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Karma Monkey posted:Whoa, thanks for this! Listening to the stuff on the pages led me to this: I have so many crazy auditory hallucinations during half-sleep they almost don't even bother me any more. People calling my name, someone knocking on my window, a radio playing that isn't really on, etc. It's something about that fugue state that isn't really sleep that causes some crazy things to happen in your brain. Using melatonin can amplify it sometimes. EDIT: Sorry mod man, I didn't see your post until after. new phone who dis has a new favorite as of 22:46 on Jun 6, 2015 |
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Jun 6, 2015 22:41
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Stocking Strangling Murders Part Two: Electric Chair Bugaloo As I’ve said before, Columbus, Georgia has a history of racially-oriented violence and in general was not the most accepting place in the world to Black people in the 1970s. Unfortunately for Carlton Gary (if he is indeed innocent of the Stocking Strangler murders, an idea I’ll post some support of later), a few local incidents fanned the flames of racial hatred prior to his trial and indeed, prior to the beginning of the killing spree. (Note: if this is too off topic since very little of it is coming from Wikipedia or the like, let me know where I can move these posts, because I’m rather enjoying writing them up but don’t want to take too much away from this thread. I see there’s a “Post your favorite cool serial killer” thread that hasn’t been touched since February but I don’t think this is particularly cool?) Ferne Jackson is the first “canonically” accepted victim of the Stocking Strangler, and the first one that shows all the signs of his bloody campaign of terror in Columbus. When she failed to report to work on Friday, September 16th of 1977, one of her employees (Dixon Olive) became concerned. Knowing her to be a woman who kept a routine, he contacted a friend of hers, Lucy Mangham, who said she’d been with Ferne the night before at a church function. Being unable to reach Ferne, Mr. Olive contacted the Columbus Police Department. The responding officer, after noticing that her car was missing but determining that she was likely in the house, ended up using a pocket knife to slice open a screen door and afford himself entry into the building. After making his way through the house to the bedroom, he found Ferne Jackson, sixty years of age, dead. Her sheets had been pulled around her head, and her nightgown tugged upward, to expose her hips, pubic area and waist. There was blood on the sheets. Dr. Joe Webber’s Postmortem Report posted:The killer had tied a nylon stocking and a dressing-gown cord together to make a single ligature, which was wrapped around Mrs. Jackson’s neck three times, leaving three very deep crevasses. There was a large area of hemorrhage and bruising on the left side of her face and head, so that the white of her left eye was almost obliterated by the bleeding; the result of a massive blow to the head. The white of her right eye was a mass of tiny pinpoint petechial hemorrhages where her blood, deprived of oxygen, had burst from its vessels close to the surface –a common sign of strangulation. The small hyoid bone at the front of the throat was fractured, and there was more bleeding inside her neck. Her brain was swollen. Her sternum had been fractured, an act which would have required the application of enormous force: it apparently had been flexed and pressure applied to the point that the bone snapped about midway between the upper and lower ends. Finally her vagina was bloodied, torn and bruised. (Note: much of the direct quotes I’m using are from David Rose’s excellent book The Big Eddy Club. It somewhat clumsily tries to tie the upper crust of Columbus society in with the Stocking Strangler case. While there’s some overlap, both subjects are interesting unto themselves, and the book does a good job of educating you on both. Just try to ignore the hamhanded “RICH WHITE PEOPLE KILL EVERYONE AND DON’T CARE stuff.) Doctor Webber could not find spermatozoa in or on the body of Ferne Jackson, but the conclusion was that she had been raped and murdered: trace of seminal fluid would later be found on her sheets. There was no obvious motive for the murder. Ferne was fairly well off, but her jewelry was untouched, including two diamond rings that remained undisturbed on her body. She also had no known enemies in the community: readers writing in to the Columbus Ledger (the morning paper at the time, which later merged with the Enquirer to become the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer, which, full disclosure, I worked for for a short time) would note “Ferne Jackson fought for the underprivileged, the minority groups, and against poverty and for better mental health… If it turns out to be one of the above, they killed the wrong person. They killed a friend.” Scarcely more than a week later, the Strangler struck again. A seventy-one year old wealthy woman who originally hailed from Philadelphia, Jean Dimenstein, was dropped off at home about a half mile from the home of Ferne Jackson on the evening of September 24th. She was last seen alive by her friends as she made her way through the kitchen door, on the side of the house. Some time during the night, a killer removed the pins from that very door and let himself in. Her sister in law came over for coffee the next morning, found the open doorway (and like Ferne’s case, found that the car had been stolen) and called the police. The results of the Strangler’s work were much the same as with Ferne. She’d been beaten around the head and face, raped, strangled with a stocking wrapped thrice around her neck, and though her house was ransacked, nothing was stolen – even a diamond necklace that lay BENEATH the ligature was left on her cold corpse. Against the police’s wishes, J. Donald Kilgore – Columbus’ coroner -spoke to the Columbus Ledger about the similarities between the murders. He