The Midnight Train Podcast

The Nantiinaq; Portlock, Alaska and Other Ghost Towns

Portlock Alaska

& Other haunted ghost towns

 

Today we're talking about a ghost town in Alaska that is rumored to have been abandoned because of…. Wait for it….a killer bigfoot!! dun dun duuuuuuuuuuun!!! We're going to look at Portlock Alaska and after that maybe take a look at other haunted and creepy ghost towns! 

 

History of Portlock:

As per wikipedia

 

Portlock is a ghost town in the U.S. state of Alaska, located on the southern edge of the Kenai Peninsula, around 16 miles south of Seldovia. It is located in Port Chatham bay, after which an adjacent community takes its namesake. Named after Nathaniel Portlock, Portlock was established in the Kenai Peninsula in the early-twentieth century as a cannery, particularly for salmon. It is thought to have been named after Captain Nathaniel Portlock, a British ship captain who sailed there in 1786. In 1921, a United States Post Office opened in the town.  The population largely consisted of Russian-Aleuts, indigenous people of the Aleutian Islands. Both the Aleut people and the islands are divided between the US state of Alaska and the Russian administrative division of Kamchatka Krai.

 

In the early 1900s there were a series of deaths and disappearances in the town. Many people started to blame this on a killer cryptid! It is said that this big bad beast is the reason behind the town being abandoned and left to become a legend.

 

Nantiinaq:

 

First off let's talk about the cryptid that is believed to be the cause of all of this mess.

 

Nantinaq is a large Bigfoot-like creature that is believed to be a key factor in the abandonment of the Alaskan fishing village Portlock. Elders from the nearby town of Nanwalek have kept oral traditions of the creature alive since Portlock’s abandonment in 1950. Stories differentiate Nantinaq from the North American Sasquatch or Bigfoot through its abilities, which many believe to be supernatural and evil in nature.

 

The earliest descriptions and accounts of Nantinaq can be traced back to European expedition logs in the 1700’s. When Native Alaskans began inhabiting the Portlock area stories and encounters with a mysterious creature began occurring with increasing regularity.

 

In the early 20th century, as Portlock’s population grew, local and national sources began to record unexplained occurrences in the area. An abnormally high number of disappearances, catastrophes, and deaths eventually lead to village elders to move the population to nearby Nanwalek. 

 

The physical characteristics of Nantinaq are typically described to be similar to the North American Sasquatch. Eye witnesses and historians describe the creature as being upwards of 8 feet tall and being covered in dark fur. Sharp claws capable of ripping mammals with ease have also been identified.

 

Despite the creatures imposing physical characteristics, many locals identify Nantinaq more through its invisible traits. Strange illnesses, smells and noises have all been recorded in the Portlock area with no known explanation. This has led many locals and elders to believe Nantinaq is spiritual in nature.

 

The craziness:

Even before Portlock had even existed there had long been sinister stories told by the Natives of the area. They had long told of a creature stalking the wildernesses of the region, which they referred to as a Nantiinaq, roughly translating to “half man- half beast.” The Natives were apparently terrified of these creatures, and would avoid any area in which they were known to lurk. At first Portlock seemed safe, but whether the Nantiinaq had anything to do with it or not, strange things began happening in and around the area, not long after its settlement. In 1900, a group of hair-covered creatures ran at a prospector who had climbed a tree in an attempt to get his bearings near Thomas Bay. The prospector said they were, “the most hideous creatures. I couldn’t call them anything but devils…” The prospector, upon seeing the creatures advancing on him, was able to drop down out of the tree, get to his canoe and make his escape in the nick of time. He had no doubt in his mind that, had he not seen the creatures when he did, they would have made short work of him. Another bizarre incident allegedly happened in as early as 1905, just a few years after the cannery had opened. At this time, many of the workers at the cannery suddenly stopped coming to work and refused to come back, but this wasn’t due to poor pay or working conditions, but rather because the men were deeply spooked. They claimed that there was “something in the woods,” commonly reported by the men as being large dark shapes that would stare at them from the tree line at the shore and sometimes display menacing behavior. The workers were eventually convinced to come back the following season, but this was not the end of the town’s problems.

 

In the 1920s and 30s there were several mysterious deaths in the area that seemed to have been caused by something very large and powerful. The first was a local hunter by the name of Albert Petka, who was out hunting with his dogs in the 1920s when he came across a massive hairy creature that materialized from the trees to strike him in the chest, sending him flying. Petka’s dogs allegedly managed to chase the beast off, and when rescuers arrived he explained what had happened, before dying from his wounds later. Natives at the time saw this as a bad sign, believing it to be evidence that a Nantiinaq had come to haunt the area. Rumors like this persisted for years, only further perpetuated by stories of miners, loggers, hunters, or cannery workers finding huge tracks in the woods, or of seeing fleeting large dark shapes and sometimes hearing eerie howls at night. Making it even more ominous is that there were some reports from frightened Natives that there was a ghostly entity in the area as well, which took the form of a woman wearing a long black dress and who would appear at the top of the cliffs near town to scream and moan before vanishing.

