FLASH BACK TO THE WORLD OF HISTORY AND EVENTS.

Judge accepts jury recommendation, sentences Ohio serial killer to death for killing 11 women A serial killer will be put to death for murdering 11 women and dumping their bodies around his property, a judge ruled Friday. Anthony Sowell should die by lethal injection for his crimes, Judge Dick Ambrose ruled, accepting the sentencing recommendation of the jury that convicted Sowell of aggravated murder. Sowell, 51, never looked at victims' relatives as they spoke during the sentencing hearing. He also ignored the judge when asked if he wanted to speak and never moved when the judge asked him to sign a court document.  His attorney, John Parker, said Sowell didn't want to speak and signed the sex-offender reporting requirement document for Sowell. Dozens of relatives were in the courtroom. As the hearing began, deputies passed around boxes of tissues to the relatives and warned against any outburst. Sowell was seated in court wearing an orange jail jumpsuit, his hands cuffed with...

Timothy Evans: Innocence Hanged Timothy Evans was not remarkably bright. You need to understand this if any of what follows is to make sense. He wasn’t terribly nice either. Although subsequent movies have portrayed him sympathetically, a tragic victim of circumstance, the fact is that he drank heavily, and tended to stagger home to yell at his wife. Knock her about, occasionally. He was known for his tall tales, grandiose stories focused on his heroics. They undermined him when he tried to defend himself on the charge of murdering his baby. November 30th, 1949, Timothy Evans entered the police station in Merthyr Tydfil. He was worried for the safety of his eighteen-month-old Geraldine, he told them. Where was the baby’s mother, they asked. Dead. Died in unusual circumstances. What circumstances? She was pregnant again, he told them. A man had given him a liquid to abort the foetus. He’d given it to Beryl to drink. She’d died.  He’d stuffed her body down a manhole outside the house...

A History of Capital Punishment in Britain Hanging was the most common method of execution in England from Saxon times until the 20th century. At first, the criminal stood on a ladder, which was pulled away, or on a cart, which was moved. From the 18th century, he stood on a trapdoor.  Sometimes the hanged man broke his neck when he fell but until the 19th century, he was usually strangled by a rope.  In the 18th century and the early 19th century hanging was the punishment for many crimes, not just murder (although in reality people convicted of lesser crimes were often reprieved). In 1752 a law in England stated that the body of a person hanged for any crime would be handed over to surgeons to be dissected. To us, it would not seem like a severe punishment.  However, to people of the time, the idea that after their death their bodies would be cut up was terrifying. It added an extra punishment to hanging. During the early 19th century the number of crimes punishable by ...

Britain’s last executions: hanging of two jobless criminals a ‘low key’ affair The 50th anniversary of the deaths of thieves Gwynne Evans and Peter Allen marks a historic moment As they were led to the gallows there was little fuss. No public outcry, no headlines indicated that the executions of Gwynne Evans and Peter Allen would be remembered as anything other than run-of-the-mill. The deaths of the two convicted murderers, hanged with little ceremony at separate prisons at 8am on 13 August 1964, made only a couple of lines in the national press. Exactly 50 years later, however, the names Evans and Allen – two criminals who bludgeoned a man to death to steal £10 – are a significant footnote in the annals of abolitionist history. As the last two people executed in Britain, the macabre anniversary of their deaths at Strangeways prison in Manchester and Walton prison in Liverpool is generating more publicity than their crime and punishment ever did at the time. Evans, 24, and Allen, 21, ...

Doomed to hang because she refused to betray her lover - and insisted on staying a 'tarty' blonde Ruth Ellis was the last woman to be hanged in Britain — an execution that appalled the world.  On Saturday we told how she was beaten and abused by the men in her life before finally snapping and shooting dead her faithless, violent lover David Blakely.  Today, in our final gripping extract from a forensically researched new book, we reveal how vital evidence that would have saved her from the gallows was ignored . . . Two hours after the shooting, while David Blakely’s body was lying in the mortuary, Ruth Ellis was questioned by three detectives in Hampstead police station.  It was 11.30pm. One of the detectives recalled: ‘She had a cigarette and she was  completely calm . . . she really couldn’t care less what was going to happen to her.’ She was cautioned: ‘You are not obliged to say anything at all about this unless you wish to do so, but whatever you say will be tak...

Stepdad of boy who died after eating strawberries arrested for trafficking fentanyl The stepfather of an eight-year-old boy who died earlier this month in Hopkins County has been booked into jail. 33-year-old Antonio Person is charged with trafficking fentanyl, as well as other drug and gun possession charges. Eight-year-old Trey Harris was laid to rest over the weekend. His death sparked a warning about strawberries sold at a school fundraiser. Initially, health officials worried there was something wrong with the strawberries, but then officials believed Trey had an allergic reaction. The coroner says they are still waiting on toxicology results to determine Trey’s cause of death. Police say the investigation into Trey’s death led to the search warrant, which led to the discovery of the drugs and gun in the home. Major Jason McKnight with the Madisonville Police Department says he knows there’s a large public interest in this case. However, they want to be clear that there have been ...