believed, to use a recently coined term, that we had a serial killer on our hands. The Big Eddy Club by David Rose posted:In the autumn of 1977, Kilgore had been in his post for a year. He was not, however, a qualified forensic scientist or a pathologist, but the former director of a funeral home who had been embalming bodies with unusual enthusiasm since his teens. Fun fact about Columbus: anyone can be the coroner there. At least as of 2004 (last time I bothered to check) any person regardless of technical qualifications could run for the elected position, and indeed I received a few write-in votes when my friends decided to “campaign” for me for a laugh. I bring this up because Mr. Kilgore’s “expert” testimony helped lead the police down the road that would lead them to Mr. Carlton Gary. After the police noticed that both missing cars from both stranglings were found in Carver Heights (an area that was then and is now a predominantly African-American area), Mr. Kilgore told reporters that he believed the Strangler was black – he based this on his belief that the pubic hair from a crime scene he examined had “Negroid characteristics” – in other words, it was black and curly. I’ll let some of you take a moment to examine your own pubes in light of this… But wyntyr, you cry, you said there were some pre-existing things that would make people in Georgia more susceptible to hatred of Black folks before the Stranglings started! Sorry. Got carried away with the first two killings. Let me back up a bit, in a way. On November 30, 1976 – about ten months prior to the first Stocking Strangler – the nineteen year old bride of a soldier from Fort Benning (an Army base just south of Columbus) named Katharina Wright was raped, robbed and murdered by a man posing as a gas company worker in her home on Broadway, in downtown Columbus – a street that would have particular significance in Carlton Gary’s life. The following September, JUST before the Stranglings begin, a “mentally retarded Black man” named Johnny Lee Gates was found guilty of her murder and sentenced to death. (His sentence was changed to life without parole around thirty years after the fact.) That definitely fanned the flames of racial hatred. Things got much worse with the murder of Jeannine Galloway on July 15, 1977. A blonde twenty-three year old virgin, Jeannine was the picture of Southern innocence. She was, by all accounts, an accomplished musician and very morally “upright”; her fiancé had to shave his beard and cut his hair before she’d give him the time of day. On that fateful Friday morning when Ray Toro of My Chemical Romance was entering this world, Jeannine likely had no idea she was going to leave it. According to the testimony of her killer, William Anthony Brooks – himself a young African American who’d had some trouble with the law after stealing a car as a teenager – he ambushed her as she took the trash out, using a “small caliber pistol” (I don’t have my notes near me, as I think they’re all still boxed up from when I moved, but I think it was a .25 ACP) to persuade her to come with him. He took her to a nearby wetland, secluded behind a school and: William Anthony Brooks, speaking to the police posted:She was continually asking me to let her go – to take her money and the car and let her go. (He marched her into the secluded area and) I told her to take her clothes off and she said no, and I yelled at her to take her clothes off. (After raping her, he asked if that was the first time she’d had sex and..) She said yes, and I said I didn’t believe it. She started screaming and wouldn’t stop and I pulled out my gun so she’d know I was serious… she kept screaming and the pistol went off. She kept trying to scream but couldn’t get her voice. Jeannine died from a gunshot wound to the neck from a small caliber pistol, and according to Brooks it took some time. His trial began in November of 1977, two months after the first Strangling. The DA objected strenuously to every proposed African-American juror, and twelve white men and women sat in judgment of William Anthony Brooks. The defending attorney pleaded with the jury to consider the abusive nature of Brooks’ past, as he was brutally abused as a child by his stepfather (with testimony from family as proof). The prosecution argued that he probably deserved the abuse, and appealed to the emotion of the jurors and seemingly, to their prejudices, reminding them frequently of what Brooks “looked like”. It took less than an hour for the jury to decide that this man needed to die for what he’d done. Six years later, a federal court of appeals found that his sentence was not proper due to the rhetoric used in the courtroom and not truly being tried by a jury of his peers; his sentence was changed to life without parole. Next time: the plot thickens! False confessions! Rewards get offered! Black cops get treated like poo poo by white cops!
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Jun 7, 2015 03:34
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Karma Monkey posted:Whoa, thanks for this! Listening to the stuff on the pages led me to this: I used to get that several times a night, almost every night as a kid. A loud noise with a turquoise flash just as I fell asleep. really loving annoying.
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Jun 7, 2015 03:37
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wyntyr posted:Next time: the plot thickens! False confessions! Rewards get offered! Black cops get treated like poo poo by white cops! Full approval for this wyntyr. Eager to see where it goes.
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Jun 7, 2015 07:05
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I like your writing and this isn't a case that's ringing bells for me despite my general interest in serial killers, so please continue, wyntyr 
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Jun 7, 2015 07:10
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Yeah, this is well-written and interesting so please do continue.