 

Brian Weed is the co-founder of a group called Juneau's Hidden History that primarily keeps track of things through their Facebook page. He has traveled all over Juneau and many other Alaskan towns in search of natural history and stories. His group plans frequent hikes in the area to places that have some sort of story to tell or just to see the natural beauty of the state. He related another story of a mysterious death.

 

                    "A logger was out working and something or someone hit him over the head with a huge piece of logging equipment, something that one man couldn't have lifted. When they found his body, there was blood on the equipment and there was no way that one person could have done it. He was a good ten feet from the logging equipment, so it's not like he slipped, fell, and hit his head. It looked more like someone picked it up and bonked him over the head."

 

       

In 1940 it was reported that a search party had been sent out to look for one such missing hunter, which would claim that they had come across his body in a creek, mutilated and torn apart in a way not consistent with a bear attack. Other bodies would reportedly be found as well, apparently washed down from the mountains into a nearby lagoon, with others still discovered washed up on the shores of Port Chatham, all of them ripped apart and maimed as if by some immensely powerful animal. At the time there were so many people turning up in that lagoon dead that it began to truly freak out the locals, to the point that they spent much time cowering indoors away from those creepy ass woods.

 

By the 1950s, locals were sick and tired of living in fear so they completely fled the town and left it abandoned. Years later when hunters returned, it is said that they reported seeing 18-inch long human-like footprints with patterns similar to a deer or wolf.

 

Former Portlock resident Malania Helen Kehl was interviewed by Naomi Klouda of the Homer Tribune back in October of 2009 and said things in Portlock started out well enough but degenerated to such a point that the family left their home and fled to Nanwalek.The family had endured the murder of Malania’s godfather, Andrew Kamluck in 1931. Kamluck was the logger who was killed when someone, or something, hit him over the head. 

 

       "We left our houses and the school and started all new here (Nanwalek),” said Kehl.

 

Port Graham elder, Simeon Kvasnikoff told of the unexplained disappearance of a gold miner near the village during this time.

 

“He went up there one time and never came back,” said Kvasnikoff. “No one found any sign of him.”

 

Another interesting aspect of the Portlock story was relayed to Klouda by an Anchorage paramedic who preferred to remain anonymous.

 

“In 1990, while I was working as a paramedic in Anchorage, we got called out on an alarm for a man having a heart attack at the state jail in Eagle River. He was a Native man in his 70s, and after I got him stabilized with IVs, O2 and cardiac drugs, my partner and I began to transport him to the Native Hospital in Anchorage.”

En route to the hospital, the paramedic and the Native man, an “Aleut'' from Port Graham, talked about hunting. The paramedic had been to DogFish Bay and was once stuck there due to bad weather.

 

“This old man sat up on the gurney and grabbed me by the front of my shirt. He got right up to my face and said, ‘Did it bother you?’ Well, with that question, the hair just stood up on the back of my head. I said, ‘Yes.’ “Did you see it?” was his next question. I said, “No, did you see it?” He said “No, but my brother seen it. It chased him.”

 

Ok so that's pretty jacked up….a killer bigfoot! That's one hell of a story. The town had been abandoned ever since and sightings continue to this day. In fact there is a TV series about this place called Alaskan Killer Bigfoot! The series followed a 40 day expedition to the area to try and see if they can get to the bottom of all the mystery! Moody hasn't watched it yet but I'm sure he'll get high and binge it soon. 

 

So on the side of fairness we do have to disclose an interview we found. The interview was with a woman named Sally Ash. Sally is Sugpiaq of Russian-Aleut descent. She has lived in Nanwalek for most of her life and continues to speak her native language Sugt’stun. Her mother was born in Dogfish Bay, near Port Chatham.

 

         “Our people were nomadic, went by the seasons, whatever was in season they would move from one place to another. They went through Port Chatham, Dogfish Bay, Seldovia, Homer, even to Kodiak.”

 

            "Portlock was kind of a creepy place,” she admitted.  “They’d tell us don’t go out on a foggy day.  That’s when he’s walking around. You could run into him and you never know what he might do.”

 

The ‘he’ that she is talking about is their local form of Sasquatch, known as Nantiinaq.  Nantiinaq pronounced ‘non-tee-nuck,’ is not your typical, everyday Sasquatch brute. Nantiinaq is more of a supernatural being.   

 

“I think he is part-human,” Sally describes. “He lived with people and then didn’t want to be around them anymore so he moved to the forest; away from everybody. He started growing hair and he looked like a bigfoot — scary… My uncles, my grandfathers, they all talked about him. They’d tell us they live far away from people. They don’t mix with people.”

 

“My brother went up to the lake. He was tying off his skiff. He started smelling something really bad in the bushes, so he opened it, moving the branches. Something’s going on here.  Then he looked in there and there was a man with his hands — in the back way (turned around). It looked like a man, but he was all hairy and he looked really scary. So he and our cousin took off running and didn’t want to be up there.  He wasn’t sure if it was a bigfoot, but there was a horrible smell,” she said.