Dad indicted on aggravated murder charges in deaths of 3 young sons He shot his three sons with a Marlin Model HC .22 Rifle, according to court records. Ohio (WXIX) - A father has been indicted in connection with the killings of his three young sons. Chad Doerman, 32, was indicted on nine counts of aggravated murder for the June 15 deaths of his three sons, according to lermont County court records. The boys, ages 3, 4 and 7 were shot with a Marlin Model HC .22 Rifle, according to the court documents. The grand jury report shows Doerman was indicted on the following charges: Aggravated murder - Nine counts (all unclassified felonies) Kidnapping - Eight counts (all first-degree felonies) Felonious assault - Four counts (all second-degree felonies) The shooting was reported just before 4:15 p.m. at a home owned by Doerman near the corner of Laurel Lindale Road and Clermontville Laurel Road. The children’s mother called 911 screaming, her “babies had been shot,” sheriff’s officials wrote ...

Case against mother accused of decapitating 6-year-old son, dog set to move forward The case against a Kansas City mother accused of decapitating her son and her dog will now move forward after she was found fit to stand trial. (Source: KCTV) By Sarah Motter and Gray News staff The case against a Kansas City mother who allegedly decapitated her son and her dog will move forward after she was found fit to stand trial. According to court records from the 16th Circuit Court of Jackson County, on Friday, Judge Jerri Zhang granted a motion to proceed with the case against Tasha Haefs for the 2022 death of her 6-year-old son.  Haefs has been deemed competent to proceed. A warrant was issued for Haefs’ arrest in February 2022 after she allegedly decapitated her 6-year-old son, Karvel Stevens.  She was later charged with first-degree murder and armed criminal action. Court documents said police were called to Haefs’ home to check on her welfare.  When they arrived, they found blo...

Texas Executed Carlos DeLuna for Murder in 1989. A New Documentary Says He Was Innocent. Different people tell the same story in different ways. An academic will tell it one way, a journalist another, and a filmmaker a third.  All try to get at the truth in their own fashions.  In telling the story of Carlos DeLuna, a young Corpus Christi man executed in 1989 for murder, that means ultimately trying to figure out: Did DeLuna really stab Wanda Lopez to death in 1983? Another way of putting it: Did Texas really execute an innocent man? DeLuna’s story has been told numerous times, by the Corpus Christi Caller-Times back in 1983, by the Chicago Tribune in 2006, by a team from the Columbia University Law School in 2012 and again in 2014.  The latest telling is The Phantom, a brooding documentary by British filmmaker Patrick Forbes that premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in June and opens in theaters July 2.  The film takes viewers to places that readers of a newspaper...

Sickening murder of 10-year-old ‘the most gruesome act of evil I’ve ever seen’ On the day Victoria Martens was going to celebrate her 10th birthday, she was found dead in her family’s apartment by Albuquerque police officers, her dismembered remains wrapped in a burning blanket. Details of what New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez and law enforcement officials described as an unspeakable crime emerged Thursday in a criminal complaint made public and filed against the girl’s mother, her boyfriend and his cousin.  The three were taken into custody late Wednesday. Police say Victoria was injected with methamphetamine, sexually assaulted, strangled and stabbed before being dismembered. A caller told a police dispatcher before dawn Wednesday that there was a disturbance in the apartment, said Albuquerque Police Chief Gorden Eden Jr.  Officers who went to the apartment complex found the gruesome crime scene. “This homicide is the most gruesome act of evil I have ever seen in my career,” ...

These French Maids Snapped And Brutally Killed Their Boss's Family Christine and Léa Papin were two quiet French girls who committed one of the most heinous acts in French history.  Unlike many other female serial killers who carried out numerous crimes, the Papin sisters became known for the one murderous afternoon they spent killing the two women they worked for. The torture and mutilation they inflicted upon the bodies were horrifying, especially to contemporaries, since the two girls looked so polite and innocent. But looks can be deceiving, as the crime scene photos prove in bloody detail. Christine and Léa Papin's mother, Clémence, gave birth to her first child, a girl named Emilia, in 1902.  By the social standards of the time, Clémence was forced to marry Emilia's father, Gustave, and they went on to have two more children together: Christine, born in 1905, and Léa, born six years later. After Clémence gave birth to Christine, she sent Emilia and Christine to be rai...

