldo.

Great Wolf Lodge

i love that cute little place. my family has been several times. once i got a wristband that got me free scoops of ice cream. mom didn't want any of her own but had little bites of our own (like her mom). apparently great wolf lost money on that deal (i'm guessing they didn't expect me to run out as many times as i did). after 7 scoops and 1 cookie i called it a night on sugar.

Heriberto Seda

Heriberto Seda is an American serial killer who struck New York City from 1990 to 1993. Before being caught on June 18, 1996, Seda killed three people and wounded five others (four critically). Seda is believed to have admired San Francisco's Zodiac Killer for avoiding capture. Police described Seda, a Brooklyn resident, as a recluse obsessed with astrology and death. Seda was formally charged in the case on June 21, 1996, convicted in 1998, and sentenced to 232 years imprisonment. Crimes: Seda attacked people throughout New York City, sending taunting messages to the police and media after each crime. The messages included codes based on International maritime signal flags, which New York Post journalist Kieran Crowley decoded with the assistance of his father-in-law, a veteran of World War II cryptography and signals intelligence. The killer's letters to police claimed that he was selecting his victims based on their signs of the zodiac, and implied he would act only at certain times when specific stars were visible in the night sky. Police consulted a professional astronomer, whose predictions about when the killer would strike proved somewhat accurate. He used an improvised firearm, explaining in his messages that the lack of rifling marks on the shells would prevent his capture. New York police considered the possibility that the notorious Zodiac Killer may have relocated to the East Coast and resumed his crimes after two decades of inactivity. In the late 1960s the Zodiac Killer murdered at least five people and injured another two in the San Francisco area. He sent taunting letters and coded messages to local media, and was never identified. However, a handwriting analyst and consultation with California authorities ruled out that possibility. Capture: In March 1994, Seda was arrested for possession of a deadly weapon after police noticed a suspicious bulge in his jacket pocket that concealed one of his zip guns. Police determined that the weapon was not functional, and Seda's public defender managed to get all charges dropped and his arrest record sealed. Seda interpreted this turn of events as an omen, proving that he was beyond consequences. At 26 years of age, Seda was an unemployed high school drop out, living with his mother and half-sister. He had been a good high school student, but was expelled after bringing a starter pistol to school. He had dropped out rather than attend mandatory counseling sessions to be readmitted to school. He was unemployed and supported by his mother, but obtained money by stealing coins from pay phones and vending machines. Seda was mentally and physically abusive to his teenage half-sister, Gladys "Chachi" Reyes. During a confrontation with her and her boyfriend on June 18, 1996, Seda pulled out a weapon and began threatening the couple. While Reyes' boyfriend hid in the bedroom, she tried to escape through the front door, but Seda shot her in the buttocks. Wounded but not incapacitated, she made her way to her neighbor's apartment where she called the police. After an hours-long stand-off with the police, Seda gave up his firearms and was arrested. Investigation and trial: Authorities initially made no connection between Seda's arrest for the family violence incident, and the string of unsolved murders. However, he closed his handwritten statement about the family incident with a symbol resembling one written on the taunting letters to the police by the unidentified killer. From here, police focused on Seda as a suspect. Despite the killer's claim that he could never be linked to the crimes due to the lack of rifling on the improvised guns, police were able to use tool-mark evidence to link Seda to the attacks. Fingerprint evidence was also found, and handwriting analysis determined a strong similarity between Seda's statement and the anonymous letters. Most damning, police found Seda's DNA on one of the stamps that had been used to mail a letter to police. Seda caused repeated disruptions in court, making outbursts and shouting at the judge. On June 24, 1998, Seda was convicted by a jury after a six-week trial, presided over by the Honorable Robert J. Hanophy, Justice of the State Supreme Court for the County of Queens, New York. The case was prosecuted by Assistant District Attorneys Robert J. Masters and Raymond E. Scheer. The prosecution presented testimony of 45 witnesses, and introduced 150 pieces of evidence. Seda was represented by court appointed attorneys David A. Bart and John S. Wallenstein. Personal life: In prison, Seda began a romantic affair with Synthia-China Blast, a trans woman who is serving a sentence for a gang-related murder. Their relationship garnered attention due to their legal battle to be allowed to marry while incarcerated, and due to Blast's efforts to obtain gender-reassignment surgery.

Patty Hearst

Patricia Campbell Hearst is an American author and actress. A granddaughter of the American publishing magnate William Randolph Hearst, she became internationally known for events following her 1974 kidnapping by a left-wing terrorist group, the Symbionese Liberation Army. Hearst was found 19 months after being abducted, by which time she was a fugitive wanted for serious crimes committed with members of the group. She was held in custody, and there was speculation before trial that her family's resources would enable her to avoid time in jail. At her trial, the prosecution suggested that Hearst had joined the Symbionese Liberation Army of her own volition. However, Hearst testified that she had been raped and threatened with death while held captive. In 1976, she was convicted for the crime of bank robbery and sentenced to 35 years in prison, later reduced to 7 years. Her sentence was commuted by President Jimmy Carter, and she was later pardoned by President Bill Clinton. Background- Family: Hearst's grandfather, William Randolph Hearst, created the largest newspaper, magazine, newsreel, and movie business in the world. Her great-grandmother was philanthropist Phoebe Hearst. The family was associated with immense political influence and a position of anti-Communism since before World War II. Early life and education: Patricia Hearst, called "Patty", was born in San Francisco, California, the third of five daughters of Randolph Apperson Hearst and Catherine Wood Campbell. She grew up primarily in Hillsborough, and attended its Crystal Springs School for Girls and the Santa Catalina School in Monterey. She attended Menlo College in Atherton, California, before transferring to the University of California, Berkeley. Hearst's father was only one of a number of heirs, and did not have control of the Hearst interests, so her parents did not consider it necessary to take measures for their children's personal security. At the time of her abduction, Hearst was a sophomore at Berkeley, studying art history. She lived with her fiancé, Steven Weed, in an apartment in Berkeley. Kidnapping: On February 4, 1974, 19-year-old Hearst was kidnapped from her Berkeley apartment. She was beaten and lost consciousness during the abduction. Shots were fired from a machine gun during the incident. An urban guerrilla group, called the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), claimed responsibility for the abduction. Motives: Hearst's kidnapping was partly opportunistic, as she happened to live near the SLA hideout. According to testimony, the group's main intention was to leverage the Hearst family's political influence to free two SLA members who had been arrested for Marcus Foster's killing. Faced with the failure to free the imprisoned men, the SLA demanded that the captive's family distribute $70 worth of food to every needy Californian – an operation that would cost an estimated $400 million. In response, Hearst's father took out a loan and arranged the immediate donation of $2 million worth of food to the poor of the Bay Area, in an operation called "People in Need." After the distribution descended into chaos, the SLA refused to release Hearst. Hearst's account: According to Hearst's later testimony, she was held for a week in a closet, blindfolded and with her hands tied, during which time DeFreeze repeatedly threatened her with death. She was let out for meals and, blindfolded, began to join in the political discussions. She was given a flashlight for reading