 

“I think it’s a he; he has been living for a long time,” Sally says. “He’s old, he’s tall, he’s strong, he’s hairy.  It lives in the woods and you can tell when he’s getting near. You can smell him.  My mom used to talk about it a lot.  She’d tell stories of the bigfoot, like in Dogfish area, her and her brother would talk about how bigfoot was around. They were getting too close to him and they would be nice to him. Respect him. Keep distance. They live with him but not so close. He moved around — he was quick.”

 

Sally served as translator for her cousin, Malania Kehl during her historic interview for the Homer Tribune in 2009, that has since taken the bigfoot-believing world by storm. Malania told the reporter that the entire town evacuated Port Chatham in 1949 due to this murderous Nantiinaq. Her story has been perceived as being factual by authors, documentarians, and bigfoot buffs.

 

Buuuuuuuuttttttt…..

 

“My cousin Malania was being interviewed and we were sitting with her,” Sally recalls. “Malania kind of made up a story, because she was getting tired of people asking if this (story) is true. She made up this story about how Bigfoot was killing people. It wasn’t true.  Everybody knows that, but it was not our place to say nothing. We all knew but we couldn’t just stop her. We were brought up in a way where we can’t tell our elders they are wrong.”

 

"And that was her story,” Sally giggles…  “we knew it. There was me and my sisters and my cousins and we all just sat there. We couldn’t tell her, ‘Don’t say that Malania,’  because she might get mad at us. We were younger than her and we were not allowed in front of her to say anything like that… Malania knew that we knew about her story that she made up and we all had a laugh about it with her.”

 

Sally said the reason for the exodus from Port Chatham was more practical in nature.

 

“People would see Nantiinaq, but that wasn’t the reason why people moved this way to Seldovia and Nanwalek. They moved because of the economy, schools and the church.  There really was no killing of people.”  

 

Well…that's disappointing…but we here at The train are gonna stick to the fact that there's a killer bigfoot to blame!

 

Wow so that's fun! But you know what…it's not enough. We strive to bring you the best in podcast entertainment here so we're going to do some of our patented quick hitters and throw in some more crazy ghost towns for ya! 

Let's roll!

 

First up we’re off to Italy. The ghost town of Craco to be more specific. 

 

Craco is a ghost town and comune in the province of Matera, in the southern Italian region of Basilicata. 

 

Haunted, surreal and moving, it’s not surprising that the Craco ghost town and the beautiful surrounding landscape was chosen as the setting for several movies such as Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ and 007 Quantum of Solace.

 

The first written evidence of the town's existence shows that it was under the possession of a bishop named Arnaldo in 1060 A.D. The town's oldest building, the tall Torre Normanna, predates the bishop's documented ownership by 20 years.

 

From 1154 to 1168, after the archbishop, the nobleman Eberto controlled the town, establishing Feudalistic rule, and then ownership passed onto Roberto di Pietrapertos in 1179.

 

A university was established in the 13th century and the population kept growing, reaching 2,590 in the year 1561. By this time, the construction of four large plazas was completed. Craco had its first substantial landslide in 1600, but life went on, and the monastery of St. Peter went up in 1630.

 

Then, another tragedy hit. In 1656, the Black Death began to spread. Hundreds died and the population dipped.

 

But Craco wasn't down for the count quite yet. In 1799, the town successfully overthrew the feudal system — only to then fall to Napoleonic occupation. In 1815, a still-growing Craco was divided into two separate districts.

 

After Italy's unification in the mid-19th century, the controversial gangster and folk hero Carmine Crocco briefly conquered the village.

 

Mother Nature had more in store for Craco. Poor agricultural conditions caused a severe famine in the late 19th century. This spawned a mass migration of the population — about 1,300 people — to North America.

 

Then came more landslides. Craco had a series of them — plus a flood in 1972 and an earthquake in 1980. Luckily, in 1963, the remaining 1,800 inhabitants were transferred down the mountain to a valley called Craco Peschiera.

 

Not everyone was willing to move, however. One man native to the tiny town resisted the relocation, choosing to live the rest of his more than 100 years in his native land.

 

Some houses still hold traces of the life that once was: old appliances, abandoned tools, a lonely chair in the middle of a room where no one will ever sit anymore. A few facades still bear the signs of their past beauty in what has remained of their decorations.

 

And of course there are the tales of hauntings that come with most ghost towns. While there isn't a whole lot on a cursory search, if you dig a little you can find some stories of late night expeditions finding some interesting things. There are stories of groups seeing shadow people and apparitions. People hearing strange sounds. Pictures containing orbs and other anomalies. It's a great looking place, definitely check it out.

 

Next up is Rhyolite Nevada.

 

The ghost town of Rhyolite and its remnants are definitely a popular destination among those who like seeking out Nevada's abandoned places. Home to many of the town's original and now crumbling buildings, it's a fascinating place to see and think about Nevada's past. 