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Jun 7, 2015 16:04
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Aww shucks. Thanks guys, I’m glad you’re enjoying it so far. LivesInGrey the case is not well known outside of the Columbus area or in certain “Social Justice”-type circles where people are trying to get him off death row because of how awfully the trial was handled despite the fact that he’d be in prison for life no matter what because of the New York stuff, plus even if his story of being a getaway driver for some of the Stranglings is true he’d still be an accomplice. With that noted, welcome to Stocking Strangler Murders Part III: In Which Cops Act Like Assholes and False Confessions are Elicited! Even separate from the citizens of the city they “protected and served”, the Columbus Police Department was a hostile area in many ways for black men. Consider the case of Robert Leonard, a patrolman who worked for the Columbus Police Department in the early 1970s. A Vietnam veteran, Leonard earned the respect of his peers in the Army and became accustomed to being treated as the equal of the white men fighting beside him. When he returned to Columbus and decided to devote his life to protecting people who couldn’t protect themselves, he found: Robert Leonard posted:We’d been out there fighting for our country. When we got to the department, they wouldn’t let us drink from the water fountains. They were reserved for whites. We had to go down to the basement and drink the water they used for washing patrol cars. Leonard was later fired from the force (along with six of his compatriots) after leading a protest that involved his removing the American flag (respectfully) from his uniform, explaining that the American ideals of equality and justice could not be found inside the Columbus Police Department. This was followed by a protest led by the Southern Leadership Christian Council, with demands to reorganize the CPD along racially equal lines. The Mayor J.R. Allen – later remembered as a reformer who believed in racial integration, and the namesake of one of the highways through town – refused to listen, describing the demands as “an extortion note”. The Big Eddy Club by David Rose posted:Mayhem followed. For three nights, Columbus was afflicted by rioting and arson, with grocery stores, a lumberyard, and a candy company fire-bombed and set ablaze. Firemen and their trucks were shot at, and their hoses cut. At 1:10 AM on June 22, 1971, Mayor Allen declared a state of emergency. Bars, liquor stores, and shops selling guns and ammunition would be closed until further notice. Notwithstanding the Constitution of the United States and its First Amendment protecting free speech, any gathering on the streets of Columbus of more than twelve people would be illegal, and its members subject to arrest. Protest marches would be allowed only if their organizers had obtained a permit from the Mayor’s office in advance. Allen was buoyed by a message of support from Georgia’s governor, the Democratic future President Jimmy Carter. He too denounced Hosea Williams (ed. Note: the leader of the Southern Leadership Christian Council): “There is no evidence that he wants to solve problems. He wants to create one.” This atmosphere of racial tension was the one that CPD officers Arthur Hardaway and Eddie Florence, themselves both Black, found themselves working in during the Stocking Stranglings. Arthur Hardaway was the first black cop to work the Broadway beat, at a time in the late 60s when the street held mostly white businesses. Hardaway was determined to have the right kind of attitude to work as a black cop in a white area, and it apparently went well. Hardaway relates the following: Arthur Hardaway posted:The businesspeople accepted me pretty good; treated me with respect, invited me in and offered me Cokes, like I guess they did the white officers... When the stranglings began, I did a few door-to-door interviews. But when they formed a special task force to investigate them, I wasn’t picked for it, though I was one of the top investigators, and I’d worked on that squad a long time. I didn’t know then if it was a white man or a black man who had committed those crimes. But the victims were influential people and they still had that racial concern in their heart in Columbus. The people who were making decisions still had that racist mentality. Eddie Florence suffered a similar indignity – despite being one of the better and more scientifically minded detectives on the force (he was CPD’s leading fingerprint expert at the time), he was not asked to take part in an investigation that would cause all police leave to be cancelled and administrative personnel to be working the streets. Eddie Florence posted:You had to be part of that madness to know what it was really like. The pressure, not just in the police department but across the whole city, was incredible, and it was being applied right in the middle of the racial divide. But the poo poo they put on me; not trusting me to take part in the investigation because they thought the killer was black! I suppose they thought I’d try to fudge the evidence. At this point in our story, after the murder of Dimenstein, the police were gearing up for one of the largest investigations Georgia had ever seen. Vacation’s cancelled and desk jockeys are banging on doors trying to generate leads as to who might be committing this awful murders – the term “serial killer” had only recently been coined by Robert Ressler, a man who worked cases like Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy. An $11,000 reward was offered for a lead that resulted in capture – roughly $44,000 in today’s money. A few days after Dimenstein died, something happened that some hoped would be a crack in the case: the arrest of Jerome Livas. The Big Eddy Club by David Rose posted:Jerome Livas, an African-American odd-job man aged twenty-eight, lived in South Columbus with a much older woman – Beatrice Brier, who was fifty-five. Early on Sunday, October 2, she was found by the porch of her home, beaten and unconscious. As her partner, Livas immediately became a suspect. He was arrested and questioned by two detectives, Gene Hillhouse and Warren Myles. Livas, a short, muscular man who looked older than his years, was illiterate and easily confused. Here we have a black guy who’s beaten an older woman to the point that she died – sounds a lot like our Strangler, though the MO is obviously completely different and the motivation was completely different… but he’s a black guy who killed an older woman! Three detectives from CPD – Ronald Lynn, Robert Matthews and Robert Coddington – interrogated Livas overnight, driving him to the crime scenes and illuminating them with flashlights “to enhance his recollections”. By 2:45 AM on October 3, they had a typed confession