and SLA political tracts to learn. Hearst was confined in the closet for weeks, after which she said, "DeFreeze told me that the war council had decided or was thinking about killing me or me staying with them, and that I better start thinking about that as a possibility." Hearst said, "I accommodated my thoughts to coincide with theirs." When asked for her decision, Hearst said she wanted to stay and fight with the SLA. The blindfold was removed, allowing her to see her captors for the first time. After this she was given daily lessons on her duties, especially weapons drills. Angela Atwood told Hearst that the others thought she should know what sexual freedom was like in the unit; According to her lawyer, Hearst was allegedly raped by William "Willie" Wolfe and later by DeFreeze. Announcement: On April 3, 1974, two months after she was abducted, Hearst announced on an audiotape that she had joined the SLA and taken the name "Tania" (inspired by the nom de guerre of Haydée Tamara Bunke Bider, Che Guevara's comrade). Criminal activity as avowed SLA member- Bank robbery: On April 15, 1974, Hearst was recorded on surveillance video wielding an M1 carbine while robbing the Sunset District branch of the Hibernia Bank, at 1450 Noriega Street in San Francisco. Hearst identified under her pseudonym of "Tania". Two men who entered the bank while the robbery was occurring were shot and wounded. According to later testimony at her trial, a witness thought Hearst had been several paces behind the others when running to the getaway car. Within days, United States Attorney General William B. Saxbe said Hearst was a "common criminal" and "not a reluctant participant" in the bank robbery. James L. Browning Jr. said that her participation in the robbery may have been voluntary, contradicting an earlier comment in which he said that Hearst may have been coerced into taking part. The FBI agent heading the investigation had said SLA members were photographed pointing guns at Hearst during the robbery. A grand jury indicted her in June 1974 for the robbery. Rescue of Harris: On May 16, 1974, a store manager at Mel's Sporting Goods, in Inglewood, California, observed a minor theft by William Harris, who had been shopping with his wife Emily, while Hearst waited across the road in a van. Accompanied by a female employee, the manager followed Harris out and confronted him. During the ensuing scuffle, Harris was restrained, and his pistol fell out of his waistband. Hearst, who had first used guns with her father, discharged the entire magazine of an automatic carbine into the overhead storefront, causing the manager to dive behind a lightpost. When he tried to shoot back, Hearst, firing single shots with another weapon, brought her fire closer to him. Fugitive: Escaping from the area, Hearst and the Harris couple hijacked two cars and abducted the owners. One, a young man, found Hearst so personable that he was reluctant to report the incident. At the trial he testified to her having discussed the effectiveness of cyanide-tipped bullets and repeatedly asking if he were okay. Police had surrounded the main base of the SLA before the three returned, so the trio hid elsewhere. On May 17, 1974, the six SLA members inside died in a gunfight with police. It was at first thought that Hearst had also died. Her father publicly worried that she might be killed in revenge. To allay his fears, the abduction victim gave police a more complete account of what took place with her. A warrant was issued for Hearst's arrest for several felonies, including two counts of kidnapping. According to one account, Hearst and the Harrises (now the only survivors of the SLA unit that abducted her) bought a car blocks away while the siege was going on. It broke down when they happened to stop in an African-American neighborhood, leaving them with a total of $50. They walked a few hundred yards from the car and hid in a crawlspace under a residential building. When a late night party started in the room above, Hearst readied her weapon, saying "the pigs" were closing in on them. In whispers, the Harrises begged her to calm down. Disguised as derelicts, they spent the next two weeks in San Francisco flophouses. With a few dollars left, Emily Harris was sent to a Berkeley rally to commemorate the deaths of Angela Atwood and other founding members of the SLA, who had died during the police siege. Harris recognized Atwood's acquaintance Kathy Soliah among the radicals, whom she'd known from civil rights groups. Soliah introduced the three fugitives to Jack Scott, an athletics coach and radical who had been asking for an interview with the SLA. Scott agreed to provide help and money. During a car ride to a rural hideout, Scott said that Hearst was incredulous when he offered to take her "anywhere". According to Scott's account, which Hearst later disputed, she had said, "I want to go where my friends are going". Scott was never charged for facilitating a revival of the SLA that eventually resulted in murder. Involvement in later SLA crimes: Hearst helped make improvised explosive devices. These were used in two unsuccessful attempts to kill policemen during August 1975, and one of the devices failed to detonate. Marked money found in the apartment when she was arrested linked Hearst to the SLA armed robbery of Crocker National Bank in Carmichael, California; she was the getaway car driver for the robbery. Myrna Opsahl, who was at the bank making a deposit, was shot dead by a masked Emily Harris. Hearst was potentially at risk for felony murder charges and could testify as a witness against Harris for a capital offense. Legal consequences: On September 18, 1975, Hearst was arrested in a San Francisco apartment with Wendy Yoshimura, another SLA member, by San Francisco Police Inspector Timothy F. Casey and his partner, Police Officer Laurence R. Pasero, and FBI Special Agent Thomas J. Padden and his partners, FBI agents Jason Moulton, Frank Doyle, Jr., Larry Lawler, Monte Hall, Dick Vitamonte, Leo Brenneissen, and Ray Campos. While being booked into jail, Hearst listed her occupation as "Urban Guerilla" and asked her attorney to relay the following message: "Tell everybody that I'm smiling, that I feel free and strong and I send my greetings and love to all the sisters and brothers out there." Brainwashing claims: At the time of her arrest, Hearst's weight had dropped to 87 pounds (40 kg), and she was described by Dr. Margaret Singer in October 1975 as "a low-IQ, low-affect zombie". Shortly after her arrest, signs of trauma were recorded: her IQ was measured as 112, whereas it had previously been 130; there were huge gaps in her memory regarding her pre-Tania life; she was smoking heavily and had nightmares. Without a mental illness or defect, a person is considered to be fully responsible for any criminal action not done under duress, which is defined as a clear and present threat of death or serious injury. But for Hearst to secure an acquittal on the grounds of having been brainwashed would be completely unprecedented. Psychiatrist Louis Jolyon West, a professor at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), was appointed by the court in his capacity as a brainwashing expert and worked without a fee. After the trial, he wrote a newspaper article asking President Carter to release Hearst from prison. Hearst wrote in her memoir, Every Secret Thing (1982), "I spent fifteen hours going over my SLA experiences with Robert Jay Lifton of Yale University. Lifton, author of several books on coercive persuasion and thought reform, pronounced me a 'classic case' which met all the psychological criteria of a coerced prisoner of war. If I had reacted differently, that would have been suspect, he said." After some weeks, Hearst repudiated her SLA allegiance. Her first lawyer, Terence Hallinan, had advised Hearst not to talk to anyone, including psychiatrists. He advocated a defense of involuntary intoxication: that the SLA had given her drugs that affected her judgment and recollection. He was replaced by attorney F. Lee Bailey, who asserted a defense of coercion or duress affecting intent at the time of the offense. This was similar to the brainwashing defense which Hallinan had warned was not a defense in law. Hearst gave long interviews to various psychiatrists. Trial: Hearst alone was arraigned for the Hibernia Bank robbery; the trial commenced on January 15, 1976. Judge Oliver Jesse Carter (who happened to be a professional acquaintance of a junior member of the prosecution team's) ruled that Hearst's taped and written statements after the bank robbery, while she was a fugitive with the SLA members, were voluntary. He did not allow expert testimony that stylistic analysis indicated the "Tania" statements