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8 Ball posted:I think these might just be cultural traits rather than actual racism - many European countries are quite reserved in their social interactions with strangers, especially when they share no common language. In comparison people from the US are generally viewed by Europeans as being egregriously outgoing (an unkind stereotype). True. There seems to be two types of American tourists: The annoying "Y'all speak funny, must be something wrong with you for speaking your native language" kind, and the fun "wow I'm stupid for not learning another language, let's laugh at me and then we're friends" kind. Either way, we speak pretty loud and talk to strangers.
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Jun 20, 2015 03:17
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Never have I seen a more affronted group of people then the group of British tourists I saw go into a Applebees. Not because of the food, but because of just how in your face overly friendly to the point of annoyance the staff is at American family dining chains. You get used to it when you grow up around it in the US but I imagine it can be off putting. In the UK you could strangle a hooker while doing a line of coke off of her decomposing body while a second hooker blows you and there is no loving way any staff member of Nandos is approaching your booth if they've already given you your food.
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Jun 20, 2015 08:35
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I haven't gone through every page, and I know this was mentioned in the previous thread on the same topic because that's where I learned about it, but... Has anyone brought up the New Mexico State Penitentiary riots? A dude's head exploded.
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Jun 20, 2015 09:02
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El Estrago Bonito posted:Never have I seen a more affronted group of people then the group of British tourists I saw go into a Applebees. Sounds like an extra-cheeky Nando's.
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Jun 20, 2015 16:42
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El Estrago Bonito posted:Never have I seen a more affronted group of people then the group of British tourists I saw go into a Applebees. Yea, but I think a lot of Americans are also annoyed by the exaggerated in-your-face fake enthusiasm of Applebees and its ilk. If Nandos is how you describe, the Brits should have gone to Denny's.
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Jun 20, 2015 16:46
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El Estrago Bonito posted:In the UK you could strangle a hooker while doing a line of coke off of her decomposing body while a second hooker blows you and there is no loving way any staff member of Nandos is approaching your booth if they've already given you your food. To be fair I don't think most Americans would be very keen on approaching that booth either. 
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Jun 20, 2015 18:06
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Karma Monkey posted:Yea, but I think a lot of Americans are also annoyed by the exaggerated in-your-face fake enthusiasm of Applebees and its ilk. If Nandos is how you describe, the Brits should have gone to Denny's. Also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2I-jfW31XyE
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Jun 20, 2015 19:09
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Zombie Raptor posted:I haven't gone through every page, and I know this was mentioned in the previous thread on the same topic because that's where I learned about it, but... That whole article is  They put that guy against a window and shoved a blowtorch in his eye socket, what the hell is wrong with people
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Jun 20, 2015 19:23
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Here in 2015 the world is a scary place, divided on racial lines and full of mistrust for people that we view as something “other” than ourselves. So it was in 1978 as well. Stocking Strangler Murders Part Six: The night of terror (Sorry it’s been a week or so between updates. I’ve been busy with work and some life responsibilities and there’s been some great posting in this thread during my absence. Of course I’m probably being super self-absorbed and no one even noticed that I’d left y’all hanging. Anyway…) When last we left the city of Columbus the Columbus Police Department lowered their guard – after weeks of heavy patrols, stopping primarily black citizens and getting hair and saliva samples from them (Including kids on their way to and from school), and fitting potential victims with panic alarms in their homes, they let everything lapse due to a lack of leads and, to quote, “The boredom felt officers”. Men charged with keeping potential victims safe, men who described themselves as the “only thing” standing between the Strangler and a potential victim, stopped being as extraordinarily vigilant as they had been and shortly after Christmas, one of Columbus’ most prominent citizens, Kathleen Woodruff, met her end… with a strangling that stood out from the others. Not only was a different garment used (a scarf versus a stocking) but she also was not beaten, as others had been. These are seemingly small differences but they’ve bugged me over the years as I’ve looked into the case. Mrs. Woodruff was raped, the Mayor made promises that arrests would be made and the Ku Klux Klan led small marches in the Wynnton area “to protect the White Matrons of Wynnton”. So we come to January of 1978, with the killings now officially spanning two calendar years. Police were again flooding the area, chasing leads that may or may not have been grounded