“It was early evening of Aug. 31, 2012, when Yancy Noll left work and headed home. He started driving his battered old Subaru up Interstate 5. At some point, he encountered a man in a BMW,” Prosecutor Kristin Richardson told “48 Hours” correspondent Peter Van Sant.  “He had no way of knowing he was going to be dead in 10 minutes.” King County prosecutors Adrienne McCoy and Kristin Richardson say the murder of Yancy Noll -- shot to death in his car while stopped at a red light -- put the city of Seattle on edge. “This case is about the presence of evil in our world,” said McCoy. “It was like a bomb had dropped,” said Richardson. “None of us is safe,” McCoy said. “Any of us could have been Yancy Noll.” “The police went all out. They took it very seriously,” said Richardson. Alison Grande is a reporter for KIRO-7, a CBS News affiliate. “This was a very big story,” she told Van Sant. “We have shootings in Seattle.  We don’t necessarily have many shootings in that area of Seattle. ...

Why Kelly Anne Bates’ Murder Is One Of The Most Disturbing In History From being partially scalped to having her eyes gouged out, Kelly Anne Bates was tortured for weeks before James Patterson Smith killed her on April 16, 1996. On April 16, 1996, James Patterson Smith contacted Greater Manchester Police to say that his teenage girlfriend Kelly Anne Bates had accidentally drowned in the tub.  Though he claimed he’d tried to resuscitate her, she was dead at the age of just 17. However, when police arrived at Smith’s house, the scene was far worse than anything they could have ever expected.  Not only was Bates dead, but her blood was found all over the house and she’d clearly suffered dozens of gruesome injuries before her “drowning.” The authorities quickly arrested James Patterson Smith and his story fell apart almost immediately.  Soon, the post-mortem examination showed that Smith had brutally tortured Kelly Anne Bates for weeks before she finally died. As the patholog...

Japanese Cannibal Who Walked Free Dies Age 73 This file photo taken on February 5, 1992 shows former Japanese student Issei Sagawa, known as the “Kobe Cannibal” for killing and then devouring a Dutch student in 1981, smiling and gesturing as he meets with an AFP journalist at his apartment in Yokohama.0 Issei Sagawa, a Japanese murderer known as the “Kobe Cannibal” who killed and ate a Dutch student but was never jailed, has died aged 73. Sagawa died of pneumonia on November 24 and was given a funeral attended only by relatives, with no public ceremony planned, his younger brother and a friend said in a statement. In 1981, Sagawa was studying in Paris when he invited Dutch student Renee Hartevelt to his home. He shot her in the neck, raped her, and then consumed parts of her body over the course of several days. Sagawa then attempted to dispose of her remains in the Bois de Boulogne park and was arrested several days later, confessing his crime to police. But in 1983 he was deemed unfi...

Murder of Sylvia Likens Sylvia Marie Likens (January 3, 1949 – October 26, 1965) was an American teenager who was tortured and murdered by her caregiver, Gertrude Baniszewski, many of Baniszewski's children, and several of their neighborhood friends.  The abuse lasted for three months, occurring incrementally, before Likens died from her extensive injuries and malnourishment on October 26, 1965, in Indianapolis, Indiana. Likens was increasingly tormented, neglected, belittled, sexually humiliated, beaten, starved, lacerated, burned, and dehydrated by her tormentors.  Her autopsy showed 150 wounds across her body, including several burns, scald marks and eroded skin.  Through intimidation, her younger sister, Jenny, was occasionally forced to participate in her mistreatment.  The official cause of her death was determined to be a homicide caused by a combination of subdural hematoma and shock, complicated by severe malnutrition. Gertrude Baniszewski; her oldest daught...

Disturbing video shows Mexican cartel lining up rivals for mass execution Shocking video shows Mexican cartel members lined up on their knees and taunted, moments before they are executed by a rival gang. The video, posted to social media by members of Los Tlacos, shows about 20 doomed men who are purported members of La Bandera, part of the Guerreros Unidos cartel, according to El País, a Spanish language publication. A man narrating the disturbing footage says, “This plaza already has an owner,” El País reported. “People from Iguala, here are all those who extorted money and who were killing innocent people and women,” the man says.  The garbage that terrorized this beautiful city.” The footage of the massacre was released Wednesday and is part of the increasing violence in the southern Mexican state of Geurrero, reports said. The footage shows a masked man taunting the doomed men, who are cuffed behind their backs.  He violently grabs their hair and points a gun at their fa...

The Most Brutal Execution Methods Reportedly Used By Mexican Cartels The Mexican Drug War - a sustained, violent conflict between powerful drug cartels and the Mexican government - has claimed an estimated 164,000 lives over the past decade.  This rampant bloodshed has torn apart cities and communities across Mexico, often taking the lives of the innocent along with those directly involved.  The Mexican cartels (The Sinaloa, Los Zetas, The Gulf Cartel, and the Knights Templar, most notably) and their known drug associates continue to escalate gratuitous acts of retaliation and often record the executions.  In 2017, the Mexican government extradited Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán, a known member of the Sinaloa cartel, to the US. Guzmán faces charges of murder and laundering funds.  New York prosecutors have evidence against the alleged cartel leader, including YouTube videos in which Guzmán systematically harmed and then removed the heads of rival gang members.  In a ...