and writing were not wholly composed by Hearst. He permitted the prosecution to introduce statements and actions Hearst made long after the Hibernia robbery, as evidence of her state of mind at the time of the robbery. Judge Carter also allowed into evidence a recording made by jail authorities of a friend's jail visit with Hearst, in which Hearst used profanities and spoke of her radical and feminist beliefs, but he did not allow tapes of psychiatrist Louis Jolyon West's interviews of Hearst to be heard by the jury. Judge Carter was described as "resting his eyes" during testimony favorable to the defense by West and others. According to Hearst's testimony, her captors had demanded she appear enthusiastic during the robbery and warned she would pay with her life for any mistake. Her defense lawyer F. Lee Bailey provided photographs showing that SLA members, including Camilla Hall, had pointed guns at Hearst during the robbery. In reference to the shooting at Mel's Sporting Goods Store and her decision to not escape, Hearst testified that she was instructed throughout her captivity on what to do in emergency situations. She said one class in particular had a situation similar to the store manager's detention of the Harrises. Hearst testified that "when it happened I didn't even think. I just did it, and if I had not done it and if they had been able to get away they would have killed me." Testifying for the prosecution, Dr. Harry Kozol said Hearst had been "a rebel in search of a cause", and her participation in the Hibernia robbery had been "an act of free will." Prosecutor James L. Browning Jr. asked the other psychiatrist testifying for the prosecution, Dr. Joel Fort, if Hearst was in fear of death or great bodily injury during the robbery, to which he answered, "No", but Bailey angrily objected. Fort assessed Hearst as amoral, and said she had voluntarily had sex with Wolfe and DeFreeze, which accusations Hearst denied both in court and outside. Prosecutor Browning tried to show that writings by Hearst indicated her testimony had misrepresented her interactions with Wolfe. She said she had been writing the SLA version of events and had been punched in the face by William Harris when she refused to be more effusive about what she regarded as sexual abuse by Wolfe. Judge Carter allowed testimony from the prosecution psychiatrists about Hearst's early sexual experiences, although these had occurred years before her kidnapping and the bank robbery. In court, Hearst made a poor impression and appeared lethargic. An Associated Press report attributed this state to drugs she was given by jail doctors. Bailey was strongly criticized for his decision to put Hearst on the stand, as she declined to answer some questions in the presence of the jury. According to Alan Dershowitz, Bailey was wrong-footed by the judge, who had appeared to indicate she would have Fifth Amendment privilege: the jury would not be present for some of her testimony, or would be instructed not to draw inferences, on matters subsequent to the Hibernian Bank charges for which she was being tried, but he changed his mind. After a few months, Hearst provided information to the authorities, not under oath (sworn testimony could have been used to convict her) of SLA activities. A bomb exploded at Hearst Castle in February 1976. After Hearst testified that Wolfe had raped her, Emily Harris gave a magazine interview from jail alleging that Hearst's keeping a trinket given to her by Wolfe was an indication that she had been in a romantic relationship with him. Hearst said she had kept the stone carving because she thought it was a pre-Colombian artifact of archeological significance. The prosecutor James L. Browning Jr. used Harris' interpretation of the item, and some jurors later said they regarded the carving, which Browning waved in front of them, as powerful evidence that Hearst was lying. In a closing prosecution statement that hardly acknowledged that Hearst had been kidnapped and held captive, prosecutor Browning suggested that Hearst had taken part in the bank robbery without coercion. Browning also suggested to the jury that as the female SLA members were feminists, they would not have allowed Hearst to be raped. He said that Hearst's having kept an Olmec carving given to her by Wolfe showed that she had lied about being raped by him. Bailey's closing defense statement was, "But simple application of the rules, I think, will yield one decent result, and, that is, there is not anything close to proof beyond a reasonable doubt that Patty Hearst wanted to be a bank robber. What you know, and you know in your hearts to be true is beyond dispute. There was talk about her dying, and she wanted to survive." Conviction and sentencing: On March 20, 1976, Hearst was convicted of bank robbery and using a firearm during the commission of a felony. She was given the maximum sentence possible of 35 years' imprisonment, pending a reduction at final sentence hearing, which Carter declined to specify. Because Judge Carter had died, Judge William Horsley Orrick Jr. determined Hearst's sentence. He gave her seven years imprisonment, commenting that "rebellious young people who, for whatever reason become revolutionaries, and voluntarily commit criminal acts will be punished". Prison life: Hearst suffered a collapsed lung in prison (the beginning of a series of medical problems) and underwent emergency surgery. This prevented her from appearing to testify against the Harrises on eleven state charges, including robbery, kidnapping, and assault; she was also arraigned for those charges. Hearst was being held in solitary confinement for security reasons; she was granted bail for an appeal hearing in November 1976, on condition that she was protected on bond. Her father hired dozens of bodyguards. Saying he believed that Hearst did not act voluntarily, Superior Court judge Talbot Callister gave her probation on the sporting goods store charge when she pleaded no contest. California Attorney General Evelle J. Younger said if there was a double standard for the wealthy, it was the opposite of what was generally believed and that Hearst had received a stiffer sentence than she might have. He said that although Hearst had no legal brainwashing defense, there was a good deal of equity favoring her in the essential point that everything followed her kidnapping. Hearst's bail was revoked in May 1978 when appeals failed, and the Supreme Court declined to hear her case. The prison took no special security measures for Hearst's safety until she found a dead rat on her bunk the day William and Emily Harris were arraigned for her abduction. The Harrises were convicted on a simple kidnapping charge (as opposed to the more serious kidnapping for ransom or kidnapping with bodily injury), and were released after serving a total of eight years each. Although some articles were published in legal journals about the issues in the case, the definition of duress in law remained unchanged. In the weeks before Representative Leo Ryan was murdered while visiting the Jonestown, Guyana, settlement, he was collecting signatures to petition for Hearst's release. He had noted his own mass death threats from Synanon, comparisons to Charles Manson's cult, and questions of the Hearst case. Actor John Wayne, speaking after the Jonestown cult deaths, said it was odd that people had accepted that Jim Jones had brainwashed 900 individuals into mass suicide but would not accept that a group such as the Symbionese Liberation Army could have brainwashed a kidnapped teenage girl. Commutation, release, and pardon: President Jimmy Carter commuted Hearst's federal sentence to the 22 months served, freeing the young woman eight months before she was eligible for her first parole hearing. The 1979 release was under stringent conditions, and she remained on probation for the state sentence on the sporting goods store plea. President Ronald Reagan reportedly gave serious consideration to pardoning Hearst. She recovered full civil rights when President Bill Clinton granted her a pardon on January 20, 2001, his last day in office. Life after release: Two months after her release from prison, Hearst married Bernard Lee Shaw (1945–2013), a policeman who was part of her security detail during her time on bail. They had two children, Gillian and Lydia Hearst-Shaw. He died in 2013. Hearst became involved in a foundation helping children suffering from AIDS, and is active in other charities and fund-raising activities. Media and other activities: Hearst published the memoir Every Secret Thing in 1981. Her accounts resulted in authorities considering bringing new charges against her. She was interviewed in 2009 on NBC and said that the prosecutor