in reality – tensions ran high and the slightest snap of a twig on a winter’s night was enough to send potential victims into a panic. Police detectives described hunting the Strangler as trying to catch “a will-o’-the-wisp, a ghost.” Earnestine Flowers was a childhood friend of Carlton Gary’s (the man currently on death row in Georgia for the Stocking Strangler crimes – but I’ll get to that eventually) and he was working as a Sheriff’s Deputy at the time – it’s important to remember that many different agencies were involved in the hunt for the Stocking Strangler and he relates the story this way: Earnestine Flowers posted:There were guys from the hills of Tennessee who knew how to track people; military police from Fort Benning; the Ku Klux Klan; people from other police departments who wanted to volunteer. We had night lights, people hiding up in trees; that new night vision thing which had just come out; dogs. And yet we were getting so many calls. People were so afraid.. I don’t mean only the people who lived there. I was terrified, too. I was out on patrol, shaking with fear. I remember thinking ‘I can’t do this, night after night; I gotta get myself assigned as a radio operator…  It started at this building, the historic Illges house – one that Carlton Gary and others referred to as “the castle”. Not far from where the stranglings were taking place, the Illges house (now a historic site) housed more “old money” – the Ilgesses had made their mint in cotton and grocery businesses, but were best known for Abraham Illges being the president of the Golden Foundry and Machine Company, a company that still manufactures parts for everything from medical equipment to farm machinery. Carlton Gary worked for Golden Foundry for a short time in late 1977, but it was evident to anyone in the area that the Illgeses were rich, rich, rich. On January 1st, the Illges house is burglarized, and Mrs. Illges’ purse is stolen, containing the keys to her Cadillac, which is later found at a restaurant on Victory Drive. (Victory Drive is further south in Columbus, adjacent to Fort Benning, and is now and was then primarily bars, strip clubs, and residences that are primarily rented by black families.) After having been burglarized on January 1st and likely fearing a return visit, the Illgeses fitted their house with a sophisticated alarm system, including a pressure pad under the carpet near the front door. This decision paid off handsomely and may have saved someone’s life. At 5:15 AM on February 11th, the alarm was triggered by someone stepping on the pressure pad. The police were summoned and arrived promptly, and they came in force, with dogs and many officers. Radios buzzed with information and the area was crawling with cops. A scant half hour later, a homemade panic alarm sounded in the bedroom of Fred Burdette, a physician who lived on Carter Avenue. His neighbor, Mrs. Ruth Schwob, a 74 year old widower, had installed an alarm in her home that would ring in his, so that help could be summoned if she were attacked. Mr. Burdette tried calling her on the phone, and when no one answered, he bravely ran to his elderly neighbor’s home while his wife phoned the police. She needn’t have called, by the time Mr. Burdette reached his neighbor’s door, several squad cars were on scene. The first officer on scene describes what he saw: Sergeant Richard Gaines posted:I climbed in through the kitchen window, over the kitchen counter, had my flashlight. I started going through the house room by room, without turning on any lights, using only my flashlight. (ed. Note: the sun would not rise for about another 45 minutes) And after about two minutes, I got to the back of the house and looked in through the bedroom door and saw Mrs. Schwob, sitting on the edge of the bed. She had a stocking wrapped around her neck; it was hanging down between her legs, also laying on the floor was a screwdriver. Then I went over to where she was and when she saw me she said, “I thought you were him coming back.” And then she said, “he’s still here, he’s still in the house.” And I went over and I checked the necklace – I mean the strangling – the stocking that was wrapped around her neck to make sure it was not too tight, and it was loose.” Mrs. Schwob was wrong, the Stocking Strangler was gone. But  she had survived. For the first time, a definite chosen victim could speak out and tell the world what they knew of the maniac who’d been stalking Columbus for months. Now if you’re from the area, especially if you went to Columbus State University (back then known as Columbus College, or derisively as Cody Road High School – it was situated on Cody Road and not thought of as a very challenging institution), you know the Schwob name. The Schwob School of Music, the Schwob Library, those are named after Simon Schwob, Ruth’s late husband. Ruth was an unusually fit woman for her age – she was a regular jogger, she’d studied Judo, and in general was very active. That may have been how she survived, and as she tells it:Ruth Schwob posted:I just awakened and he was there. He was on the bed and had his hand on my throat and wrapped pantyhose all the way around. Then he pulled the thing tightly around my neck. He had a mask on his face, I think he had gloves on, and it was dark in my room. There was no flesh showing, and he never uttered a sound. It was quite a struggle. I fought like a tiger. He choked me so bad, I passed out. I think the police just missed him. I don’t know how long he was in the house or whether he was gone before the police arrived. Streets were sealed off, bloodhounds combed the streets and helicopters with floodlights buzzed overhead hoping to catch the Strangler, presumably mere minutes after he’d fled the home of the still-living Schwob. As the search pressed on, police became convinced that this will-o-wisp, this ghost they’d been