 

According to the national parks service This ghost town's origins were brought about by Shorty Harris and E. L. Cross, who were prospecting in the area in 1904. They found quartz all over a hill, and as Shorty describes it “... the quartz was just full of free gold... it was the original bullfrog rock... this banner is a crackerjack”! He declared, “The district is going to be the banner camp of Nevada. I say so once and I’ll say it again.” At that time there was only one other person in the whole area: Old Man Beatty who lived in a ranch with his family five miles away. Soon the rush was on and several camps were set up including Bullfrog, the Amargosa and a settlement between them called Jumpertown. A townsite was laid out nearby and given the name Rhyolite from the silica-rich volcanic rock in the area.

 

There were over 2000 claims covering everything in a 30 mile area from the Bullfrog district. The most promising was the Montgomery Shoshone mine, which prompted everyone to move to the Rhyolite townsite. The town immediately boomed with buildings springing up everywhere. One building was 3 stories tall and cost $90,000 to build. A stock exchange and Board of Trade were formed. The red light district drew women from as far away as San Francisco. There were hotels, stores, a school for 250 children, an ice plant, two electric plants, foundries and machine shops and even a miner’s union hospital.

 

The town citizens had an active social life including baseball games, dances, basket socials, whist parties, tennis, a symphony, Sunday school picnics, basketball games, Saturday night variety shows at the opera house, and pool tournaments. In 1906 Countess Morajeski opened the Alaska Glacier Ice Cream Parlor to the delight of the local citizenry. That same year an enterprising miner, Tom T. Kelly, built a Bottle House out of 50,000 beer and liquor bottles.

 

In April 1907 electricity came to Rhyolite, and by August of that year a mill had been constructed to handle 300 tons of ore a day at the Montgomery Shoshone mine. It consisted of a crusher, 3 giant rollers, over a dozen cyanide tanks and a reduction furnace. The Montgomery Shoshone mine had become nationally known because Bob Montgomery once boasted he could take $10,000 a day in ore from the mine. It was later owned by Charles Schwab, who purchased it in 1906 for a reported 2 to 6 million dollars.

 

The financial panic of 1907 took its toll on Rhyolite and was seen as the beginning of the end for the town. In the next few years mines started closing and banks failed. Newspapers went out of business, and by 1910 the production at the mill had slowed to $246,661 and there were only 611 residents in the town. On March 14, 1911 the directors voted to close down the Montgomery Shoshone mine and mill. In 1916 the light and power were finally turned off in the town.

 

Today you can find several remnants of Rhyolite’s glory days. Some of the walls of the 3 story bank building are still standing, as is part of the old jail. The train depot (privately owned) is one of the few complete buildings left in the town, as is the Bottle House. The Bottle House was restored by Paramount pictures in Jan, 1925.

 

And according to only on your state, It also happens to be home to one of Nevada's spookiest cemeteries. After all, nothing says "creepy" like a ghost town graveyard! Known as the Bullfrog-Rhyolite Cemetery, it definitely looks the part of a haunted destination you probably shouldn't visit at night.

 

The Bullfrog-Rhyolite Cemetery was actually shared between two towns. Home to just a handful of rugged graves, including some that look like nothing more than a human-shaped mound of rocks, it definitely has a serene type of beauty to it...during daylight, that is.

 

There's no telling what kind of creepy experiences you could have in Rhyolite once the sun sets. In fact, paranormal enthusiasts make trips out here to challenge just that! Disembodied voices and orbs are often reported in this area. And while most of the action seems to be centered on this area there are also reports of the same strange goings on in the town itself. Strange sounds and voices and orbs, as well as strange shadows and apparitions. Sounds awesome to us!

 

Next up we head to Calico California.

 

Calico is a ghost town and former mining town in San Bernardino County, California, United States. Located in the Calico Mountains of the Mojave Desert region of Southern California, it was founded in 1881 as a silver mining town, and was later converted into a county park named Calico Ghost Town. Located off Interstate 15, it lies 3 miles (4.8 km) from Barstow and 3 miles from Yermo. Giant letters spelling CALICO are visible, from the highway, on the Calico Peaks behind it. Walter Knott purchased Calico in the 1950s, and architecturally restored all but the five remaining original buildings to look as they did in the 1880s. Calico received California Historical Landmark #782, and in 2005 was proclaimed by then-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to be California's Silver Rush Ghost Town.

 

In 1881 four prospectors were leaving Grapevine Station (present day Barstow, California) for a mountain peak to the northeast. After they described the peak as "calico-colored", the peak, the mountain range to which it belonged, and the town that followed were all called Calico. The four prospectors discovered silver in the mountain and opened the Silver King Mine, which was California's largest silver producer in the mid-1880s. John C. King, who had grubstaked the prospectors who discovered the silver vein (the Silver King Mine was thus named after him), was the uncle of Walter Knott founder of Knott's Berry Farm. King was sheriff of San Bernardino County from 1879 to 1882. A post office at Calico was established in early 1882, and the Calico Print, a weekly newspaper, started publishing. The town soon supported three hotels, five general stores, a meat market, bars, brothels, and three restaurants and boarding houses. The county established a school district and a voting precinct. The town also had a deputy sheriff and two constables, two lawyers and a justice of the peace, five commissioners, and two doctors. There was also a Wells Fargo office and a telephone and telegraph service. At its height of silver production during 1883 and 1885, Calico had over 500 mines and a population of 1,200 people. Local badmen were buried in the Boot Hill cemetery

 

An attempt to revive the town was made in about 1915, when a cyanide plant was built to recover silver from the unprocessed Silver King Mine's deposits. Walter Knott and his wife Cordelia, founders of Knott's Berry Farm, were homesteaded at Newberry Springs around this time, and Knott helped build the redwood cyanide tanks for the plant.