which they read back to Livas, and at their prompting he wrote the only thing he knew how to write at the bottom – his name. It was filled with facts that only the killer (or the police) would have known. Now, there’s some evidence to indicate that Livas might have committed these two murders. A third woman who’d been raped but survived the experience, Gertrude Miller, picked Livas out of a photo lineup as her attacker. Many had their doubts – reporter Carl Cannon says an anonymous police source said Livas “was a twenty-four carat idiot”, and Livas’ boss said he was “slow, illiterate and stupid and would say anything to make someone happy”. But with this eyewitness evidence (since that’s so reliable) and a signed confession, CPD chief McClung was certain that they’d nabbed their guy, and suspended the special patrols in Wynnton designed to catch or stop the Strangler. That would be a fatal mistake… but we’ll get to that in a moment. Carl Cannon was sure that the police had the wrong guy, that this was a frame job. He was so sure that he enlisted the assistance of a judge to get access to Livas in jail. In a matter of hours, Livas signed another confession that Cannon helped him create: not only did he kill those two women, he had assassinated JFK and McKinley, he’d been with Charles Manson the night Sharon Tate died, he’d had foreknowledge of the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, and that he knew the victim of the notorious “black dahlia” murder. When asked if he knew what the word “suspect” meant, he replied: “That means you’re trespassing on private property or something. The one crime he vehemently denied was the only one for which he’d be convicted – the murder of his girlfriend, Beatrice Brier. Having secured this information, Carl Cannon wrote a dynamite story about the handling of the Livas case and decided, as a matter of courtesy, to let Chief McClung know that his department’s inept handling of a mentally incapable illiterate was going to be blown wide open. The Chief, in response, asked what Cannon was making and offered to double it if he could “do public affairs to get our stories out to the public… like the army has.” Cannon declined, and kept quiet on that offer for (I believe) several decades. While the police were mishandling the investigation, neglecting their best resources and focusing on pinning serial killings on a man who’d beaten his girlfriend in an apparent fit of rage, the killings continued on the streets of Wynnton, left unguarded in the belief that the “Columbus maniac” was caught… Next time: Victims three and four! A servant finds a body!  THE KU KLUX KLAN GETS INVOLVED!(If you guys would like longer, less frequent posts I can do them in that style as well... I think these work as being short enough to read quickly but packed with enough info to keep you entertained.)
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Jun 7, 2015 17:02
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wyntyr posted:(Note: if this is too off topic since very little of it is coming from Wikipedia or the like,) I love your effort posting in this thread, please don't stop, but for the love of God: quote:PYF scary or unnerving article or Wikipedia quote:PYF scary or unnerving article or Wikipedia quote:PYF scary or unnerving article Please stop triggering me 
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Jun 7, 2015 19:03
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A Pinball Wizard posted:I love your effort posting in this thread, please don't stop, but for the love of God: I mean it does say post your favorite article or Wikipedia, and the stuff I'm posting is neither.  But yes I'll definitely be continuing , next post will either be late tonight or tomorrow morning.
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Jun 7, 2015 19:59
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AKA Pseudonym posted:The thing that jumps out at me is the part where they told him to "watch channel 11 tonight." For one thing that's an awfully big hint to drop to some 13 year-old. But there's also the fact that channel 11 was the victim of the second incident and that one seems to have been a back-up plan whoever it was resorted to after WGN cut him off. There are a bunch of references to WGN in the video too, so there's reason to think they were the prime target all along. The channel being wrong isn't necessarily a problem - after years you'd be more likely to look up what channel was actually hit than accurately remember the wrong information you were given. But I'm with you on the big portentous hint, particularly the bit where the young man manages to miss its not-even-slightly-cryptic meaning the next day.
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Jun 8, 2015 00:12
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Not sure if it's been posted, but I'm reading an article on Dennis Nilsen at the moment, who was a British serial killer known for luring gay men to his flat, killing them, doing all manner of awful things to their corpses (though apparently never going so far as to penetrate them, which is nice of him I guess) and then dismembering them and flushing them down his goddamn toilet. Police clocked onto him after the plumbing got blocked with decomposing body parts. Nice chap. All of it is fairly loving creepy, but this one part of the article genuinely made me go 'Jesus Christ.'quote:In the late autumn of 1980, Nilsen removed and dissected the bodies of each victim killed since December 1979 and burned them upon a communal bonfire he had constructed on waste ground behind his flat.[64] To disguise the smell of the burning flesh of the six dissected bodies placed upon this pyre, Nilsen crowned the bonfire with an old car tyre. Three neighbourhood children stood to watch this particular bonfire, and Nilsen later wrote in his memoirs that he felt it would have seemed "in order" if he had seen these three children "dancing around a mass funeral pyre". Just the fact that there's these kids stood watching some hosed up bloke burning the corpses of these guys he'd strangled and kept under his floorboards for up to a year...ugh. happyflurple has a new favorite as of 03:15 on Jun 8, 2015 |
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Jun 8, 2015 00:20
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NecropantsWikipedia posted:If you want to make your own necropants (literally; nábrók) you have to get permission from a living man to use his skin after his death. See a photo here (yeah, this is probably a bit NWS). Zamboni Rodeo has a new favorite as of 04:05 on Jun 8, 2015 |
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Jun 8, 2015 03:27
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That is creepy as hell but it does make me want to go to the Museum of Icelandic Sorcery and Witchcraft.