chasing had given them the slip, that he had somehow disappeared through the tightening net of the police once again. Little did they know how close he was. At 1612 Forest Avenue, located diagonally from the Ilges “castle” where the frantic search began scarcely an hour before, the Strangler broke into the house of Mildred Borom, a seventy-eight year old widower living alone. Mrs. Borom’s son, Perry Borom, was an associate of George C. Woodruff Jr., and on Mr. Woodruff’s urging, he’d sent someone to screw Mrs. Borom’s windows closed. She probably thought that made her somewhat safe. It did not. And so while police helicopters buzzed overhead, the strangler forced his way into the house of Mildred Borom, raped her, and strangled her with the cord from a Venetian blind. He left her body lying on the hall floor and eluded the police who were busy at the home of Ruth Schwob, two blocks away. If an officer had decided to run in that direction from the Schwob house, he’d have been there in about twenty seconds. That’s how close the cops were to catching the Strangler in the act – the amount of time it takes, roughly, to buy a zoo (according to the hit film “We Bought a Zoo”). While the deed was done right under the “watchful eye” of the Columbus Police Department early in the morning of February 11th, the body was not found until the following day. Judith Borom, Mildred’s daughter in law, called Mildred’s home on the morning of Sunday, February 12th before she went to church. She had her three children with her and at 11:30 AM, stopped at the home on Forest Avenue to check on her mother in law, having not gotten an answer when she called. She parked her car in the back yard and rang the back doorbell. She could hear the television, but got no answer. She told her son to go around to the front while she tried to peer through the bedroom window. Suddenly her son began screaming: “Mama, come here!” At the front of the house a plate glass window was broken, and the front door was ajar. The police were summoned and task force leader Ronnie Jones was amongst the first on scene. At the sight of the sixth victim, he began openly weeping. He’d begun to take it all personally, and felt that each new victim was a blight on his soul. Detective Luther Miller stepped in to head the task force, as Chief MClung decided that Ronnie needed a break from the emotional weight that leading the investigation carried. Next time: The Chairman of the Forces of Evil makes his debut! A psychic gets involved! My ex-girlfriend’s uncle gets interviewed!
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Jun 20, 2015 20:24
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quote:Of course I’m probably being super self-absorbed and no one even noticed that I’d left y’all hanging. Wrong. This story is why I'm still checking the thread every day. Please keep going! 
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Jun 20, 2015 20:34
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Nah this is good poo poo, keep going.
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Jun 20, 2015 20:48
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I'm going to - there's another victim to talk about, the other serial killer that comes to light during the stranglings, then the investigation, then the trial, then the stuff that's come to light since the trial. There's a lot to this case and I'm glad people are enjoying it. I'll try to post more frequently. 
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Jun 20, 2015 21:06
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stickyfngrdboy posted:One thing I can honestly say I never thought I'd do was 'share a cracked article in the scary/disturbing thread', but holy poo poo Excuse me, I have to go set myself on fire.
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Jun 20, 2015 21:14
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wyntyr posted:He left her body lying on the hall floor and eluded the police who were busy at the home of Ruth Schwob, two blocks away. If an officer had decided to run in that direction from the Schwob house, he’d have been there in about twenty seconds. That’s how close the cops were to catching the Strangler in the act – the amount of time it takes, roughly, to buy a zoo (according to the hit film “We Bought a Zoo”). Jesus christ. Thank you for these, again. They make for a more harrowing read than a basic wiki article.
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Jun 20, 2015 21:31
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wyntyr posted:I'm going to - there's another victim to talk about, the other serial killer that comes to light during the stranglings, then the investigation, then the trial, then the stuff that's come to light since the trial. There's a lot to this case and I'm glad people are enjoying it. I'll try to post more frequently. Yessssss
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Jun 20, 2015 21:48
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Wedemeyer posted:Jesus christ. Thank you for these, again. They make for a more harrowing read than a basic wiki article. This. Like most people, I'm very  about posting. "Here's a link. Wow, pretty creepy/gross/funny, huh?" And while wiki is great for getting the basic facts in one spot (more or less), it usually lacks all the little touches that pull you into a story and make you want to read more. This has been a really compelling serial. Even if it wasn't a true story and was just a novella submission, I'd still want to keep reading it. I need an emoticon that combines  and 
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Jun 20, 2015 22:07
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nthing that Wyntyr's story is great -- very well-written and compelling. One can only hope that the new season of True Detective will be half as good ...