had suggested that she had been in a consensual relationship with Wolfe. She described that as "outrageous" and an insult to rape victims. Hearst produced a special for the Travel Channel titled Secrets of San Simeon with Patricia Hearst, in which she took viewers inside her grandfather's mansion Hearst Castle, providing unprecedented access to the property. She has appeared in feature films for director John Waters, who cast her in Cry-Baby, Serial Mom, Pecker, A Dirty Shame, and Cecil B. DeMented. She collaborated with Cordelia Frances Biddle on writing the novel Murder at San Simeon (Scribner, 1996), based upon the death of Thomas H. Ince on her grandfather's yacht. She also appeared in the episode "Lord of the Pi's" in season 3 of Veronica Mars. The character was the heiress of a fictionalized Hearst family, loosely based on aspects of her life. Hearst also made a cameo in Pauly Shore's film The Bio-Dome. Hearst has participated with her dogs in dog shows, and her Shih Tzu Rocket won the "Toy" category at the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show at Madison Square Garden on February 16, 2015. At the 2017 show, Hearst's French bulldog Tuggy won best of breed, and Rubi won best of opposite sex. Films about Hearst's SLA period: -Patty Hearst (1988) -Guerrilla: The Taking of Patty Hearst (2004) -The Radical Story of Patty Hearst (2018) -Drunk History: The Kidnapping of Patty Hearst (2019)

Paul Avery

Paul Avery was an American journalist, best known for his reporting on the serial killer known as the Zodiac, and later for his work on the Patricia Hearst kidnapping. Early life: Avery was born in Honolulu, Hawaii, the son of Howard Malcom Avery, a U.S. Navy officer and pilot, and Frances Avery. He was raised and educated in Honolulu, Oakland, California, and Washington, D.C.. Avery started his career in journalism in 1955, working at a variety of newspapers in Mississippi, Texas and Alaska before returning to Hawaii and hiring on at the Honolulu Advertiser where he was appointed the paper's Big Island bureau chief. He was 23 years old at the time. San Francisco Chronicle career: Avery joined the San Francisco Chronicle in 1959. In the second half of the 1960s, Avery took a leave of absence from the Chronicle and moved his family to Vietnam. In Saigon, Avery co-founded Empire News, a freelance photojournalism organization. He expanded Empire News, opening a branch in Hong Kong, before returning to San Francisco, in 1969 after three years in Asia. In the mid-1980s, after working for The Sacramento Bee and writing a book about the Hearst kidnapping, he signed up with the then- Hearst-owned San Francisco Examiner, where he stayed until his retirement in August 1994. Zodiac Killer: Avery reported on the Zodiac case, a series of killings—unsolved to this day—that began in December 1968 and ostensibly ended with the death of a San Francisco cab driver in October 1969. At the time, Avery was a police reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle. For a long time, it was thought that the Zodiac's activities were limited to the Bay Area, but Avery discovered a 1966 murder in Riverside that he linked to the Zodiac. The Zodiac soon wrote Avery (misspelled by the Zodiac as "Averly") a Halloween card, warning, "You are doomed." The front of the card read, "From your secret pal: I feel it in my bones/you ache to know my name/and so I'll clue you in..." Then inside: "But why spoil the game?" Just as quickly as the threat was made public, a fellow journalist made up hundreds of campaign-style buttons, worn by nearly everyone on Chronicle staff, including Avery, that said, "I Am Not Paul Avery." It was at this time that Avery began carrying a .38 caliber revolver. Patty Hearst: When Patricia Hearst was kidnapped in February 1974, Avery joined forces with Chronicle reporter Tim Findley to produce a series of stories detailing the kidnapping and writing about the members of the little-known band of revolutionaries called the Symbionese Liberation Army. Avery covered the Hearst case until the newspaper heiress-turned-bank robber was arrested in September 1975. Avery then holed up on his houseboat at Gate 5 in Sausalito with Boston writer Vin McLellan to write The Voices of Guns, a book on the SLA and the Hearst kidnapping." Later work: Despite his progressive illness with emphysema, Avery continued working in crime and journalism until the end of his life. After joining The Sacramento Bee in 1976, he discovered that authorities had wrongly charged an innocent man with murder, and was instrumental in convincing detectives to drop the charges. Personal life: While covering the war in Vietnam, Avery suffered a spinal fracture when a falling tree limb knocked him from atop an armored personnel carrier. Avery died of pulmonary emphysema in West Sound, Washington on December 10, 2000. Avery's family scattered his ashes in the San Francisco Bay the following June. At the time of his death, Avery was married to Margo St. James, a feminist organizer and founder of the sex worker's rights group COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics). He has two daughters from an earlier marriage, Charlé Avery and Cristin Avery. He has a third daughter, Janet Anderson. In media: Avery was portrayed by Robert Downey Jr. in the 2007 film Zodiac. The film details his involvement in the Zodiac case, including his discovery of the 1966 Riverside murder, the threat on his life, the "I Am Not Avery" buttons, a heavily fictionalized involvement with cartoonist turned Zodiac expert Robert Graysmith, as well as his eventual physical decline, including his abuse of cocaine and alcohol, ending with a brief mention of his fatal illness. In 2010, his former colleague Lance Williams wrote that the movie "portrayed Avery as ruined by the Zodiac... That just wasn't true."

George Chapman (murderer)

Seweryn Kłosowski, better known under his pseudonym George Chapman, was a Polish serial killer known as the Borough Poisoner. Born in Congress Poland, he moved to England as an adult, where he committed his crimes. Chapman was convicted and executed after poisoning three women, but is remembered today mostly because some contemporary police officers suspected him of being the notorious serial killer Jack the Ripper. Early life: George Chapman was born in the village of Nagórna in the Warsaw Governorate of Congress Poland to Antoni and Emilia Kłosowski. His father was a carpenter. According to a certificate found in his personal effects after his arrest, he was apprenticed at age 14 to a senior surgeon, Moshko (Mosze) Rappaport, in Zwoleń, whom he assisted in procedures such as the application of leeches for blood-letting. He then enrolled on a course in practical surgery at the Warsaw Praga Hospital. This course was very brief, lasting from October 1885 to January 1886 (attested to by another certificate in his possession) but Chapman continued to serve as a nurse, or doctor's assistant in Warsaw until December 1886. Chapman later left Poland for Britain, settling in London, though the time he arrived in the capital has never been reliably ascertained. A receipt for hospital fees from February 1887 indicating that Chapman was still there is the last record of him in Poland, and papers documenting his early life end abruptly at that month, indicating that he potentially left Poland at around that time. Witness testimony at his trial seems to indicate that he emigrated to London in 1888. He settled in the East End and became a hairdresser's assistant in either late 1887 or early 1888, with records indicating that he worked for an Abraham Radin of 70 West India Dock Road. He stopped working there after five months, and he subsequently opened a barbershop at 126 Cable Street, St George in the East. This was also listed as his residence in an 1889 London directory. It is likely that this was his residence during the Jack the Ripper murders in the fall of 1888. Chapman married a young Polish girl, Lucie Badewski, in 1889, and had two children with her, and because of this was soon confronted by his original Polish wife. The couple moved around different residences in London before moving to the United States in 1891. The last census record of them in London is from April of that year. The couple settled in Jersey City, New Jersey, where Chapman found work in a barbershop, but often fought bitterly. In February 1892, after Chapman had attacked Lucie while she was pregnant and later told her he had intended to kill her and cover up her murder, she returned to London, where she moved in with her sister and gave birth to a daughter. Chapman himself eventually returned to London, and the two reunited for a while before ending their relationship permanently. In 1893, while working