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Jun 8, 2015 03:36
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There is a Tamam Shud update. Though no one offers a hypothesis about why he died, if you subscribe to either of the two trains of thought offered, it's probably not as mysterious as it seems. The article's end is its own bit of creepy, though, but for other reasons. Also, a New York zoo briefly housed an African-American pygmy man, Ota Benga, as a special exhibit for customers in 1906. At the least the guy had a few relatively decent years in the United States, though it's still a thoroughly  story.
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Jun 8, 2015 03:37
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Buh posted:But I'm with you on the big portentous hint, particularly the bit where the young man manages to miss its not-even-slightly-cryptic meaning the next day.
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Jun 8, 2015 03:55
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RC and Moon Pie posted:There is a Tamam Shud update. Though no one offers a hypothesis about why he died, if you subscribe to either of the two trains of thought offered, it's probably not as mysterious as it seems. The article's end is its own bit of creepy, though, but for other reasons. Thank you for posting this, it was really interesting and a good read. That's always been one of my favorite mysteries... there's just so much seemingly going on with it. However, as much as the idea of crazy espionage poo poo is fun to think about, the more mundane (though still weird) explanation is also intriguing.
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Jun 8, 2015 05:08
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Short post tonight as it's late, but I wanted to get this one out of my system... When we last left our sleepy Southern town, the cops were pinning a couple of well-executed murders on a man who could barely write his own name and were suspending the special patrols of the Wynnton area in light of this surefire capture, and an intrepid young reporter named Carl Cannon was making sure that the city of Columbus knew that the Columbus Police Department was full of incompetent hicks. (I know I promised the KKK and a servant finding a body in this update, but I don’t know if I’ll get quite the far. We’ll see. Be patient.) And now that you’re all caught up it’s time for The Stocking Stranglings Part IV: A New Hope? No. No new hope. On October 14, 1977 Jerome Livas – our aforementioned “man who could barely write his own name” – was named as the prime suspect in a press conference, while he remained in the custody of the Columbus Police Department. While three CPD detectives – Detectives Lynn, Matthews and Coddington – likely knew that the confession was at the very least coerced, Livas had not yet confessed to things that were impossible or extremely unlikely, like partying with the Manson family, having foreknowledge of the Lindbergh kidnapping, shooting President McKinley and so forth. That brilliant bit of reporting wouldn’t happen until November. So the situation that the city of Columbus found itself in was this – the cops had a suspect, at least some of the cops knew that this probably maybe almost definitely wasn’t the actual guy, but Ronnie Jones – the robbery-homicide squad director for CPD – was crowing on television about how Jerome Livas was likely going to face the death penalty for his crimes against the women of Wynnton, the city of Columbus, and the concept of decency in general. (Keep in mind that the only thing Livas actually did was batter his girlfriend during an argument, which resulted in her later death – not an angelic character by any means, but not a serial rapist and murderer.) The city of Columbus, and the vulnerable elders in general breathed a sigh of relief…  But this woman would soon breathe her last.Sorry, morbid joke. That sigh lasted about a week. Florence Scheible was a widow, eighty-nine years of age, who required the use of a walker to get around. She’d moved to Georgia from Iowa in her advanced age because she preferred the warmer weather, for once and perhaps only this once, she would’ve been safer going further south into Florida. (I can crack Florida crime jokes, it’s home for me now.) It is here that our killer, killers, or whatever the case may be deviated from their normal routine. On the morning of October 21, with Livas sitting behind bars, Scheible went shuffling around her garden, ambulating as well as she could, hopefully enjoying the sights and smells of the flowers she loved. She was seen by her neighbors at 11 AM that morning in her yard in front of her two story house on Dimon Street – just a few blocks away from where the two murders so far occurred. At 2:30 PM, her son Paul – a decorated Colonel stationed nearby at Fort Benning – came by the house to check on his mother. He found her dead. When Ed Gibson, a patrolman from CPD, arrived at the house he must have noticed that unlike previous killings, the house was not ransacked. (I know I mentioned it in one case, can’t remember if I said it both places – both times the house was torn apart as if the intruder were looking for something, but neither time was anything taken, even plainly obvious jewelry.) Mrs. Scheible was in bed, her walker next to her, with her dress pulled above her waist, exposing her pubic area, which was covered in blood. One stocking remained on her leg. I bet you can guess where the other one was. The worst fears of much of Columbus were coming to life. The police had incompetently arrested the wrong man for the Stranglings, or perhaps a new Strangler (or Columbus Maniac as he was known at the time) had sprung forth out of the darkness. Now he was moving so boldly as to kill women in the middle of the day! Thoroughly embarrassed by this turn of events, the police department reinstated the special patrols, and they were reinforced by volunteers from other jurisdictions and even soldiers from Fort Benning (this detail has always bothered me – it