 

The last owner of Calico as a mine was Zenda Mining Company. After building Ghost Town at Knott’s Berry Farm in the 1940s, Walter Knott, his son, Russell, and Paul von Klieben, who was Knott's art director, made a road trip to Calico. The three of them came back filled with enthusiasm. If they could build an imaginary ghost town at Knott’s Berry Farm, would it not be possible to restore a real ghost town? In 1951, Walter Knott purchased the town of Calico from the Zenda Mining Company and put Paul von Klieben in charge of restoring it to its original condition, referencing old photographs.

 

Using the old photos, and Walter’s memory and that of some old-timers who still lived in the area, von Klieben was able to not only restore existing structures, but also design and replace missing buildings. Knott spent $700,000 restoring Calico. Knott installed a longtime employee named Freddy "Calico Fred" Noller as resident caretaker and official greeter. In 1966 Walter Knott decided to donate the town to San Bernardino County, and Calico became a County Regional Park.

 

The site is now a thriving tourist attraction, and is quite interesting to visit despite being neither original nor very atmospheric, as only about four of the buildings are largely unchanged from the mining era, and the whole place is rather commercialized. Some of the replica houses have only a frontage, as if part of a movie set. 

 

The best part?…yup…its friggin haunted. You can take ghost tours through the town to find out for yourself! 

 

According to Haunted Rooms. Com, Amid the claims of paranormal activity, there are 3 main entities who have been identified as residing in Calico Ghost Town and these are the ones that visitors should be on the lookout for.

 

One of the most commonly spotted entities haunting Calico Ghost Town is said to be a woman by the name of Lucy Lane. History suggests that Lucy ran Calico’s General Store alongside her husband John Robert Lane. Just like so many of the residents, the Lanes moved away from Calico when the town began rapidly depopulating. However, they ended up returning in 1916 after the town was abandoned and live the rest of their days in the town. Lucy was well into her 90s when she finally passed.

 

It seems only natural then that she would want to stick around in the town where she lived and died. Visitors to Calico Ghost Town have frequently reported seeing Lucy walking between what was once her home and the General Store. She is easily recognizable by her attire – the beautiful black lace dress in which she was buried. Although most of the reports describe seeing Lucy Lane walking from her home to the General Store, there have also been sightings of her inside both buildings as well. Her former home is now a museum dedicated to Lucy and John Robert Lane and she is sometimes seen sitting in a rocking chair slowly rocking back and forth. Some visitors also claim to have seen Lucy behind the counter in the General Store.

 

Another of the paranormal hotspots in the Calico Ghost Town is definitely the schoolhouse! The names of the teachers have long since been lost, but it is said to be their spirits who are responsible for the plethora of paranormal activity happening in the old schoolhouse. There are frequent reports that the teachers like to stand in the windows of the schoolhouse peering out at those passing by on the outside! There are also reports of a red ball of light moving around inside the schoolhouse. This phenomenon has been witnessed by many visitors to Calico Ghost Town.

 

The former teachers are certainly not the only ones who are up to mischief! There have also been reports of various ghostly students in the schoolhouse as well. These children’s spirits can be seen flitting around inside the building. They do seem to keep themselves to themselves most of the time, but there is one girl aged around 11 or 12 who is far more outgoing. However, she is most likely to appear to children and teens who will often comment on seeing her only for their parents to turn around and the girl to vanish!

 

The most prominent ghost that roams around Calico Ghost Town is probably the entity known as ‘Tumbleweed’ Harris. He is actually the last Marshal of Calico and it seems as though he has not yet stepped down from his duty! He is often seen by the boardwalks on Main Street and you will be able to recognize him by his large frame and long white beard. If you do visit Calico Ghost Town be sure to stop by Tumbleweed’s gravestone and thank him for continuing to keep Calico’s peace even in death.

 

And finally we double back and head back to Alaska for one more ghost town. Kennecott Alaska is our final destination.

 

In the summer of 1900, two prospectors, "Tarantula" Jack Smith and Clarence L. Warner, a group of prospectors associated with the McClellan party, spotted "a green patch far above them in an improbable location for a grass-green meadow." The green turned out to be malachite, located with chalcocite (aka "copper glance"), and the location of the Bonanza claim. A few days later, Arthur Coe Spencer, U.S. Geological Survey geologist independently found chalcocite at the same location.