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Jun 20, 2015 23:50
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Minarchist posted:That whole article is I find the New Mexico State Penitentiary riot terrifying and fascinating, and have been looking for more information on it. This part in particular is really disturbing to me: Wikipedia posted:When the group reached cellblock 4, they found that they did not have keys to enter these cells. In response the rioters found blowtorches that had been brought into the prison as part of an ongoing construction project. They used these to cut through the bars over the next five hours. Locked in their cells, the segregated prisoners called to the State Police pleading for them to save them, but to no avail. Waiting officers did nothing despite there being a back door to cellblock 4, which would have offered a way to free them.[1]The inmates were not freed because State Police agreed to not enter the prison as long as officers held hostage were kept alive. Oh, and Wyntyr, great write-up! Keep it coming!
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Jun 21, 2015 00:26
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Wyntyr, no poo poo, you should maybe start thinking about these posts in terms of a book proposal. Fascinating subject matter and you're a super-engaging writer, and this story has so much potential to expand in cool directions. Carry on.
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Jun 21, 2015 01:41
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wyntyr posted:I'm going to - there's another victim to talk about, the other serial killer that comes to light during the stranglings, then the investigation, then the trial, then the stuff that's come to light since the trial. There's a lot to this case and I'm glad people are enjoying it. I'll try to post more frequently. Yeah! Effortpostin' is the good stuff.
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Jun 21, 2015 04:13
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wyntyr posted:
Like others, I was waiting for you to continue the story as well. This is absorbing, not just for the scary-crime story, but for your great writing. Do you write books? 'Cause you should write books.
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Jun 21, 2015 08:07
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Zombie Raptor posted:I haven't gone through every page, and I know this was mentioned in the previous thread on the same topic because that's where I learned about it, but... Sidenote but I've come to love the absolute inevitability of every horrifying wiki article having in the "In popular culture" section just list off every metal band to name themselves or an album after the event.
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Jun 21, 2015 08:35
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Madkal posted: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). I feel like I fell down some sort of rabbit hole after looking into this guy's research. I am genuinely so mad that it was this sort of chucklefuck who decided to undertake the effort of cataloging disappearances in National Parks. Like, I went into it hoping it would be Krakauer-esque but it's just a lot of heavy-handed insinuations that these people could never possibly hosed up in any way because they were all Boy Scouts or some poo poo. I wanted it to be objective but it was just a lot of this guy none-too-gently elbowing you in the side and insisting that something spooky was going on.  Don't get me wrong, some of the disappearances definitely feel like foul play but like foul play on the part of a creepy adult and not foul play on the part of child-and-corpse-raping bigfoots. If he wasn't so heavy-handed with his insinuations I'd honestly consider trying to get my hands on one of his books. As it stands, ain't no way in hell I'm paying $100 to read the whole collection. I'm super surprised his Missing 411 stuff isn't easy to find online for free. I wish I could read up more on the cases mentioned in his books (like the children showing up huge distances away from where they went missing or the girl who was supposedly raped after she fell to her death) but I guess I have to accept that it's not to be. I just wish this guy hadn't been a paranormal conspiracy theorist because it completely calls into question his credibility, especially when it comes down to his descriptions of how the National Park Service and other SAR agencies are either not on top of tracking this poo poo at all or actively attempting to hamper search attempts.
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Jun 21, 2015 17:50
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Y'all are too kind. If I were to write a book on this subject I'd need to do a LOT more original research than I have; so far a lot of what I'm writing is pulled from sources found by David Rose and detailed in his book The Big Eddy Club which, though flawed, is probably the most comprehensive source for people interested in the case. I'm also drawing from articles written for the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer and its forebears, recently by Tim Chitwood (mostly) and historically by the aforementioned Carl "loose cannon" Cannon. I believe he writes for Real Clear Politics now, or another writer of his name does. So basically while I definitely put my own voice into it (and clear up some things that David Rose gets wrong about the area... It's good to be a local I suppose) I think you guys are way overstating my abilities. But I'm glad you're enjoying it. Next post should come out between midnight and one am eastern time tonight.
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Jun 21, 2015 23:14
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JibbaJabberwocky posted:I feel like I fell down some sort of rabbit hole after looking into this guy's research. I am genuinely so mad that it was this sort of chucklefuck who decided to undertake the effort of cataloging disappearances in National Parks. Like, I went into it hoping it would be Krakauer-esque but it's just a lot of heavy-handed insinuations that these people could never possibly hosed up in any way because they were all Boy Scouts or some poo poo. I wanted it to be objective but it was just a lot of this guy none-too-gently elbowing you in the side and insisting that something spooky was going on. That guy was on Coast to Coast a couple weeks back. It was exactly what you'd expect. "His body was found at the bottom of a ravine directly below a sharp cliff with loose rocks, but his friends say he would never fall into a hole. So, you know, alien Bigfoot Illuminati." All of his stories were head-scratchers. "The corpse was doused in bourbon and the victim had a lifelong history of drunken night-hikes, but someone who saw him twelve hours before he disappeared said he was sober. So, you know, alien Bigfoot Illuminati."