would seem to violate the Posse Comitatus act, and a little googling shows me that similar “support” during a murder spree in 2009 in Alabama led to disciplinary action against soldiers involved for violating that very act). Incidentally this would not be the only time in the area’s history that armed soldiers helped restore the peace – Civil War stuff aside, the neighboring city of Phenix City, Alabama was once placed under martial law to help curb gangland activity following the execution of an Attorney General. Fascinating stuff unto itself, but perhaps for another thread. Even with the police and soldiers marching the streets, tensions and fear were running high in Columbus, and many citizens chose to up the security measures in their own homes. Incidents were reported of women firing through their doors at suspected intruders, and even “respectable” men feared being fingered by the incompetent police and a fearful public as being the Strangler. Judge Andrew Prather, at that time a single man living in Wynnton posted:There was a police car parked outside (my house) and I knew they were watching me. I thought of moving to Atlanta but then I thought, “What if I leave town and the killings stop?” One night I found an old lady’s dog out in the street. I was scared to give it back, I thought I might get shot. I yelled towards the door “It’s Andy Prather, I live down the street and I found your puppy!” Around this time Robert Ressler, who you may recall as the man who coined the term “serial killer”, came to town to assist with the investigation by providing a criminal psychological profile. In his memoirs, he writes: Robert Ressler posted:A group of middle-aged and elderly women were at a party together, and the main topic of conversation was the mysterious series of killings. At one point in the evening, in a demonstration of how completely the fear of the killer had gripped the city, seven of the women guests emptied their purses, revealing seven handguns that fell out on to the carpet.  No real witty caption here, though check those glasses out. In the midst of this spirit of fear, Martha Thurmond, a sixty-nine year old retired teacher, decided that the assembled might of the Columbus Police Department and the United States Army was not enough to keep her safe. She had deadbolts fitted to her doors, and burglar bars attached to the windows of her Marion Street home, located just off Wynnton Road. Her son Bill came down from his home near Atlanta with his wife and child to stay for the weekend after the slaying of Florence Scheible on October 21. (Which, parenting note, maybe don’t take your kid somewhere you suspect a serial killer might strike, even if they aren’t the preferred target? Just a thought. Throwing that one out there for free…) They left in the early afternoon on Monday, October 24. On October 25 at 12:30 PM, a neighbor called the police department to report Mrs. Thurmond’s front door as being open. Again this departs from the killer’s previous MO – whereas earlier kills were conducted stealthily in the dead of night, going so far as to remove the pins from a side door, this time the front door was opened and found open in the middle of the day, in a neighborhood gripped by panic. The newly-installed deadbolts were not installed properly. Like Schieble, Thurmond was found in her bed, wearing a pink pajama top. Like Schieble, she had been assaulted with tremendous force sufficient to shatter the base of her skull. The stocking had been so furiously tightened around her neck that it caused a brownish red blistered trough against her windpipe – picture the worst rugburn you’ve ever seen, except it killed you.  In and around her vagina were copious amounts of seminal fluid (REMEMBER THAT because semen will turn out to be very important later.) The phone number for the Columbus Police Department remained above her bedside, taped to the wall, written in large, reassuring numbers.Note: on the date of Mrs. Thurmond’s death, Wikipedia and the sources I’m consulting disagree. Wikipedia says the 23rd, David Rose’s book and my notes (taken from microfiche at Columbus State back in…. 2004, I think) say the 25th. I’m going with the 25th. So despite the cops “catching” the killer, he strikes again twice within a week, seemingly more audacious than ever with crimes (possible) being committed in the middle of the day. The houses are no longer ransacked, leaving only the violent end of a woman as the sole focus of any investigation. The Devil had come to Wynnton, as he roamed to and fro seeking whom he may devour. As the city lay waiting in panicked desperation to see what would happen next, the Mayor cancelled Halloween celebrations, wanting no one to have any reason to answer the door for a stranger. Next time (for real): Murdered heiress! Servants find a body! And the Ku Klux Klan gets involved!
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Jun 8, 2015 07:00
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The Ku Klux Kan.
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Jun 8, 2015 08:19
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Zamboni_Rodeo posted:Necropants [To the tune of Safety Dance] Necropants, Necropants Everybody look it's a grand
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Jun 8, 2015 08:53
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Don't mind me, just checking my scrote for necrocoins.
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Jun 8, 2015 12:12
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I wonder if any curators were tempted to try them on...
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Jun 8, 2015 12:27
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You'd've thought he could have knocked up a nice matching jacket to go with his necropants. Typical 17th century Icelandic sorcerer-tailors, having no idea about fashion. 
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Jun 8, 2015 12:43
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pixelbaron posted:Necropants, Necropants This made me laugh like a loving fool. 