as an assistant in Haddin's hairdresser shop, he met a woman named Annie Chapman (no known relation to the Ripper victim). They began a relationship and moved in together. In 1894, after almost a year of cohabiting, Chapman brought another woman to live with them, and Annie, who was pregnant, left a few weeks later. In early 1895, Annie told Chapman about their baby, but he offered no support. That same year, he became an assistant in William Wenzel's barbershop at 7 Church Lane, Leytonstone, while lodging at the house of John Ward in Forest Road. Crimes and execution: Chapman took at least four mistresses, who posed as his wife; he killed three by poisoning. They were Mary Isabella Spink, Bessie Taylor and Maud Marsh. He administered the compound tartar-emetic to each of them, having purchased it from a chemist in Hastings, Sussex. Rich in the metallic element antimony, tartar-emetic can, if used improperly, cause painful death with symptoms similar to arsenic poisoning. Chapman had met Spink while working at Wenzel's barbershop. Spink, an alcoholic whose husband had left her and taken their son, joined him in a fake marriage and left him a legacy of £500 (equivalent to £56,000 in 2018). They began living together and leased a barbershop in a poor section of Hastings. This business was unsuccessful, and they moved their shop to a more prosperous location and began offering "musical shaves", in which Spink played the piano while Chapman serviced the customers. This proved popular, and gave the couple a sizable income. Chapman eventually purchased his own sailing boat, which he named the Mosquito. However, Chapman repeatedly subjected Spink to brutal beatings. A woman who lived in the same building claimed to have often heard Spink crying out in the night, and to have noticed abrasions and bruises on her face and marks on her throat. On 3 April 1897, Chapman purchased a one-ounce dose of tartar-emetic from the shop of William Davidson, a chemist in High Street. Their barbershop eventually failed, and Chapman resorted to managing a pub in Bartholomew Square. It was there that he fatally poisoned Spink. Soon afterward, he hired Taylor, who had been a restaurant manager, to work at his pub, and they entered into a relationship. Chapman again became abusive, reportedly shouting at her and at one point threatening her with a revolver. After she began coming down with the same symptoms that Spink had shown, Chapman left London with her to avoid controversy, moving to the market town of Bishop's Stortford, Hertfordshire, where he ran The Grapes Pub. After an operation, Taylor's condition remained poor, and they returned to London, where he leased the Monument Tavern. Taylor's condition grew steadily worse, and she died in 1901. Chapman also attempted to commit arson on the Monument Tavern, which was quickly losing its lease. In August 1901, he hired Marsh as a barmaid for the Monument Tavern. He again entered into a false marriage with her, and was physically abusive to her. She was also eventually poisoned to death. Suspicions surrounding Marsh's death led to a police investigation. It was found that she had been poisoned, as had the other two women, whose bodies were exhumed. An indictment for murder could contain only one count and Chapman was therefore charged only with the murder of Marsh. He was prosecuted by Sir Archibald Bodkin and the solicitor-general, Sir Edward Carson, convicted on 19 March 1903 and hanged at Wandsworth Prison on 7 April 1903. Immediately following Chapman's death, his widow Lucie Kłosowski married Frank Szymanski in April 1903. Chapman's motives for these murders are unclear. While Spink had left him a legacy of £500, he gained nothing from the other two victims. Jack the Ripper suspect: One of the detectives at Scotland Yard, Frederick Abberline, is reported to have told George Godley, the policeman who arrested Chapman: "You've got Jack the Ripper at last!" In two 1903 interviews with the Pall Mall Gazette, Abberline spelled out his suspicions, referring to Chapman by name. Abberline thought Chapman was the Ripper because during the original investigation, he had closely interviewed Chapman's first "wife", Lucie Badewski, and she had told him that her husband often used to go out during the night for hours on end. Speculation in contemporary newspaper accounts and books has led to Chapman, like fellow serial killer Thomas Neill Cream, becoming one of many suspects in the infamous Ripper murders. As far as is known, Chapman was not a suspect at the time of the murders. Chapman was a later surname borrowed in 1895 from one of his mistresses whom he did not poison – (Sarah) Annie Chapman (not to be confused with the Ripper victim of the same name). Recent writers are divided about whether Chapman should be regarded as a serious Ripper suspect. Philip Sugden considered that Chapman is the most likely candidate among known Ripper suspects, but that the case against him is far from proven. However, John Eddleston rated Chapman at only two ("a remote possibility") on his zero-to-five rating of Ripper suspects. Paul Begg only dealt with Chapman briefly, and evidently did not regard him as a serious suspect. The case against Chapman rests mainly on the point that he undoubtedly was a violent man with a misogynistic streak. He was known to beat his common-law-wives and was prone to other violent behaviour. While living in the United States, Chapman allegedly forced his wife, Lucy Klosowska, down on their bed and began to strangle her, only stopping to attend to a customer who walked into the shop which adjoined their room. When he left, she was said to have found a knife under the pillow. He reportedly later told her that he had planned to behead her, even pointing out the spot where he would have buried her and reciting what he would have said to their neighbours. Chapman had arrived at Whitechapel roughly around the time the first murder took place. His description matched the man seen with Mary Jane Kelly (the fifth victim of the "canonical five") and the murders stopped when he left for the United States. It has even been suggested that he carried out a Ripper-style killing in New York City, the murder of Carrie Brown, but recent research suggests he did not reach the United States until after this murder. However, there is a lack of any hard evidence that would link Chapman to the Ripper murders. The main argument against treating him as a serious Ripper suspect is that it would be unusual for a serial killer to change his method of killing, from mutilation to poisoning, although some authorities have cast doubt on whether this is as unusual as is supposed. There is also some doubt about whether he could speak English at the time, as the Ripper would have almost certainly had to according to eyewitness reports about the suspect holding conversations with some of his victims, and whether as a recent immigrant he would have had the intimate knowledge of the Whitechapel district that the Ripper seems to have had. The Ripper appears to have selected victims who were previously unknown to him, while Chapman killed acquaintances, and although Chapman did live in Whitechapel it was not particularly near the scene of the murders. Nonetheless, Robert Milne, MFSSoc, FFS, FA IA-IP, who had recently retired from the Metropolitan Police Directorate of Forensic Services, presented a paper to the International Association for Identification Conference in 2011 and to the Chartered Society of Forensic Sciences in 2014, suggesting Chapman (Kłosowski) as the most likely Ripper. Based on his expertise, review of investigation documents, and the use of geographical profiling software, he was convinced that the killer lived in the area of the murders. Chapman, also Frederick Aberline's top suspect, fit that bill accurately. Milne also pointed out that Chapman "a now known serial poisoner of women" "would go out carrying a small bag, not coming home until 4:30 a.m.", according to his estranged wife. In his 2014 paper, Milne also discussed a 1902 (or 1901) murder victim, Mary Ann Austin, who had described a client before her death. (Austin was murdered with ten wounds to her abdomen at Annie Chapman's former home, Crossingham's Lodging House, at 35, Dorset Street.) According to Milne, "a Russian 5ft 7 inches tall with a black moustache [who] visited Mary and in the course of having sex stabbed her and tried to cut out her uterus". Chapman's story was dramatised twice by Towers of London. Firstly in 1949 in Secrets of Scotland Yard as George Chapman... Poisoner, Publican and Lady Killer and then again in a 1951 episode of The Black Museum entitled "The Straight Razor". Both conclude with a brief argument for Chapman's identity as Jack the Ripper.