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Jun 21, 2015 23:32
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"He had never fallen off a cliff and died before, so it seemed suspiciously out of character for him."
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Jun 22, 2015 00:38
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Gonna be honest, dude's website reads like he wrote it while on some sort of stimulant. Or he's just manic. Either way normal people aren't that dumb and paranoid (hopefully). Oh and I read that two of the missing people he lists in one of his books were later discovered to have been killed by a serial killer working in the area however he completely doesn't include that information in the book. That and the fact that he makes a lot of stupid statements about how things (location of bodies, missing or intact clothing, etc) couldn't possibly have happened for normal reasons. It just makes it obvious that he's got a weird agenda and it would be SO GOOD if he could have put a lid on that poo poo and written it well. Like, he's selling a few copies of his books to weirdos but he'd probably be rolling in dough if he wrote and marketed it like any other generic interesting nonfiction piece. JibbaJabberwocky has a new favorite as of 01:13 on Jun 22, 2015 |
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Jun 22, 2015 01:10
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I like when he comments on a missing person's status in red letters: "Body Found in the area of the search but not found by searchers." 
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Jun 22, 2015 01:31
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Karma Monkey posted:I like when he comments on a missing person's status in red letters: "Body Found in the area of the search but not found by searchers." Jesus Christ this a hundred times. People miss stuff on searches all the freaking time. I think he's forgetting that a lot of the time searchers are spread really thin and they're also usually just random nice people from the community who dedicate their time to helping out, not trained professionals. Also he seems to think that SAR dogs are 100% infallible and they can smell everything forever and that it's totally impossible for one of them to not be able to find a thing that is there. Like dogs are awesome and they can smell some poo poo but they aren't made of pure magic. 
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Jun 22, 2015 03:00
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JibbaJabberwocky posted:Jesus Christ this a hundred times. People miss stuff on searches all the freaking time. I think he's forgetting that a lot of the time searchers are spread really thin and they're also usually just random nice people from the community who dedicate their time to helping out, not trained professionals. Also he seems to think that SAR dogs are 100% infallible and they can smell everything forever and that it's totally impossible for one of them to not be able to find a thing that is there. Like dogs are awesome and they can smell some poo poo but they aren't made of pure magic. Seriously. I've had the good fortune to work with some great working dogs, both professionally and when volunteering on SAR teams. Dogs are AWESOME. The dog I worked with most recently pinged on me because I'd gone to a shooting range the day before AND HAD SHOWERED, I SWEAR - she was just that good. But that was a dog was who trained to detect explosives. I can only imagine how hard it is for a dog, even a great one, to sniff someone's socks and go find that particular person when they've been lost in the woods for three or four days. They're awesome, but they're not magic.
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Jun 22, 2015 04:45
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When last we left the sleepy mill town of Columbus, Georgia, the sixth victim had passed on during what the locals were calling “The Night of Terror”. Presuming the same person did all this stuff (and you guys will find that I question the official version of events a lot), one man, in the space of one hour, attempted to break into a home colloquially known as “the castle”, attempted to rape and kill an elderly widower two blocks away, was thwarted, and ran back to the home of Mildred Borom – located diagonally from the Illges house (the aforementioned “castle) and raped and killed her while police helicopters buzzed overhead and officers with bloodhounds tracked the streets. What he’d done is horrendous, terrifying, awful stuff – but that’s a lot of productivity for a serial killer to pull off in about an hour. And so we come to Stocking Stranglings Part VII: This time the serial killer isn’t the Stocking Strangler! Do you guys remember the old Homeland Security Advisory System? “Threat level orange” and all that, it ran from green all the way up to red and never, ever went below yellow, not even once? If the city was on “yellow” alert when all this started and jumped up to “red” when Kathleen Woodruff was murdered days after Christmas, around this time Columbus ratcheted their personal threat level up to “ the bottom of a well located inside the center of a supermassive black hole”. To say that the city was on edge is like calling World War II a minor tiff. Mildred Borom’s body was located on February 12, 1978. On February 16th, the Columbus Police Department took the plunge that only the truly desperate (or beleaguered homicide detectives in Santa Barbara, California) take – they hired a psychic detective. Mr. Argeris was an apparently accomplished psychic who’d helped police solve crimes throughout New England, and I hate to speak ill of the dead (he passed away in 1986) but I doubt his abilities. Mr. Argeris was driven through Wynnton by two officers. Their report said that Mr. Argeris determined that “the