 

Stephen Birch, a mining engineer just out of school, was in Alaska looking for investment opportunities in minerals. He had the financial backing of the Havemeyer Family, and another investor named James Ralph, from his days in New York. Birch spent the winter of 1901-1902 acquiring the "McClellan group's interests" for the Alaska Copper Company of Birch, Havemeyer, Ralph and Schultz, later to become the Alaska Copper and Coal Company. In the summer of 1901, he visited the property and "spent months mapping and sampling." He confirmed the Bonanza mine and surrounding by deposits were, at the time, the richest known concentration of copper in the world.

 

By 1905, Birch had successfully defended the legal challenges to his property and he began the search for capital to develop the area. On 28 June 1906, he entered into "an amalgamation" with the Daniel Guggenheim and J.P. Morgan & Co., known as the Alaska Syndicate, eventually securing over $30 million. The capital was to be used for constructing a railway, a steamship line, and development of the mines. In Nov. 1906, the Alaska Syndicate bought a 40 percent interest in the Bonanza Mine from the Alaska Copper and Coal Company and a 46.2 percent interest in the railroad plans of John Rosene's Northwestern Commercial Company.

 

Political battles over the mining and subsequent railroad were fought in the office of U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt between conservationists and those having a financial interest in the copper.

 

The Alaska Syndicate traded its Wrangell Mountains Mines assets for shares in the Kennecott Copper Corporation, a "new public company" formed on 29 April 1915. A similar transaction followed with the CR&NW railway and the Alaska Steamship Company. Birch was the managing partner for the Alaska operation.

 

Kennecott Mines was named after the Kennicott Glacier in the valley below. The geologist Oscar Rohn named the glacier after Robert Kennicott during the 1899 US Army Abercrombie Survey. A "clerical error" resulted in the substitution of an "e" for the "i", supposedly by Stephen Birch himself.

Kennecott had five mines: Bonanza, Jumbo, Mother Lode, Erie and Glacier. Glacier, which is really an ore extension of the Bonanza, was an open-pit mine and was only mined during the summer. Bonanza and Jumbo were on Bonanza Ridge about 3 mi (4.8 km) from Kennecott. The Mother Lode mine was located on the east side of the ridge from Kennecott. The Bonanza, Jumbo, Mother Lode and Erie mines were connected by tunnels. The Erie mine was perched on the northwest end of Bonanza Ridge overlooking Root Glacier about 3.7 mi (6.0 km) up a glacial trail from Kennecott. Ore was hoisted to Kennecott via the trams which head-ended at Bonanza and Jumbo. From Kennecott the ore was hauled mostly in 140-pound sacks on steel flat cars to Cordova, 196 rail miles away, via the Copper River and Northwestern Railway (CRNW).

 

In 1911 the first shipment of ore by train transpired. Before completion, the steamship Chittyna carried ore to the Abercrombie landing by Miles Glacier. Initial ore shipments contained "72 percent copper and 18 oz. of silver per ton."

 

In 1916, the peak year for production, the mines produced copper ore valued at $32.4 million.

 

In 1925 a Kennecott geologist predicted that the end of the high-grade ore bodies was in sight. The highest grades of ore were largely depleted by the early 1930s. The Glacier Mine closed in 1929. The Mother Lode was next, closing at the end of July 1938. The final three, Erie, Jumbo and Bonanza, closed that September. The last train left Kennecott on November 10, 1938, leaving it a ghost town.

 

From 1909 until 1938, except when it closed temporarily in 1932, Kennecott mines "produced over 4.6 million tons of ore that contained 1.183 billion pounds of copper mainly from three ore bodies: Bonanza, Jumbo and Mother Lode. The Kennecott operations reported gross revenues above $200 million and a net profit greater than $100 million.

 

In 1938, Ernest Gruening proposed Kennecott be preserved as a National Park. A recommendation to President Franklin D. Roosevelt on 18 Jan. 1940 for the establishment of the Kennecott National Monument went nowhere. However, 2 Dec. 1980 saw the establishment of the Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve.

 

From 1939 until the mid-1950s, Kennecott was deserted except for a family of three who served as the watchmen until about 1952. In the late 1960s, an attempt was made to reprocess the tailings and to transport the ore in aircraft. The cost of doing so made the idea unprofitable. Around the same time, the company with land rights ordered the destruction of the town to rid them of liability for potential accidents. A few structures were destroyed, but the job was never finished and most of the town was left standing. Visitors and nearby residents have stripped many of the small items and artifacts. Some have since been returned and are held in various archives.

 

KCC sent a field party under the geologist Les Moon in 1955. They agreed with the 1938 conclusion, "no copper resource of a size and grade sufficient to interest KCC remained." The mill remains however.

 

Most of this historical info came from an awesome article called A Kennecott Story by Charles Hawley in the University of Utah Press.

 

So you know we love our history and we thought it was cool cus this was such an important town in Alaska's history and then boom…ghost town. But you know that's not why we're there…it's also haunted!