Jack the Ripper

Jack the Ripper was an unidentified serial killer active in the largely impoverished areas in and around the Whitechapel district of London in 1888. In both the criminal case files and contemporary journalistic accounts, the killer was called the Whitechapel Murderer and Leather Apron. Attacks ascribed to Jack the Ripper typically involved female prostitutes who lived and worked in the slums of the East End of London whose throats were cut prior to abdominal mutilations. The removal of internal organs from at least three of the victims led to proposals that their killer had some anatomical or surgical knowledge. Rumours that the murders were connected intensified in September and October 1888, and letters were received by media outlets and Scotland Yard from a writer or writers purporting to be the murderer. The name "Jack the Ripper" originated in a letter written by someone claiming to be the murderer that was disseminated in the media. The letter is widely believed to have been a hoax and may have been written by journalists in an attempt to heighten interest in the story and increase their newspapers' circulation. The "From Hell" letter received by George Lusk of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee came with half of a preserved human kidney, purportedly taken from one of the victims. The public came increasingly to believe in a single serial killer known as "Jack the Ripper", mainly because of the extraordinarily brutal nature of the murders, and because of media treatment of the events. Extensive newspaper coverage bestowed widespread and enduring international notoriety on the Ripper, and the legend solidified. A police investigation into a series of eleven brutal killings in Whitechapel up to 1891 was unable to connect all the killings conclusively to the murders of 1888. Five victims—Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly—are known as the "canonical five" and their murders between 31 August and 9 November 1888 are often considered the most likely to be linked. The murders were never solved, and the legends surrounding them became a combination of genuine historical research, folklore, and pseudohistory. The term "ripperology" was coined to describe the study and analysis of the Ripper cases. There are now over one hundred hypotheses about the Ripper's identity, and the murders have inspired many works of fiction. Background: In the mid-19th century, Britain experienced an influx of Irish immigrants who swelled the populations of the major cities, including the East End of London. From 1882, Jewish refugees from pogroms in Tsarist Russia and other areas of Eastern Europe emigrated into the same area. The parish of Whitechapel in London's East End became increasingly overcrowded. Work and housing conditions worsened, and a significant economic underclass developed. Robbery, violence, and alcohol dependency were commonplace, and the endemic poverty drove many women to prostitution. In October 1888, London's Metropolitan Police Service estimated that there were 62 brothels and 1,200 women working as prostitutes in Whitechapel. The economic problems were accompanied by a steady rise in social tensions. Between 1886 and 1889, frequent demonstrations led to police intervention and public unrest, such as that of 13 November 1887. Anti-semitism, crime, nativism, racism, social disturbance, and severe deprivation influenced public perceptions that Whitechapel was a notorious den of immorality. In 1888, such perceptions were strengthened when the series of vicious and grotesque murders attributed to "Jack the Ripper" received unprecedented coverage in the media. Murders: The large number of attacks against women in the East End during this time adds uncertainty to how many victims were killed by the same person. Eleven separate murders, stretching from 3 April 1888 to 13 February 1891, were included in a London Metropolitan Police Service investigation and were known collectively in the police docket as the "Whitechapel murders". Opinions vary as to whether these murders should be linked to the same culprit, but five of the eleven Whitechapel murders, known as the "canonical five", are widely believed to be the work of Jack the Ripper. Most experts point to deep throat slashes, abdominal and genital-area mutilation, removal of internal organs, and progressive facial mutilations as the distinctive features of the Ripper's modus operandi. The first two cases in the Whitechapel murders file, those of Emma Elizabeth Smith and Martha Tabram, are not included in the canonical five. Smith was robbed and sexually assaulted in Osborn Street, Whitechapel, on 3 April 1888. A blunt object was inserted into her vagina, rupturing her peritoneum. She developed peritonitis and died the following day at London Hospital. She said that she had been attacked by two or three men, one of whom was a teenager. The attack was linked to the later murders by the press, but most authors attribute it to gang violence unrelated to the Ripper case. Tabram was killed on 7 August 1888; she had suffered 39 stab wounds. The savagery of the murder, the lack of obvious motive, and the closeness of the location (George Yard, Whitechapel) and date to those of the later Ripper murders led police to link them. The attack differs from the canonical murders in that Tabram was stabbed rather than slashed at the throat and abdomen, and many experts do not connect it with the later murders because of the difference in the wound pattern. Canonical five: The canonical five Ripper victims are Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly. Nichols' body was discovered at about 3:40 a.m. on Friday 31 August 1888 in Buck's Row (now Durward Street), Whitechapel. The throat was severed by two cuts, and the lower part of the abdomen was partly ripped open by a deep, jagged wound. Several other incisions on the abdomen were caused by the same knife. Chapman's body was discovered at about 6 a.m. on Saturday 8 September 1888 near a doorway in the back yard of 29 Hanbury Street, Spitalfields. As in the case of Mary Ann Nichols, the throat was severed by two cuts. The abdomen was slashed entirely open, and it was later discovered that the uterus had been removed. At the inquest, one witness described seeing Chapman at about 5:30 a.m. with a dark-haired man of "shabby-genteel" appearance. Stride and Eddowes were killed in the early morning of Sunday 30 September 1888. Stride's body was discovered at about 1 a.m. in Dutfield's Yard, off Berner Street (now Henriques Street) in Whitechapel. The cause of death was one clear-cut incision which severed the main artery on the left side of the neck. The absence of mutilations to the abdomen has led to uncertainty about whether Stride's murder should be attributed to the Ripper or whether he was interrupted during the attack. Witnesses thought that they saw Stride with a man earlier that night but gave differing descriptions: some said that her companion was fair, others dark; some said that he was shabbily dressed, others well-dressed. Eddowes' body was found in Mitre Square in the City of London, three-quarters of an hour after Stride's. The throat was severed and the abdomen was ripped open by a long, deep, jagged wound. The left kidney and the major part of the uterus had been removed. A local man named Joseph Lawende had passed through the square with two friends shortly before the murder, and he described seeing a fair-haired man of shabby appearance with a woman who may have been Eddowes. His companions were unable to confirm his description. Eddowes' and Stride's murders were later called the "double event". A section of Eddowes' bloodied apron was found at the entrance to a tenement in Goulston Street, Whitechapel. A chalk inscription upon the wall directly above this piece of apron became known as the Goulston Street graffito and seemed to implicate a Jew or Jews, but it was unclear whether the graffito was written by the murderer as he dropped the apron piece, or was merely incidental. Such graffiti were commonplace in Whitechapel. Police Commissioner Charles Warren feared that the graffito might spark anti-semitic riots and ordered it washed away before dawn. Kelly's mutilated and disembowelled body was discovered lying on the bed in the single room where she lived at 13 Miller's Court, off Dorset Street, Spitalfields, at 10:45 a.m. on Friday 9 November 1888. The throat had been severed down to the spine, and the abdomen almost emptied of its organs. The heart was missing. The canonical five murders were perpetrated at night, on or close to a weekend, either at the end of a month or a week (or so) after. The mutilations became increasingly severe as the series of murders proceeded, except for that of Stride, whose attacker may have been interrupted. Nichols was not missing any organs; Chapman's uterus was taken; Eddowes had her uterus and a kidney removed and her face mutilated; and Kelly's body was extensively eviscerated, with her face hacked beyond recognition and the tissue of her neck being severed to the bone, although the heart was the sole body organ missing from this crime scene. Historically, the belief that these five crimes were committed by the same man is derived from contemporary documents that link them together to the exclusion of others. In 1894, Sir Melville Macnaghten, Assistant Chief Constable of the Metropolitan Police Service and Head of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID), wrote a report that stated: "the Whitechapel murderer had 5 victims—& 5 victims only". Similarly, the canonical five victims were linked together in a letter written by police surgeon Thomas Bond to Robert Anderson, head of the London CID, on 10 November 1888. Some researchers have posited that some of the murders were undoubtedly the work of a single killer but an unknown larger number of killers acting independently were responsible for the others. Authors Stewart P. Evans and Donald Rumbelow argue that the canonical five is a "Ripper myth" and that three cases (Nichols, Chapman, and Eddowes) can be definitely linked but there is less certainty over Stride and Kelly. Conversely, others suppose that the six murders between Tabram and Kelly were the work of a single killer. Dr Percy Clark, assistant to the examining pathologist George Bagster Phillips, linked only three of the murders and thought that the others were perpetrated by "weak-minded individuals induced to emulate the crime". Macnaghten did not join the police force until the year after the murders, and his memorandum