Ian
priscilla 1Unsolved Crimes
December 20th 2010 01:24
As reported on Raw Justice, contrary to what many TV shows will have you believe, there are crimes that remain unsolved.
Below are some of the most famous and baffling unsolved crimes. Read the full list of 15 crimes here.
Perhaps the best known unsolved crimes of all time were perpetrated by one Jack the Ripper, aka the Whitechapel Murderer or “Leather Apron.” Jack murdered at least five (many believe more) prostitutes in the East End of London between August and November of 1888. The prostitutes didn’t have much in common aside from their profession and the fact that they were believed to have been drunk at the times of their deaths. After probably soliciting his soon-to-be victim for sex and waiting for her to drop her hands to lift her skirt, Jack grabbed her by the throat and strangled her until she was either dead or unconscious. Once the body was prone, he slit the throat and mutilated it in various ways, once even removing the kidney of a victim without damaging any of the other organs. Surprisingly, no evidence of sexual molestation post-mortem was ever found.
One of the main reasons the case is so infamous is because the press was a rising influence in London society, which was also fraught with political difficulties at the time, and the highly-literate citizenry followed closely the way the police handed the case was handled by the police and politicians. Hundreds of letters were sent to various newspapers and other recipients but only three of them led to any real clues. Two were signed “Jack the Ripper,” which is where the moniker comes from, and one included the line “From Hell,” which was then used as the title for a pretty awful 2001 movie about the case starring Johnny Depp and Heather Graham. The movie expands on the popular and salacious theory that Prince Albert Victor, also known as Eddy, was behind the murders. Other suspects included a surgeon’s son, a cotton broker and prolific diarist, a psychopathic Polish Jewish misogynist, and a doctor arrested for homosexual activity.
Jimmy Hoffa was the son of a Pennsylvania coal miner who grew to be the bullying head of the Teamsters Union after his predecessor was (shock of shocks) ousted for financial misdeeds. Hoffa was the stereotypical union leader: buddy-buddy with some politicians (i.e. Richard Nixon) and enemies of others (Robert Kennedy), a gruff man with “close friends” in the Mafia whose style he emulated (think tailored suits and Gucci loafers) and arbitrary system of morality he believed in. Hoffa was staunchly against JFK’s adulterous behavior and yet had been arrested and served time in prison for mail fraud, forgery, conspiracy and jury tampering before Nixon commuted his sentence to time served. After he was released from prison, he quickly began a campaign to assert his influence in union activities, but met with only minor success. The man he had named his successor, Frank Fitzsimmons, was well-liked by politicians and mobsters alike, very good people to have on your side.
On July 30, 1975, Hoffa went to meet a Detroit mobster named Anthony “Tony Jack” Giacalone and a New York/New Jersey Genovese capo named Anthony “Tony Pro” Provenzano. He called his wife Josephine from outside the Machus Red Fox restaurant in Bloomfield Township, Michigan, to tell her he had been stood up. He never came home. A number of mafiosi and teamsters, including Giacalone’s son Joe, were considered suspects, but not surprisingly, no arrests were ever made. Decades after his disappearance, DNA matched a hair from the back seat of Joe Giacalone’s car to a hair found in Jimmy Hoffa’s hairbrush. No one seems to doubt that the mob was responsible, but the big question that remains is: where is the body? The most plausible clue yet, given to police in 2006, led to a Detroit farm where the authorities found no trace of Hoffa’s remains.
The story of D. B. Cooper reads like the plot of a James Bond book, if Bond were more a villain and less of a womanizing do-gooder. On December 24, 1971, a man traveling under the name of Dan Cooper boarded a plane at Portland International Airport bound for Seattle. He was wearing a black suit, raincoat, and sunglasses and he sat in the back of the plane. After the plane took off, he handed a flight attendant a note claiming he had a bomb in his briefcase. It went to say that Cooper wanted two sets of parachutes and $200,000 in unmarked bills when the plane landed in Seattle. The FBI had the flight attendant glance at the bomb, and when she confirmed that there were in fact wires sticking out from his briefcase, they agreed to cooperate. The plane landed in Seattle, where Cooper sipped a bourbon cocktail and waited for his money. When all was delivered, the plane took off again, this time headed toward Reno, Nevada, to refuel before a trip to Mexico City, but over the southern part of Washington, Cooper strapped on a parachute and jumped out of the plane.