suspect lives in the area… without a doubt he is a white male with large eyes, having a full beard. Suspect either has money or his family is considered well-to-do. The suspect has the initial J… it should stand for John”.While the city sat in terror over the Stocking Strangler murders, things got much worse on March 1st. Police Chief McClung received a handwritten letter, written on United States Army stationery. The handwritten note was from the self-styled Chairman of the Forces of Evil, a group of seven white men who claimed that they had a black woman they were holding hostage – Gail Jackson. Ms. Jackson would be murdered if the Stocking Strangler – by this time, fueled by (amongst other things) the coroner’s inept decision to label the Strangler as a black man based on a “curly black” pubic hair (and again, gents, I’ll give you a moment to take a look at your own junk to see how prevalent that particular iron-clad identifier is), pretty much all of Columbus was looking for a black man as the Stocking Strangler, and the Forces of Evil were going places that even the Ku Klux Klan wouldn’t. While the Klan was content to march a few times in Wynnton, the Forces of Evil were going to murder black women until the cops stopped the Stocking Strangler from killing white women. David Rose uses a great word here and I’ll repeat it – David Rose’s The Big Eddy Club posted:With commendable sangfroid, McClung separated the “Forces of Evil” investigation from the stranglings case. The Forces of Evil, through their esteemed Chairman, claimed to be a group of white men holding a woman hostage. They were, in fact, a single black man who’d already killed. When the police started looking for Gail Jackson they came up empty handed. Gail Jackson happened to have sex with men professionally, so using a pseudonym is par for the course. I believe her birth name was Brenda Faison, though that may have been an alias as well. The Forces of Evil sent further letters and eventually made phone calls – five letters were sent to Chief McClung and one to the Columbus Ledger. Ten thousand dollars in ransom was demanded – roughly forty thousand dollars in today’s money. Meanwhile Gail Jackson / Brenda Faison was rotting in a shallow grave. Murderpedia posted:On or about February 28, 1978, William Henry Hance, a soldier stationed at Fort Benning, Columbus, Georgia, went to the Sand Hill Bar located near the base for a drink. If any of you were ever stationed at Benning you probably know the general area. To try and throw the eventual investigation off the trail, Hance placed an Army cap with a different unit insignia near the scene of the crime. If you think his cover up was less than genius, well, that’ll come up in a minute. All in all William Henry Hance killed at least four women, three of whom he was tried for in civilian and military courts. Hance was fond of inflicting massive trauma on his victims – Karen Hickman, a 24 year old white female Private who was murdered prior to the “Forces of Evil” stuff, was killed by being beaten profusely with a jack handle and then run over repeatedly with a car. Her body was dumped near the women’s barracks. Basically, Hance was a violent, sick gently caress who hated women, loved beating the hell out of them and killing them, but he was dumb enough to dump the bodies where he worked – even if Fort Benning is huge, any body dumped there is probably going to point straight to a military man as the primary suspect. Hance was bad at covering tracks, which is great for those of us who are fond of the ideas of “justice” and “good”, but it makes his eventual punishment a little morally grey, even for people who approve of the death penalty. You see, Mr. Hance had an IQ of between 75 and 79 points, which qualifies him as "borderline intellectual functioning" on modern medical scales of mental abilities. Hance was tried in military and civilian courts, as I said, and the military courts sentenced him to a life of hard labor. The civilian courts decided that he needed to die. Wikipedia posted:In the hours before his death, the Supreme Court voted, 6-3, not to consider his appeal. In dissent, Justice Harry Blackmun said that that even if he had not recently One of his jurors at his second sentencing (after the first was reversed for prosecutorial misconduct), a white woman named Patricia Lemay, reported that other jurors said batshit horrible things about Hance such as "just one more sorry friend of the family that no one would miss" and that when he was executed he would be "one less friend of the family to breed.” Wikipedia posted:There was only one black juror, a 26-year-old woman named Gayle Lewis Daniels. According to Lemay, Daniels was subjected to racial invective in the jury room. According to both Lemay and Daniels herself, Daniels refused to vote for the death penalty. The other jurors ignored her and reported to the judge that they were unanimous. When the jury was polled in the presence of the court, Daniels was by then too frightened to speak up. The other jurors had told her that she could be convicted of perjury if she continued to hold out, since she had testified, during jury selection, that she could vote for the death penalty. (White people being absolute shitheads about black people suspected of murder? That will surely not come up again!) Next time: one more strangling, and then silence…
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Jun 22, 2015 06:03
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Even though I know it'll take a few days before the next part is posted. Your posts are like camping... They're intense 
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Jun 22, 2015 08:08
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PYF scary or unnerving article or Wikipedia: He had never fallen off a cliff and died before, so it seemed suspiciously out of character for him.