contains serious factual errors about possible suspects. Later Whitechapel murders: Kelly is generally considered to be the Ripper's final victim, and it is assumed that the crimes ended because of the culprit's death, imprisonment, institutionalisation, or emigration. The Whitechapel murders file details another four murders that happened after the canonical five: those of Rose Mylett, Alice McKenzie, the Pinchin Street torso, and Frances Coles. Mylett was found strangled in Clarke's Yard, High Street, Poplar on 20 December 1888. There was no sign of a struggle, and the police believed that she had accidentally hanged herself on her collar while in a drunken stupor or committed suicide. Nevertheless, the inquest jury returned a verdict of murder. McKenzie was killed on 17 July 1889 by severance of the left carotid artery. Several minor bruises and cuts were found on the body, discovered in Castle Alley, Whitechapel. One of the examining pathologists, Thomas Bond, believed this to be a Ripper murder, though his colleague George Bagster Phillips, who had examined the bodies of three previous victims, disagreed. Later writers are also divided between those who think that her murderer copied the Ripper's modus operandi to deflect suspicion from himself, and those who ascribe it to the Ripper. "The Pinchin Street torso" was a headless and legless torso of an unidentified woman found under a railway arch in Pinchin Street, Whitechapel, on 10 September 1889. It seems probable that the murder was committed elsewhere and that parts of the dismembered body were dispersed for disposal. Coles was killed on 13 February 1891 under a railway arch at Swallow Gardens, Whitechapel. Her throat was cut but the body was not mutilated. James Thomas Sadler was seen earlier with her and was arrested by the police, charged with her murder, and briefly thought to be the Ripper. He was discharged from court for lack of evidence on 3 March 1891. Other alleged victims: In addition to the eleven Whitechapel murders, commentators have linked other attacks to the Ripper. In the case of "Fairy Fay", it is unclear whether the attack was real or fabricated as a part of Ripper lore. "Fairy Fay" was a nickname given to a victim allegedly found on 26 December 1887 "after a stake had been thrust through her abdomen", but there were no recorded murders in Whitechapel at or around Christmas 1887. "Fairy Fay" seems to have been created through a confused press report of the murder of Emma Elizabeth Smith, who had a stick or other blunt object shoved into her vagina. Most authors agree that the victim "Fairy Fay" never existed. Annie Millwood was admitted to Whitechapel workhouse infirmary with stab wounds in the legs and lower torso on 25 February 1888. She was discharged, but died from apparently natural causes on 31 March 1888, aged 38. She was later postulated to be the Ripper's first victim, but the attack cannot be linked definitely. Another supposed early victim was Ada Wilson, who reportedly survived being stabbed twice in the neck on 28 March 1888. Annie Farmer resided at the same lodging house as Martha Tabram and reported an attack on 21 November 1888. She had a superficial cut on her throat, but it was possibly self-inflicted. "The Whitehall Mystery" was a term coined for the discovery of a headless torso of a woman on 2 October 1888 in the basement of the new Metropolitan Police headquarters being built in Whitehall. An arm belonging to the body was previously discovered floating in the River Thames near Pimlico, and one of the legs was subsequently discovered buried near where the torso was found. The other limbs and head were never recovered and the body was never identified. The mutilations were similar to those in the Pinchin Street case, where the legs and head were severed but not the arms. The Whitehall Mystery and the Pinchin Street case may have been part of a series of murders called the "Thames Mysteries", committed by a single serial killer dubbed the "Torso killer". It is debatable whether Jack the Ripper and the "Torso killer" were the same person or separate serial killers active in the same area. The modus operandi of the Torso killer differed from that of the Ripper, and police at the time discounted any connection between the two. Elizabeth Jackson was a prostitute whose various body parts were collected from the river Thames over a three-week period in June 1889. She may have been another victim of the "Torso killer". John Gill, a seven-year-old boy, was found murdered in Manningham, Bradford, on 29 December 1888. His legs had been severed, his abdomen opened, his intestines drawn out, and his heart and one ear removed. The similarities with the murder of Mary Kelly led to press speculation that the Ripper had killed him. The boy's employer, milkman William Barrett, was twice arrested for the murder but was released due to insufficient evidence. No-one was ever prosecuted. Carrie Brown (nicknamed "Shakespeare", reportedly for quoting Shakespeare's sonnets) was strangled with clothing and then mutilated with a knife on 24 April 1891 in New York City. Her body was found with a large tear through her groin area and superficial cuts on her legs and back. No organs were removed from the scene, though an ovary was found upon the bed, either purposely removed or unintentionally dislodged. At the time, the murder was compared to those in Whitechapel, though the Metropolitan Police eventually ruled out any connection. Investigation: The surviving police files on the Whitechapel murders allow a detailed view of investigative procedure in the Victorian era. A large team of policemen conducted house-to-house inquiries throughout Whitechapel. Forensic material was collected and examined. Suspects were identified, traced, and either examined more closely or eliminated from the inquiry. Modern police work follows the same pattern. More than 2,000 people were interviewed, "upwards of 300" people were investigated, and 80 people were detained. The investigation was initially conducted by the Metropolitan Police Whitechapel (H) Division Criminal Investigation Department (CID) headed by Detective Inspector Edmund Reid. After the murder of Nichols, Detective Inspectors Frederick Abberline, Henry Moore, and Walter Andrews were sent from Central Office at Scotland Yard to assist. The City of London Police were involved under Detective Inspector James McWilliam after the Eddowes murder, which occurred within the City of London. The overall direction of the murder enquiries was hampered by the fact that the newly appointed head of the CID Robert Anderson was on leave in Switzerland between 7 September and 6 October, during the time when Chapman, Stride, and Eddowes were killed. This prompted Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Charles Warren to appoint Chief Inspector Donald Swanson to coordinate the enquiry from Scotland Yard. A group of volunteer citizens in London's East End called the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee patrolled the streets looking for suspicious characters, partly because of dissatisfaction with the police effort. They petitioned the government to raise a reward for information about the killer, and hired private detectives to question witnesses independently. Butchers, slaughterers, surgeons, and physicians were suspected because of the manner of the mutilations. A surviving note from Major Henry Smith, Acting Commissioner of the City Police, indicates that the alibis of local butchers and slaughterers were investigated, with the result that they were eliminated from the inquiry. A report from Inspector Swanson to the Home Office confirms that 76 butchers and slaughterers were visited, and that the inquiry encompassed all their employees for the previous six months. Some contemporary figures, including Queen Victoria, thought the pattern of the murders indicated that the culprit was a butcher or cattle drover on one of the cattle boats that plied between London and mainland Europe. Whitechapel was close to the London Docks, and usually such boats docked on Thursday or Friday and departed on Saturday or Sunday. The cattle boats were examined but the dates of the murders did not coincide with a single boat's movements and the transfer of a crewman between boats was also ruled out. Criminal profiling: At the end of October, Robert Anderson asked police surgeon Thomas Bond to give his opinion on the extent of the murderer's surgical skill and knowledge. The opinion offered by Bond on the character of the "Whitechapel murderer" is the earliest surviving offender profile. Bond's assessment was based on his own examination of the most extensively mutilated victim and the post mortem notes from the four previous canonical murders. He wrote: All five murders no doubt were committed by the same hand. In the first four the throats appear to have been cut from left to right, in the last case owing to the extensive mutilation it is impossible to say in what direction the fatal cut was made, but arterial blood was found on the wall in splashes close to where the woman's head must have been lying. All the circumstances surrounding the murders lead me to form the opinion that the women must have been lying down when murdered and in every case the throat was first cut. Bond was strongly opposed to the idea that the murderer possessed any kind of scientific or anatomical knowledge, or even "the technical knowledge of a butcher or horse slaughterer". In his opinion, the killer must have been a man of solitary habits, subject to "periodical attacks of homicidal and erotic mania", with the character of the mutilations possibly indicating "satyriasis". Bond also stated that "the homicidal impulse may have developed from a revengeful or brooding condition of the mind, or that religious mania may have been the original disease but I do not think either hypothesis is likely". There is no evidence of any sexual activity with any of the victims, yet psychologists suppose that the penetration of the victims with a knife and "leaving them on display in sexually degrading positions with the wounds exposed" indicates that the perpetrator derived sexual pleasure from the attacks. This view is challenged by others who dismiss such hypotheses as insupportable supposition. Suspects: The concentration of the killings around weekends and public holidays and within a few streets of each other has indicated to many that the Ripper was in regular employment and lived locally. Others have thought that the killer was an educated upper-class man, possibly a doctor