The case has baffled and excited citizens of the Northwest and Americans alike since the hijacking. In 2009, a group of amateur detectivesincluding “a fossil hunter who works with the Burke Museum of Natural History in Seattle, a well-known scientific illustrator, an Egyptologist who speaks 12 languages, a metallurgist, and an Arkansas man who discovered $5,800 of the loot in $20 bills while throwing a Frisbee on the banks of the Columbia River when he was 8 years old” teamed up determined to solve the mystery. They scoured a French comic book series starring a skydiver named D. B. Cooper, took detailed measurements of soil samples of the Columbia River, and decided (using intuition) that Cooper was probably dead.
Tupac Shakur, aka 2Pac, Pac, or Makaveli, was born in the East Harlem neighborhood of New York City in 1971. He was raised by members of the Black Panther Party and began studying poetry, jazz, and ballet dancing after the family, sans jailed stepfather, moved to Baltimore when he was in high school. He began his career dancing back-up for Digital Underground but by 1992, had gone solo and released his first album entitled 2paclypse Now. By this time, Tupac was twenty years old and had already been arrested eight times on charges varying from sexual abuse to wrongful death after a child was killed during gang warfare. This was the height of the feud between the East Coast and West Coast hip hop artists, and Tupac was deeply involved in this strife.
In early September of 1996, Tupac traveled to Las Vegas to see a boxing match between Mike Tyson and Bruce Seldon. He sat ringside with the owner of his record label, “Suge” Knight. After the fight (which lasted all of two minutes,) Shakur and his crew went to Knight’s house and from there, started off toward Club 662, where Shakur was set to perform with Run DMC and hang with Tyson, who was supposed to make an appearance. When they stopped at a red light near the strip, a white Cadillac pulled up aside them and fired thirteen bullets into their car. That Friday, the 13th, Tupac was pronounced dead. A witness to the murder, friend Yafeu Fala, was murdered two months later, AFTER he said he’d testify. His friend-turned-rival, Notorious B.I.G., was murdered less than a year later, though many believe the two to be living happily off royalties on a tropical island somewhere.
Tiny 5-year-old beauty queen JonBenet Ramsey’s life was a golden one. She was the beloved child of John, a successful businessman, and Patsy, a former beauty queen who doted on her towheaded daughter. All that was to come to an end, though, in the wee hours of Christmas morning, 1996, when JonBenet’s body was found in the basement of her family’s large suburban Boulder, Colorado home. The story goes that Patsy Ramsey found a ransom note demanding $118,000 in exchange for the child on the stairs of the home around 5 am. She quickly called the police, who arrived 7 minutes later and conducted a rather hasty search of the Ramsey abode. JonBenet’s body was soon found beneath a white blanket in the basement, and thus began a highly publicized case with the media focusing largely on the little girl’s painted pageant get-up and the popular suspicion of the parents.
The investigation fumbled on through the nineties and the early part of the twenty-first century, the culprit in many people’s eyes being the parents or JonBenet’s older brother Burke, who was nine at the time of her murder. Like with many widely known cases, many people stepped forward claiming to know who the killer was. An email was sent to Boulder PD in 2001 by someone who claimed an AOL user had posted writing on the Internet stating they had witnessed JonBenet’s murder. The police followed the lead –– right to a 14-year-old Ohio girl playing a prank. Most notably, John Mark Karr, creepy former teacher and pedophile, confessed to the crime while living in Thailand in 2006, but charges were never filed as it was clear to all that the man was quite simply insane. Recently, he’s the subject of new suspicion as a former pupil of his claims he has been trying to help him recruit little blond girls with small feet to join a cult he wants to form and name “The Immaculates.” Coincidentally enough, JonBenet Ramsey’s murder case has been reopened last month, with brother Burke Ramsey, now 23, among the witnesses to be called.
Below are some of the most famous and baffling unsolved crimes. Read the full list of 15 crimes here.