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Jun 22, 2015 11:39
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Thanks for the update, wyntyr, you really make this story compelling. Though certain sentences are very disturbing (run over repeatedly with a car, "one less friend of the family to breed.") I'm hoping that somewhere, there's one good guy (or gal) in this story, but afraid I'm going to be disappointed on that score.
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Jun 22, 2015 12:11
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Wyntyr, your storytelling is amazing, but one small nitpick - widowers are dudes, widows are ladies.
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Jun 22, 2015 14:23
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Someone earlier in the thread linked to a Reddit were people were recounting their stories of weird experiences in the woods and it felt like every other person had a story where they stumbled upon a clandestine Marijuana operation. NPR did a pretty good article on the topic and they also captured the fact that the guys who run these operations are dangerous and really don't like being seen and reported. I thought it was odd that basically everyone in that thread had a story about either finding a crop or being menaced by scary men who were protecting a crop and then I remembered that my friends and I stumbled upon a grow operation in Tallgrass Prarie in central Kansas with basically minimal effort. So I guess it's not exactly surprising that everyone and their mother has had experiences like that in National Parks throughout the US. Point being that this seems like a valid reason people sometimes disappear in them. But maybe the bigfoot illuminati are the ones running all of these grow operations from behind the scenes and it still comes back to them. 
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Jun 22, 2015 14:48
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Bigfoot is a huge dopefiend and he doesn't like it when pesky kids stumble into his grow-op.
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Jun 22, 2015 15:13
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pookel posted:Wyntyr, your storytelling is amazing, but one small nitpick - widowers are dudes, widows are ladies. I'm not surprised I messed up a detail like that, I'm usually writing these after I get off duty so I'm fairly tired. My bad! And Filox... there's not a whole lot of heroes in this story, I'm afraid. There are people who are genuinely committed to justice, but for the most part it's about a fairly racist town trying a black man for the murder of elderly white women. There's a lot of detestable poo poo that goes on, but I think for the most part I've covered all the violence. There's another murder, then the series of events that leads to Carlton Gary getting arrested, his trial (and everything that went wrong there) and the things we've learned since the trial. So maybe four more posts, and I'm afraid when I cover the trial portion the n-word is going to get thrown around a lot. One thing I'm going to say up front - I recommend, if you're enjoying these posts, to get your hands on David Rose's The Big Eddy Club, but to me he comes off in points as this like, 9/11 truther of the Carlton Gary story. I believe that Gary is not guilty of all of the Stocking Strangler murders. In fact, I believe that the murders were likely carried out by more than one person, but I am not an investigative journalist or a cop, and I have no evidence to prove what I believe, just a strong hunch. Where Rose goes wrong (aside from things like, say, saying that a building is on a street that it isn't) is he tries to force this connection between old money in Columbus and Carlton Gary being found guilty for all the Strangler murders. The Big Eddy Club, in real life, is a country club located in Green Island Hills, a swanky part of town. I've had friends that lived there and, as a result, I've actually been inside the club (before I was aware of David Rose's book). It's definitely very nice. An ex-girlfriend's uncle was a chef there for decades, Rose actually interviews him for his book, and I can't decide whether I want to include any of that stuff in my posts, because it all ends up here: David Rose thinks, basically, that a cackling cabal of old money met at the country club and, no doubt rubbing their hands together with glee, framed an innocent patsy for a bunch of murders and laughed the whole time. Where I differ is this: I think there were more than a few people involved in sending Gary to Death Row who realized, hey, this guy might not be entirely guilty of all these crimes. But I think it happened more as a result of casual, endemic racism. "Well, he fits the bill, gently caress this guy." As someone abhorrently said about William Henry Hance, one less black man to feed and breed. So yeah, if you can get past Rose's obsession with exposing the old money of Columbus as a bunch of straight-up evil folks (and he's at least partially right there too) who conspired to jail an innocent man, Big Eddy Club is an excellent read. It will test the limits of how many times you can read the n-word but that's par for the course when dealing with the Deep South in the 70s.