or an aristocrat who ventured into Whitechapel from a more well-to-do area. Such theories draw on cultural perceptions such as fear of the medical profession, mistrust of modern science, or the exploitation of the poor by the rich. Suspects proposed years after the murders include virtually anyone remotely connected to the case by contemporary documents, as well as many famous names who were never considered in the police investigation. Everyone alive at the time is now dead, and modern authors are free to accuse anyone "without any need for any supporting historical evidence". Suspects named in contemporary police documents include three in Sir Melville Macnaghten's 1894 memorandum, but the evidence against them is circumstantial at best. There are many and varied theories about the identity and profession of Jack the Ripper, but authorities are not agreed upon any of them, and the number of named suspects reaches over one hundred. Despite continued interest in the case, the Ripper's identity remains unknown. Letters: Over the course of the Ripper murders, the police, newspapers, and others received hundreds of letters regarding the case. Some were well-intentioned offers of advice for catching the killer, but the vast majority were useless. Hundreds of letters claimed to have been written by the killer himself, and three of these in particular are prominent: the "Dear Boss" letter, the "Saucy Jacky" postcard and the "From Hell" letter. The "Dear Boss" letter, dated 25 September, was postmarked 27 September 1888. It was received that day by the Central News Agency, and was forwarded to Scotland Yard on 29 September. Initially it was considered a hoax, but when Eddowes was found three days after the letter's postmark with one ear partially cut off, the letter's promise to "clip the ladys (sic) ears off" gained attention. Eddowes' ear appears to have been nicked by the killer incidentally during his attack, and the letter writer's threat to send the ears to the police was never carried out. The name "Jack the Ripper" was first used in this letter by the signatory and gained worldwide notoriety after its publication. Most of the letters that followed copied this letter's tone. Some sources claim that another letter dated 17 September 1888 was the first to use the name "Jack the Ripper", but most experts believe that this was a fake inserted into police records in the 20th century. The "Saucy Jacky" postcard was postmarked 1 October 1888 and was received the same day by the Central News Agency. The handwriting was similar to the "Dear Boss" letter. It mentions that two victims were killed very close to one another: "double event this time", which was thought to refer to the murders of Stride and Eddowes. It has been argued that the letter was posted before the murders were publicised, making it unlikely that a crank would have such knowledge of the crime, but it was postmarked more than 24 hours after the killings took place, long after details were known and being published by journalists and talked about by residents of the area. The "From Hell" letter was received by George Lusk, leader of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, on 16 October 1888. The handwriting and style is unlike that of the "Dear Boss" letter and "Saucy Jacky" postcard. The letter came with a small box in which Lusk discovered half of a kidney, preserved in "spirits of wine" (ethanol). Eddowes' left kidney had been removed by the killer. The writer claimed that he "fried and ate" the missing kidney half. There is disagreement over the kidney; some contend that it belonged to Eddowes, while others argue that it was a macabre practical joke. The kidney was examined by Dr Thomas Openshaw of the London Hospital, who determined that it was human and from the left side, but (contrary to false newspaper reports) he could not determine any other biological characteristics. Openshaw subsequently also received a letter signed "Jack the Ripper". Scotland Yard published facsimiles of the "Dear Boss" letter and the postcard on 3 October, in the ultimately vain hope that someone would recognise the handwriting. Charles Warren explained in a letter to Godfrey Lushington, Permanent Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department: "I think the whole thing a hoax but of course we are bound to try & ascertain the writer in any case." On 7 October 1888, George R. Sims in the Sunday newspaper Referee implied scathingly that the letter was written by a journalist "to hurl the circulation of a newspaper sky high". Police officials later claimed to have identified a specific journalist as the author of both the "Dear Boss" letter and the postcard. The journalist was identified as Tom Bullen in a letter from Chief Inspector John Littlechild to George R. Sims dated 23 September 1913. A journalist named Fred Best reportedly confessed in 1931 that he and a colleague at The Star had written the letters signed "Jack the Ripper" to heighten interest in the murders and "keep the business alive". Media: The Ripper murders mark an important watershed in the treatment of crime by journalists. Jack the Ripper was not the first serial killer, but his case was the first to create a worldwide media frenzy. Tax reforms in the 1850s had enabled the publication of inexpensive newspapers with wider circulation. These mushroomed in the later Victorian era to include mass-circulation newspapers as cheap as a halfpenny, along with popular magazines such as The Illustrated Police News which made the Ripper the beneficiary of previously unparalleled publicity. Consequently, at the height of the investigation, over one million copies of newspapers with extensive coverage devoted to the Whitechapel murders were sold each day. In early September, six days after the murder of Mary Ann Nichols, the Manchester Guardian reported: "Whatever information may be in the possession of the police they deem it necessary to keep secret. It is believed their attention is particularly directed to a notorious character known as 'Leather Apron'." Journalists were frustrated by the unwillingness of the CID to reveal details of their investigation to the public, and so resorted to writing reports of questionable veracity. Imaginative descriptions of "Leather Apron" appeared in the press, but rival journalists dismissed these as "a mythical outgrowth of the reporter's fancy". John Pizer, a local Jew who made footwear from leather, was known by the name "Leather Apron" and was arrested, even though the investigating inspector reported that "at present there is no evidence whatsoever against him". He was soon released after the confirmation of his alibis. After the publication of the "Dear Boss" letter, "Jack the Ripper" supplanted "Leather Apron" as the name adopted by the press and public to describe the killer. The name "Jack" was already used to describe another fabled London attacker: "Spring-heeled Jack", who supposedly leapt over walls to strike at his victims and escape as quickly as he came. The invention and adoption of a nickname for a particular killer became standard media practice with examples such as the Axeman of New Orleans, the Boston Strangler, and the Beltway Sniper. Examples derived from Jack the Ripper include the French Ripper, the Düsseldorf Ripper, the Camden Ripper, the Blackout Ripper, Jack the Stripper, the Yorkshire Ripper, and the Rostov Ripper. Sensational press reports combined with the fact that no one was ever convicted of the murders have confused scholarly analysis and created a legend that casts a shadow over later serial killers. Legacy: The nature of the murders and of the victims drew attention to the poor living conditions in the East End and galvanised public opinion against the overcrowded, insanitary slums. In the two decades after the murders, the worst of the slums were cleared and demolished, but the streets and some buildings survive and the legend of the Ripper is still promoted by guided tours of the murder sites. The Ten Bells public house in Commercial Street was frequented by at least one of the victims and was the focus of such tours for many years. In 2015, the Jack the Ripper Museum opened in east London. In the immediate aftermath of the murders and later, "Jack the Ripper became the children's bogey man." Depictions were often phantasmic or monstrous. In the 1920s and 1930s, he was depicted in film dressed in everyday clothes as a man with a hidden secret, preying on his unsuspecting victims; atmosphere and evil were suggested through lighting effects and shadowplay. By the 1960s, the Ripper had become "the symbol of a predatory aristocracy", and was more often portrayed in a top hat dressed as a gentleman. The Establishment as a whole became the villain, with the Ripper acting as a manifestation of upper-class exploitation. The image of the Ripper merged with or borrowed symbols from horror stories, such as Dracula's cloak or Victor Frankenstein's organ harvest. The fictional world of the Ripper can fuse with multiple genres, ranging from Sherlock Holmes to Japanese erotic horror. In addition to the contradictions and unreliability of contemporary accounts, attempts to identify the real killer are hampered by the lack of surviving forensic evidence. DNA analysis on extant letters is inconclusive; the available material has been handled many times and is too contaminated to provide meaningful results. There have been mutually incompatible claims that DNA evidence points conclusively to two different suspects, and the methodology of both has also been criticised. Jack the Ripper features in hundreds of works of fiction and works which straddle the boundaries between fact and fiction, including the Ripper letters and a hoax Diary of Jack the Ripper. The Ripper appears in novels, short stories, poems, comic books, games, songs, plays, operas, television programmes, and films. More than 100 non-fiction works deal exclusively with the Jack the Ripper murders, making it one of the most written-about true-crime subjects. The term "ripperology" was coined by Colin Wilson in the 1970s to describe the study of the case by professionals and amateurs. The periodicals Ripperana, Ripperologist, and Ripper Notes publish their research. There is no waxwork figure of Jack the Ripper at Madame Tussauds' Chamber of Horrors, unlike murderers of lesser fame, in accordance with their policy of not modelling persons whose likeness is unknown. He is instead depicted as a shadow. In 2006, BBC History magazine and its readers selected Jack the Ripper as the worst Briton in history.