10. Jeffrey Dahmer
Jeffrey Dahmer was one of the most disturbing, evil and disgusting serial killers out there; his legacy being one of insanity. His surname is now synonymous with âmonsterâ. Yet at least 17 times, he was able to get young men and boys to come home with him. In one incident, on the night of May 27, 1991 in Milwaukee, a 14-year-old managed to escape and wandered into the streets with Dahmer in pursuit. When the cops started asking questions, Dahmer was able to convince the police that it was merely a loversâ quarrel. The police conclusion: âIntoxicated Asian, naked male. Was returned to his sober boyfriend.â Like the dozen before him and four after, the young man was eventually strangled and dismembered. Dahmer kept his skull as a souvenir. He stored parts of his victims in vats. He ate them. Dahmerâs crimes raised several inchoate fears and revulsions: cannibalism, sexuality, class and race. After his arrest on July 22, 1991, Dahmer was sentenced to nearly a thousand years in jail. He was beaten to death by an inmate in 1994.
9. Manson Family
Charles Manson is the image of a cult leader: charismatic but deadly. Charles Manson was born to a drunkard of a mother, who sold him for a beer bottle. He was illiterate, and had an IQ of 109 (later retested at 121). He was in and out of prison several times, once being transferred from a low security prison to a more secure one because he sodomized another boy. He was many kinds of criminal: a burglar, a pimp, a thief, a rapist, and eventually, a murderer. During 1967âs Summer of Love, he established himself as a guru, with an ideology of partly Scientology, which he had studied in prison. In 1968, Manson and his cult, called the Manson Family, moved in to George Spahnâs ranch. Finally, in November 1968, Manson predicted something called Helter Skelter. Manson said that The Beatles had predicted a giant race war between blacks and whites in America, emphasizing Martin Luther King, Juniorâs Assassination.
He predicted that blacks would win, after annihilating the entire white population, only to be ruled by the family after the race war was done, because the Family would be in a secret underground city below Death Valley called The Bottomless Pit. They wrote songs about the end of the world, and expected Terry Melcher to come to listen to their material. Manson was an aspiring musician at one point, meeting Dennis Wilson and living with him before moving to Spahnâs residence. They were angry, so they went to Celio Drive, where Melcher was at one point a tenant, but now the tenants were director Roman Polanski and his actress wife, Sharon Tate. After Manson left, discovering that Melcher no longer lived there. Tate left for Rome the next day. In 1969, Manson sent three members of the family to murder acquaintance Gary Hinman. After Hinman was dead, they used his blood to write âPolitical Piggyâ on the wall. On August 8th, Manson said that it is time for Helter Skelter.
They went to the Polanski residence, where Tate had returned from Rome. Polanski was out working on a film in London. Tate, her unborn baby and several other tenants were killed. In Tateâs blood, they wrote âPigâ on the front door. Next night, the Family killed Rosemary and Leno LaBianca. In their blood, The Family wrote âRiseâ and âDeath To Pigsâ on the walls and âHelter Skelterâ on the refrigerator.
8. The Black Dahlia
In 1947 the body of 22 year old Elizabeth Short was found in two pieces in a parking lot in Los Angeles. According to newspaper reports shortly after the murder, Short received the nickname âBlack Dahliaâ at a Long Beach drugstore in the summer of 1946, as a play on the then-current movie The Blue Dahlia. However, Los Angeles County district attorney investigatorsâ reports state the nickname was invented by newspaper reporters covering the murder. In either case, Short was not generally known as the âBlack Dahliaâ during her lifetime. Many rumors and tales have spread about the Black Dahlia, and the investigation (one of the largest in LA history) never found the killer.
7. The Theft of the Mona Lisa
The Mona Lisa is a painting by one of the most intelligent men ever, the engineer and inventor Leonardo da Vinci. It is possibly the most famous picture in the world. It is currently in the French art museum, the Louvre. In 1911, Vincenzo Peruggia, a Louvre employee, stole it. Peruggia stole it because he believed that it should be returned to Italy (he was Italian). Peruggia was also motivated because a friend sold copies of the Mona Lisa, and the price would skyrocket after the theft of the original. Peruggia was caught after trying to sell it to a museum in Florence, Italy. He served only 6 months for the theft. Peruggia was actually quite popular in Italy. He kept the painting in his trunk for two years.
6. The Unabomber
Ted Kaczynski, known as the Unabomber, is a mathematician and anarchist. A child prodigy, he was accepted into Harvard at 16, and later earned a PhD in mathematics. In 1971, he moved to a remote cabin. After watching developments destroy the wilderness, he decided to start a bombing campaign. From 1978 to 1995, he sent 16 bombs to universities and airlines, killing three people and injuring 23. He was eventually exposed by his brother, David. He is serving time in ADX Florence, which has other notable inmates such as Joseph Edward Duncan III, Zacarias Moussaoui , Michael Swango, Luis Felipe, Matthew Hale, Robert Hanssen, at one point Timothy McVeigh, and Nuwaubian leader Dwight York.