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Jun 8, 2015 13:22
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Pesky Splinter posted:You'd've thought he could have knocked up a nice matching jacket to go with his necropants. Typical 17th century Icelandic sorcerer-tailors, having no idea about fashion. Putting root vegetables behind the nipples causes good harvests for the rest of your days!
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Jun 8, 2015 13:53
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Goodbye Iceland Ponies Would you fæck me? I'd fæck mig. I'd fæck me hård. I'd fæck me sö hård.
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Jun 8, 2015 14:30
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natetimm posted:I have so many crazy auditory hallucinations during half-sleep they almost don't even bother me any more. People calling my name, someone knocking on my window, a radio playing that isn't really on, etc. It's something about that fugue state that isn't really sleep that causes some crazy things to happen in your brain. Using melatonin can amplify it sometimes. Can confirm this - while I don't get exploding head syndrome, melatonin caused some weird poo poo to happen in my brain, especially with waking up half-asleep and thinking I'm still dreaming. I've caught myself carrying on conversations I've had in dreams, or even short sleep walking episodes, when stuff like that never happened before. Had to stop taking the stuff because it freaked me out, nothing like that has happened since.
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Jun 8, 2015 17:14
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Who's your favourite serial murderer, you guys? Mine's Peter Kürten. quote:his final words: "Tell me -- after my head is chopped off, will I still be able to hear, at least for a moment, the sound of my own blood gushing from the stump of my neck? That would be the pleasure to end all pleasures." germans are so hosed up
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Jun 8, 2015 17:28
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RC and Moon Pie posted:There is a Tamam Shud update. Though no one offers a hypothesis about why he died, if you subscribe to either of the two trains of thought offered, it's probably not as mysterious as it seems. The article's end is its own bit of creepy, though, but for other reasons. These were both excellent reads, thank you! Poor Ota Benga.
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Jun 8, 2015 17:38
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Wiggy Marie posted:These were both excellent reads, thank you! Poor Ota Benga. Indeed. I know some World's Fairs featured human exhibitions but for whatever reason it seems so much WORSE when it happens in America. Like, slaves had been freed not long before then and there were sizable African-American communities throughout the country, and you had art exhibits by A-A artists in metropolitan areas. We obviously knew that the mysterious negro from darkest Africa was clearly a person who thought, felt and hurt as we all do. Truly mans inhumanity to man is the scariest and most unnerving thing. Also RC and Moon Pie I think it's funny I'd just mentioned that gastronomic combination in one of my posts then saw your username (or rather had it consciously register) for the first time. Love it.
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Jun 8, 2015 17:44
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wyntyr posted:Indeed. I know some World's Fairs featured human exhibitions but for whatever reason it seems so much WORSE when it happens in America. Like, slaves had been freed not long before then and there were sizable African-American communities throughout the country, and you had art exhibits by A-A artists in metropolitan areas. We obviously knew that the mysterious negro from darkest Africa was clearly a person who thought, felt and hurt as we all do. Truly mans inhumanity to man is the scariest and most unnerving thing. Your posts have been great too! Thank you for taking the time to make them, very interesting case of a poorly handled investigation. The worst part of cases like Ota Benga, as a microbiologist, is seeing how "science" was used to justify such terrible, terrible actions. Ugh.
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Jun 8, 2015 18:17
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My roommate has recently been on a Bigfoot research binge. I have no idea why or how he got into a Bigfoot research binge, and normally I wouldn't care much if someone got into a bigfoot research binge but unfortunately my roommate is someone who gets into these research binges, declares something to be the absolute truth and then will argue with you if you don't absolutely agree with his absolute truth (in this case that Bigfoot exists). Anyway, the reason I bring this up is because my roommate started talking about David Paulides who did research into people disappearing at national parks and never being found again (or being found miles away in strange places). He even started a website about the missing people who disappeared under a strange circumstances (or easier theory, just got lost in the woods but don't tell my roommate that). Here is a Reddit page about people going missing in national parks in the States[ that is worth a read on it's own as well, Don't get me wrong though, the woods/outdoors can be a scary place and such, but they can also be a place where it is very easy to lose your bearings and end up in the middle of nightmare alley without a map. Some of the disappearances are pretty creepy all the same, but that is more to do with the natural creepiness of someone being nearby one minute and completely gone the next. Anyway, feel free to read the cases and the stuff about about the guy and come to your own conclusions, and if you end up thinking yep this is definitely the work of Bigfoot you and my roommate will get along well.