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Jun 22, 2015 17:02
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Gibfender posted:Sidenote but I've come to love the absolute inevitability of every horrifying wiki article having in the "In popular culture" section just list off every metal band to name themselves or an album after the event. It is pretty great, yeah. Or, if not in their name or an album title, song titles, themes, lyrics, etc. One thing about that (and the vast majority of other metal band names/titles, etc., of all its various subgenres aside from maybe, like, hair metal), though, is that it kind of does the general public a favor by being so upfront with how tasteless and tone deaf (literally and figuratively) what you're about to get into is. That is, if you can manage to read any of it, with given those loving fonts. The same can easily be said about, like, 99% of artists signed to Psychopathic records. But I'll end that thought there as to not get too far off of any topic. But since we're on the topic of metal (or, well, we two are anyway) and poor decision-making, let me contribute something. This is another thing I'm not sure whether or not has been mentioned in this thread thus far, so forgive me if I am running anything into the ground, but has anything been posted thus far about the plethora or disturbing violent crimes amongst the Norwegian black metal scene--specifically in the 90's? While I get that it's not as traditionally scary as serial murderers, nightclub fires, planes crashes, building collapses, etc., etc., I'm referring mostly to the string of murders committed by several famous (among their scene, anyway) black metal musicians. One of them, Bård 'Faust' Eithun , stabbed a homosexual man to death after he propositioned Faust for sex in the woods. He's made several conflicting statements regarding the whole thing, but it seems like ultimately he just wanted to kill someone and the fact that the man was gay wasn't much of a factor aside fro the fact that it gave him a convenient way to get the victim into a secluded wooded area. Though this occurred in 1992, it wasn't until 1993 that Faust was arrested. In the intervening period, police has no suspects, though Faust had told several of his fellow black metal musicians about it--namely Øystein 'Euronymous' Aarseth, a member of the band Mayhem (more on this in a second) and a former member of Mayhem that was still playing with another group, Varg Vikernes. Neither of the two wound up ratting Faust out for the killing (yet, at least). Not directly, anyway. What did wind up happening was this--in '93, Varg stabbed the holy poo poo out of Euronymous and killed the dude. That's when Faust was arrested. I'm not sure if Varg then reported Faust's crimes, or if Faust was brought in for questioning and then confessed. Both men were sentenced in 1994, with Faust doing nine and one-third years in prison, and Varg doing 15 years. However, there's quite a few more truly disturbing and otherwise bizarre events in the history of Norway's black metal scene. The aforementioned late Øystein 'Euronymous' Aarseth was not the first member of Mayhem to die violently. A couple of years before, his bandmate, Per "Dead" Ohlin, decided to make his moniker into a self-fulfilling prophecy. And he wanted to make drat sure he did it, too, because after slashing his wrists, he blew his head off with a shotgun. That along is tragic and an unpleasant mental image, but the part that gets disturbing is what ol' Euronymous decided to do when he found Dead dead. He went and grabbed a disposable camera and snapped some pictures of Dead's corpse, one of which wound up stolen and tactfully used as the cover art for a live bootleg album that the band has since 'officially' endorsed, because if "Tasteful" isn't the middle name of the Norwegian black metal game, then it's "Classy." More disturbing is the rumor, perpetuated by Euronymous himself (well, for a while, anyway), that he also collected some of Dead's scattered-about brain matter and ate it. Frankly, no one really knew the truth about that matter but him, and I heard somewhere that "dead men tell no tales." I don't remember where, though. I think it might have been the Bible. There are also accounts of assaults, animal cruelty/mutilaton, and of course, the infamous church arsons, which Varg was a prime suspect for (he denies doing it, but says he supports whoever did--the guy might be a piece of poo poo, but at least he's consistently a piece of poo poo). The arsons aren't exactly scary nor disturbing, but they were definitely both hate crimes and the destruction of some of the oldest churches in that area, so, ya' know, still a pretty lovely thing to do. Lastly, when the police were investigating the black metal scene in regards to the church fires, this happened: Wikipedia posted:Shortly after this episode, the Oslo police dispatched its Church Fire Group to Bergen, where they set up a makeshift headquarters in the Hotel Norge. According to Lords of Chaos, citing a police report, Vikernes knocked on their door and "virtually forced his way into the suite". He was "dressed in chain mail, carrying two large knives in his belt, and flanked by the two young men who apparently behaved as if they were his bodyguards or henchmen". Vikernes "stated that he was fed up with being harassed by the authorities, and that the police investigation into the Black Metal scene should be stopped". When police told him he had no right to issue orders, Vikernes "took one step back and raised his right arm in a Roman salute".[72]
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Jun 24, 2015 13:27
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Thanks to whoever linked the Thinking Sideways podcasts (about the two Dutch girls in the jungle), I have been going through the archives and it's an absolute trove of strange and creepy stories. http://thinkingsidewayspodcast.com/
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Jun 24, 2015 14:21
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