 

Reports of paranormal activity along the abandoned train tracks abound and have for decades. That’s not all that makes it one of the most haunted places in America. Some claim to have seen old tombstones along the route. The gravestones then vanish by the time the visitors make their return trip. Others have reported hearing disembodied voices and phantom children laughing. Reportedly, a 1990s construction project here halted after workers were scared away by spooky sounds and inexplicable events.

 

Ok, last little tid bit of fact. There’s actually a little town up in the far northwest territory of Alaska called Diomede which is located on the island of Little Diomede in the middle of the Bering Straight. During the winter months the water can freeze and you can actually walk… to Big Diomede … an island in Russia. The stretch of water between these two islands is only about 2.5 miles wide. There are two reported cases of people walking from Alaska to Russia in modern history. The last were Karl Bushby, and his American companion Dimitri Kieffer who in 2006 walked from Alaska to Russia over the Bering Straight in 14 days.

 

So there you have it…killer bigfoot and some cool haunted ghost towns! Maybe we'll drive into some more ghost towns in a future episode!

 

Bigfoot horror movies

 

https://filmschoolrejects.com/bigfoot-horror/

Narrenturm & Beechwood Insane Asylums

Ep. 152

Narranturm &

Beechwood Asylums

 

Today we're going back to some of our creepy roots. We're gonna visit a couple Asylums!!! First, we're going to look at Narrenturm asylum, and then we'll head to Beechwood Asylum! After that, we'll just hop right into the business!

 

"Narrenturm" in (Austrian/older) German translates as 'fools' tower,' or more accurately: 'lunatics' tower! 

 

The Narrenturm was indeed the world's first building especially designed, in 1783, for "keeping" such mentally ill "patients" locked up in a central facility. It was finished in 1784, and the first patients were admitted soon after.

 

Treatment in those days was minimal to non-existent, so the 250 or so inmates in the 28 cells branching off each of the circular corridors on each of the five floors were indeed more or less simply "incarcerated" here. It was little more than a "loony bin," then emphasizing the word "bin." Still, it was argued that this was better than letting the patients roam around freely with the risk that they might harm someone or be subjected to ridicule or even physical mistreatment by other people. So they were locked away inside this tower, two patients in each of the cells, which contained nothing but the beds and bare walls.

 

The Narrenturm was constructed in 1784 under Emperor Joseph II. It was Constructed by court architect Isidor Canevale. It consisted of a five-story, fortress-like circular building with 28 rooms and a ring of slit windows, plus a central chamber aligned north-to-south. There were, in total, 139 individual cells for the inmates. It was built as part of the Altes Allgemeines Krankenhaus, or "Old General Hospital." It was officially founded by Emperor Josef II in 1784 after the buildings had been used for more than 60 years as a poorhouse. The building of the Narrenturm was prompted by the discovery of underground dungeons used by the Capuchin monks of Vienna for housing their mentally ill brethren; another factor was that Joseph II had learned about similar institutions in France during his travels there. The construction of the Narrenturm points to a new attitude towards the mentally ill – they began to be separated from the rest of society and not simply classified among the general category of "the poor." Each cell had solid and barred doors and chains for restraining inmates. The building's doctors and guards were officed/housed in the center. A visitor to the Narrenturm in the late 1700s said some patients were still made to wear chains or straitjackets while in their cells. Others were allowed to roam free, although the institution was focused on a new way of dealing with the mentally ill. 

 

The Narrenturm had a lightning rod or "lightning catcher" installed on the roof ridge when it was first built. At that time, Václav Prokop Diviš, a clergyman in Přímětice near Znojmo, had studied plant growth and treatment with electrical currents present, publishing his findings to the medical community. There are rumors the 'caught lightning' may have been used to treat the mentally ill, although that has never been proven.

 

Prokop Divis invented the grounded lightning rod, which is still used in today's modern infrastructures. He was also a natural scientist, theologian, and one of the Czech canon regulars during his time. A man of science from the earlier centuries, Prokop Divis thought ahead of his time and made this classic invention. 

 

Although definitely a man who believed in God and serving the church, Prokop still made his own contribution as an inventor and scientist whose product is still being used today. He earned the needed experience to devise his invention when working in the parish in Prendice.

 

Prokop was responsible for managing the Abbey's farmland in Prendice. He also took charge of water conduit construction, which gave him the exposure to understand mechanical issues. In addition, Prokop developed an interest in electricity, and he began to perform his own experiments with great success on plant growth and therapy, using a small electric voltage.

 

When the death of Georg Wilhelm Richmann, one of the professors at St. Petersburg, reached Prokop's knowledge, he became interested in atmospheric electricity. Richmann had perished by being struck by lightning while observing a storm from a hut. This prompted Prokop to build the "weather-machine" in Prendice, a device to protect from lightning strikes.

 

Prokop devised the very first grounded lightning rod. He observed thunderstorms and deduced that lighting was an electrical spark. He also realized that he could imitate thunder and lightning on a smaller scale.

 

His grounded lightning rod was first erected on the 15th of June in 1754, six years before Benjamin Franklin invented his lightning rod in the United States.