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Jun 8, 2015 18:51
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All the talk of the Max Headroom video hijack and such reminded me of something like that I got to see first-hand. It was around 1982 or 83, and I was watching the WBRC-6 evening news. As soon as the intro finished and it cut to the anchors, the word "YES" appeared in the bottom corner of the screen and stayed there. None of the anchors acted as if there was anything wrong, and nobody called attention to it, but it stayed there throughout most of the newscast. People called in, and were told it was "technical difficulties". It made the next day's newspaper, but the station didn't say another word about it, until several months later. You see, it was right around the time of the Tylenol poisonings in Chicago, and there was a guy who called in a blackmail threat to the station- they were to pay him some bizarre amount of money so that he wouldn't poison Tylenol in Birmingham. The station got the Feds involved, and they told the station to play along until they could get the guy. That involved signaling to him that they agreed to his demands in the manner he requested: putting that "YES" on the screen on a particular day's newscast. One of the station's anchors wound up driving halfway across the state to meet the guy, while being tailed by Federal agents, at night, in the rain. Pretty scary stuff, I'd imagine. It all ended well, as I recall, but what's infuriating to me is that I can't find a single shred of evidence of any of this ever happening on the Internet. It seems there should be -something- about all this that survived. Anyway, not sure if this was terribly scary or unnerving, but if it prompts anyone whose Google-fu is stronger than mine to find a source for any of this, I'd be grateful.
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Jun 8, 2015 19:30
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The story from much earlier in the thread, missing hiker Bill Ewasko who vanished in Joshua Tree National Park, fascinated me and I followed along all the search updates and various theories that the searchers have developed. After the initial search was called off there have been 79 more trips out there, as recently as May 25th. It seems impossible that no trace has been found of him, that he was out there from a Thursday to Sunday (based on a cell phone tower ping) but without leaving any sign of where he stopped, or if he wasn't stopped, why he didn't just go back to his car. One of the searchers seems to no longer believe he is in the park at all but is being coy about his theory, not wanting to influence other people's thinking. My unnerving addition to this tale is that I absentmindedly typed Bill Ewasko into Google maps search bar instead of into the regular search bar and Google maps zoomed straight to Joshua Tree National Park. I don't know if Google maps knows where he supposedly is or whether Google took a guess at what I meant based on my search history but I was creeped out either way.
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Jun 8, 2015 19:56
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That reminds me, did the poster whose grandpa probably committed the Tylenol poisoning every follow-up? If not I'm just going to go to my grave assuming that was the guy.
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Jun 8, 2015 19:57
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Stoca Zola posted:The story from much earlier in the thread, missing hiker Bill Ewasko who vanished in Joshua Tree National Park, fascinated me and I followed along all the search updates and various theories that the searchers have developed. After the initial search was called off there have been 79 more trips out there, as recently as May 25th. It seems impossible that no trace has been found of him, that he was out there from a Thursday to Sunday (based on a cell phone tower ping) but without leaving any sign of where he stopped, or if he wasn't stopped, why he didn't just go back to his car. One of the searchers seems to no longer believe he is in the park at all but is being coy about his theory, not wanting to influence other people's thinking. Missing hiker stories always just remind me that they probably ended up like the 127 Hours guy except they didn't happen to escape/survive.
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Jun 8, 2015 20:26
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Wylie posted:All the talk of the Max Headroom video hijack and such reminded me of something like that I got to see first-hand. That reminded me of this. The statement, incidentally, was just some crazy person rambling about aliens being set to invade. And just as a little background David Horowitz was fairly famous back then. Famous enough to do guest spots as himself on sitcoms anyway. He was a consumer affairs reporter and had a network show called "Fight Back" where they'd test product claims in a proto-Myth Busters sort of way.
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Jun 8, 2015 20:29
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Danger posted:That reminds me, did the poster whose grandpa probably committed the Tylenol poisoning every follow-up? If not I'm just going to go to my grave assuming that was the guy. She (I think) posts every once in a while. The FBI (I think) was interested enough to get her story/evidence and said they'd check it out. It could be years before we hear anything more.
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Jun 8, 2015 20:51
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Tired Moritz posted:Who's your favourite serial murderer, you guys? Mine's Peter Kürten. his head is on display at the Ripley's Believe It Or Not museum. http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-gwhe1IEbI7o/UBRZsYJcGrI/AAAAAAAACt0/VPyyPT2rFSc/s640/kurten_in.jpg Kind of looks like something a serial killer would have in his house.
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Jun 9, 2015 05:49
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Tired Moritz posted:Who's your favourite serial murderer, you guys? Mine's Peter Kürten. "Kürten became known as both the The Vampire of Düsseldorf and the Düsseldorf Monster because the majority of his murders were committed in and around the city of Helena, Montana." Madkal posted:My roommate has recently been on a Bigfoot research binge. I have no idea why or how he got into a Bigfoot research binge, and normally I wouldn't care much if someone got into a bigfoot research binge but unfortunately my roommate is someone who gets into these research binges, declares something to be the absolute truth and then will argue with you if you don't absolutely agree with his absolute truth (in this case that Bigfoot exists). Are you in the Midwest? A few weeks ago, George Noory did an entire show with two saps from some Ohio-based Bigfoot-chasing society.
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Jun 9, 2015 06:05
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Centripetal Horse posted:Are you in the Midwest? A few weeks ago, George Noory did an entire show with two saps from some Ohio-based Bigfoot-chasing society. huh, i didn't realize bigfoot was related to angels
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Jun 9, 2015 07:25
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