Jack The Ripper
One of the main reasons the case is so infamous is because the press was a rising influence in London society, which was also fraught with political difficulties at the time, and the highly-literate citizenry followed closely the way the police handed the case was handled by the police and politicians. Hundreds of letters were sent to various newspapers and other recipients but only three of them led to any real clues. Two were signed “Jack the Ripper,” which is where the moniker comes from, and one included the line “From Hell,” which was then used as the title for a pretty awful 2001 movie about the case starring Johnny Depp and Heather Graham. The movie expands on the popular and salacious theory that Prince Albert Victor, also known as Eddy, was behind the murders. Other suspects included a surgeon’s son, a cotton broker and prolific diarist, a psychopathic Polish Jewish misogynist, and a doctor arrested for homosexual activity.
Jimmy Hoffa
On July 30, 1975, Hoffa went to meet a Detroit mobster named Anthony “Tony Jack” Giacalone and a New York/New Jersey Genovese capo named Anthony “Tony Pro” Provenzano. He called his wife Josephine from outside the Machus Red Fox restaurant in Bloomfield Township, Michigan, to tell her he had been stood up. He never came home. A number of mafiosi and teamsters, including Giacalone’s son Joe, were considered suspects, but not surprisingly, no arrests were ever made. Decades after his disappearance, DNA matched a hair from the back seat of Joe Giacalone’s car to a hair found in Jimmy Hoffa’s hairbrush. No one seems to doubt that the mob was responsible, but the big question that remains is: where is the body? The most plausible clue yet, given to police in 2006, led to a Detroit farm where the authorities found no trace of Hoffa’s remains.
DB Cooper
The case has baffled and excited citizens of the Northwest and Americans alike since the hijacking. In 2009, a group of amateur detectivesincluding “a fossil hunter who works with the Burke Museum of Natural History in Seattle, a well-known scientific illustrator, an Egyptologist who speaks 12 languages, a metallurgist, and an Arkansas man who discovered $5,800 of the loot in $20 bills while throwing a Frisbee on the banks of the Columbia River when he was 8 years old” teamed up determined to solve the mystery. They scoured a French comic book series starring a skydiver named D. B. Cooper, took detailed measurements of soil samples of the Columbia River, and decided (using intuition) that Cooper was probably dead.
Tupac
In early September of 1996, Tupac traveled to Las Vegas to see a boxing match between Mike Tyson and Bruce Seldon. He sat ringside with the owner of his record label, “Suge” Knight. After the fight (which lasted all of two minutes,) Shakur and his crew went to Knight’s house and from there, started off toward Club 662, where Shakur was set to perform with Run DMC and hang with Tyson, who was supposed to make an appearance. When they stopped at a red light near the strip, a white Cadillac pulled up aside them and fired thirteen bullets into their car. That Friday, the 13th, Tupac was pronounced dead. A witness to the murder, friend Yafeu Fala, was murdered two months later, AFTER he said he’d testify. His friend-turned-rival, Notorious B.I.G., was murdered less than a year later, though many believe the two to be living happily off royalties on a tropical island somewhere.
JonBenet Ramsey
The investigation fumbled on through the nineties and the early part of the twenty-first century, the culprit in many people’s eyes being the parents or JonBenet’s older brother Burke, who was nine at the time of her murder. Like with many widely known cases, many people stepped forward claiming to know who the killer was. An email was sent to Boulder PD in 2001 by someone who claimed an AOL user had posted writing on the Internet stating they had witnessed JonBenet’s murder. The police followed the lead –– right to a 14-year-old Ohio girl playing a prank. Most notably, John Mark Karr, creepy former teacher and pedophile, confessed to the crime while living in Thailand in 2006, but charges were never filed as it was clear to all that the man was quite simply insane. Recently, he’s the subject of new suspicion as a former pupil of his claims he has been trying to help him recruit little blond girls with small feet to join a cult he wants to form and name “The Immaculates.” Coincidentally enough, JonBenet Ramsey’s murder case has been reopened last month, with brother Burke Ramsey, now 23, among the witnesses to be called.
| 19 |
| Vote |
subscribe to this blog