5. The Columbine Massacre
Together these two young men were brought to the worldâs attention when they laid siege to Columbine High School the morning of April 20, 1999. Before that day they were just a couple of American high school seniors only two weeks away from graduation⌠or so those who knew them believed. For well over a year before the shooting the boys had been making plans to attack their school and the people in it. According to what they said in the hate-filled journals and videos they left behind, they wanted to take revenge on the people they accused of picking on and snubbing them. We will never know answers to all of the questions left in the wake of the tragedy but this site has gathered together a collection of documents, reports, photos, videos, and other information about the shooters that will shed some light on what happened before, during, and after the grim events of one of the worldâs worst school shootings.
4. The Valentineâs Day Massacre
Al Capone is the most famous mob boss ever. The massacre was aimed at the gang of his rival, Bugsy Moran. The plan was that a bootlegger loyal to Capone would draw Moran and his gang to a warehouse under the pretense that they would be receiving a shipment of smuggled whiskey for a price that proved too good to be true. The delivery was set for a red brick warehouse at 2122 North Clark Street in Chicago at 10:30 a.m. on Valentineâs Day.
Inside the warehouse, Moranâs men were confronted by the hit men disguised as policemen. Assuming it was a routine bust, they followed instructions as they were ordered to line up against the wall. The hit men then opened fire with Thompson sub machine guns, killing six of the seven men immediately. Despite 22 bullet wounds, Frank Gusenberg, one of the mobsters loyal to Moran, survived the attack but died after arriving at Alexian Brothers Hospital.
3. Assassination of JFK
John F. Kennedy was one of greatest presidents in history, famous for ending the Cuban Missile Crisis and his charisma. While riding in a car during a parade in Dallas, Texas, he was fatally shot by Lee Harvey Oswald. Meanwhile, Oswald, a former Marine and defector to the Soviet Union, was arrested around 2 p.m. at the Texas Theatre in the Oak Cliff suburb of Dallas and charged with murdering a police officer named J.D. Tippit. Protesting that he was âa patsy,â Oswald was paraded in front of the worldâs gathering cameras and accused of murdering President Kennedy as well. Oswaldâs defection and Marxist sympathies were quickly covered in the nationâs newspapers, in part because his curious pro-Castro activities during the summer in New Orleans had brought him to the attention of local Cuban exiles. Oswald was interrogated throughout the weekend, though no recordings or transcriptions were made. During an intended transfer to county facilities on Sunday morning the 24th, Oswald was shot and killed on live television in the basement of the Dallas Police station. His murderer was a local nightclub owner with connections to organized crime named Jack Rubinstein.
2. The Lindbergh Baby
The Lindbergh case is not so much about the kidnapped and murdered child as it is about Americaâs hero, Charles Lindbergh, the first man to fly the Atlantic alone, in a small, fragile, one-engine airplane, a feat so venerated that the plane occupies a prominent position in the Air and Space Museum. It is the story of a shy national icon caught in a wave of publicity then unknown to American journalism, now expanded beyond print to include the influential voice of radio. The case remains a memorable crime because it involved not only Lindbergh, the hero, but the accused, Bruno Richard Hauptmann, a German immigrant convicted and executed, whose guilt to this day in the minds of many remains an unanswered question. Like many crimes sustained in the USAâs history, the victim becomes less important than the participants. Its immortality is not only in the unresolved question about the accused killer, but in the checkered careers of the victimâs father and mother. The father, the âLone Eagle,â spent the rest of his forty years as an appeaser, an isolationist, and an environmentalist.
1. 9/11
Tuesday, 11 September 2001 was a cloudless, bright, late summer day in the eastern United States. It was a week after Labor Day, the traditional end of the summer travel and vacation season, and the beginning of American football season, school and thoughts of autumn.
The day was as routine as any in New York and Washington, D.C. before ordinary passenger jets became fiery menaces. People in the World Trade Center and Pentagon were working at personal computers, typing letters or reading e-mail, speaking on the phone or processing paperwork. None of the civilians seemed to know what was to happen.
At 5:30 a.m., several men flew on a commuter jet from Portland, Maine, to Logan International Airport in Boston. They boarded two Boeing 767s, American Airlines (AAL) Flight 11, and United Airlines (UAL) Flight 175. Both jets were supposed to arrive in Los Angeles.
According to investigations and eyewitnesses accounts later intercepted from the planes while in flight, these men carried small knives and box cutters, tools more often used for opening packages.
Other men, similarly armed, traveled to Newark International Airport to take UAL Flight 93 at 8:42 a.m. to San Francisco, and Washington Dulles Airport to board AAL Flight 77 for 8:20 a.m. departure to Los Angeles. Then, came one of the worst moments in American history. Two of the flights crashed into the twin towers. Another crashed into the pentagon. The passengers on the fourth defeated the Al-Qaeda hijackers, but the plane crashed in a field. All the passengers on the fourth plane died.