ISIS leader dubbed ‘Jabba the Jihadi’ captured in Iraq He put the fat in fatwa. A morbidly obese ISIS fanatic dubbed “Jabba the Jihadi” has been captured by Iraqi forces — who loaded him onto a flatbed truck because he couldn’t fit in a police car. The 560-pound mufti Abu Abdul Bari, also known as Shifa al-Nima, was nabbed Thursday by an elite SWAT team of the Nineveh regiment in the city of Mosul, according to Stars and Stripes. The jumbo jihadist was known for “provocative speeches against the security forces” and is considered one of the top leaders of “ISIS gangs,” Iraqi security officials said in a statement. Bari issued religious decrees — or fatwas — ordering the execution of scholars and clerics who refused to pledge allegiance to ISIS when the terror group occupied the city, the statement said. During the heyday of the group’s self-styled caliphate in 2014, he also ordered the destruction of a mosque built at the site believed to be the burial place of the biblical prophet Jon...

Blood runs on the streets of Iraq as ISIS executioners behead three men accused spying for the government Islamic State fanatics have beheaded three men they accused of spying for the Iraqi Government in the latest bloody execution to be carried out within the organisation's self-declared caliphate. Photographs taken in north-west Iraq's Nineveh province show the men being read their charges and sentence while masked gunmen stand guard. Forced to kneel with their heads bowed, an executioner then stands over them before striking at their necks with a sword. Public beheadings, stonings and other barbaric forms of executions have become commonplace throughout ISIS' self-declared caliphate. Stretching through large swathes of Iraq and Syria, the militants are attempting to enact a strict form of Sharia law, where crimes are commonly punished by death or physical mutilation. In recent months, men accused of being gay have been thrown from rooftops, adulterers stoned to death, an...

Doomed to hang because she refused to betray her lover - and insisted on staying a 'tarty' blonde Ruth Ellis was the last woman to be hanged in Britain — an execution that appalled the world.  On Saturday we told how she was beaten and abused by the men in her life before finally snapping and shooting dead her faithless, violent lover David Blakely.  Today, in our final gripping extract from a forensically researched new book, we reveal how vital evidence that would have saved her from the gallows was ignored . . . Two hours after the shooting, while David Blakely’s body was lying in the mortuary, Ruth Ellis was questioned by three detectives in Hampstead police station.  It was 11.30pm. One of the detectives recalled: ‘She had a cigarette and she was  completely calm . . . she really couldn’t care less what was going to happen to her.’ She was cautioned: ‘You are not obliged to say anything at all about this unless you wish to do so, but whatever you say will be tak...

Morbidly obese ISIS executioner beheads man 'who mocked Islam' in front of children The enormous executioner can be seen using a huge sword to behead the man in front of a large crowd in the Syria city of Raqqa These horrifying pictures show an obese ISIS executioner beheading a man in front of watching children. The brutal execution took place in the ISIS held city of Raqqa in Syria in front of a large crowd. The images show the executioner killing the man for reportedly “mocking Islam”. The victim - dressed in an orange jumpsuit - can be seen sat in a chair. A large crowd of men and boys surround the chair to watch the brutal execution. Some smile as the killer, dressed in army fatigues, brings down his enormous sword. As reported by Mail Online, the killer looks similar to notorious ISIS executioner The Bulldozer was who captured by Syrian forces last month. ISIS recently claimed responsibility after at least 200 people were killed and 185 others injured in two car bombings ...

Role of ‘survivor cannibalism’ during Great Famine detailed in new TV documentary The Hunger: The Story of the Irish Famine isRTÉ’s first major project on the catastrophe The lengths to which Irish people went to stay alive including cannibalism have been detailed in a new documentary on the Great Famine. Entitled The Hunger: The Story of the Irish Famine, it the first major documentary by RTÉ exclusively about the calamity and is being brought out to mark the 175th anniversary of its beginning in 1845. Things became so bad in “Black 1847” with further famines in 1848 and 1849 that people were reduced to eating putrid pigs, donkeys and dogs. There were also incidents of cannibalism recorded in counties Cork, Kerry, Galway and Mayo. In 1849 Fr Peter Ward, the parish priest of Partry in Co Mayo, wrote to his archbishop: "In the village of Drimcaggy four were dead together in a poor hut- brother, two sisters, and daughter.  The flesh was pulled off the daughter's arm and mangled ...