 

Prokop's lightning rod consisted of a pointed slender iron bar, and fastened to it, near the top of the bar, were two crossbars, so producing four arms. Then across which, in turn, a shorter bar was laid, making twelve 'ends.' At each of the twelve extremities, a box with 27 brass needles was attached; each compartment was filled with iron shavings. The main bar was supported by a 132-foot wooden column, and iron chains connected the main bar to the ground. The rod was designed to split the lightning spark into as many smaller sparks as there were needles (324) to reduce its force.

 

His lightning rod invention was not popular and was received with suspicion, so Prokop removed it in 1756 and turned his interest toward music. However, his theory of atmospheric electricity was published in his papers after his death. 

 

Apart from his invention of the first grounded lightning rod, Prokop also created the first electrical musical instrument. This was called the denis d'Or and was played by the hand and the feet, like an organ. It was invented in 1753, and this instrument had properties that allowed it to imitate the sound of other string instruments.

 

Initially, Prokop only studied science to be able to find the truth. But when he realized that he could utilize his findings, he made the most productive use of his scholarly knowledge. In 1765, Prokop died on the 21st of December in Prendice, aged 67.

 

Back to the Asylum.

Whatever the rumors, most seem to believe the clinic offered more humane treatments for the mentally ill than other doctors in the general population at the time and protected them from possibly being abused by relatives.

 

The psychiatric clinic remained in use until 1869, when it was closed down. Vienna's «Fool's Tower» was soon considered a building worthy of condemnation. Some saw the treatment of prisoners and the mentally ill at that time as unworthy. Some, therefore, quickly raised the issue of conditions in mental hospitals and prisons, made systematic inventories, and traveled abroad to gather knowledge and experience. Some thought this building and some of the other early ones that needed to be shut down were due more to architecture than anything. We've discussed several other Asylums on the show, and we've gone over their architecture and why they were designed in the specific way they were, so we won't go into that here, but feel free to go back and listen to those other episodes! 

 

So, there's not an exceptional amount of info on this place, but we thought it was incredible, primarily because of what it is now! We know some of you depraved fuckers will like this and maybe plan a trip! 

The psych facility closed in 1866 but reopened as a new location for the Anatomical-Pathological Museum in the 1970s. While the circular building (known by locals as "the poundcake") houses only a tiny percent of the museum's total collection, it contains some fascinating pieces. Syphilitic skulls that resemble Swiss cheese, jars of disfigured fetuses, and graphic wax displays of untreated STDs all peer out at you from the old cells. It also contains a recreated wonder cabinet, complete with a narwhal tusk and taxidermied monkeys. In total, 70,000 items make up the collection. Since January 2012, the collection has been administered as a branch of the Natural History Museum of Vienna.

 

But only a relatively small part of the collection in the museum's possession is regularly displayed to the general public. Most specimens are part of the "study collection" (Studiensammlung) for medical professionals and medical training only. However, some features are occasionally shown to visitors on guided tours.

 

Some people don't take kindly to the more extreme examples of shocking deformities, so some of these specimens can only be seen by special arrangement. So that's where we're all going!!! Whoooo! 

 

These restrictions are also in force to prevent the Narrenturm from becoming some kind of overtly voyeuristic attraction (this applies in particular to a room with various conjoined twins in large formaldehyde-filled jars – a type of floating twin children's cemetery). They even have a "devil," believe it or not … In actual fact, it's a preserved stillborn baby that back then (1827) was taken to look like the Devil. You need a bit of imagination to see it that way (it doesn't have horns, hooves, or a forked tail), but it's undoubtedly "shocking" to look at. Rather than having been cursed, possessed, or any other such superstitious stuff, the poor thing was simply anencephalic – i.e., a baby deformed so that most of the forebrain, upper skull, and scalp are missing. This is an extreme form of a neural tube defect termed anencephaly, literally meaning 'no brain'). The head ends in big bulging eyes at the top of the front of the head while the flat rear of the head is open, exposing the remnants of brain tissue. The disorder is attributed to a lack of folic acid. Still, it may also result from high mercury exposure, lead, or other toxic heavy metals like Sabbath, Metallica, Slayer, and cannibal corpse. Yes, it's the midnight train…and we felt we had to add that during the tour. Apparently, they go into the details of the history of tuberculosis treatment. So, there's that. Also on display are various bone diseases, tumors, birth defects (including a full-size Cyclops baby specimen floating in formaldehyde), and countless models of skin diseases (mainly of the 'moulage' technique, i.e., taken directly from the sufferer's body and then painted more or less realistically), so that's gross. 

 

There is a taxidermy specimen of a "stuffed" child, the whole body! The unfortunate patient had suffered from a severe form of congenital ichthyosis, a skin condition affecting the entire body's surface skin. Next is the skeleton of a woman who had suffered from severe rickets, resulting in such twisted bones and a bent, shortened back that she was only about 20 inches "tall." Finally, there are the leg bones of a man who had been seven feet something tall at the other extreme end – a giant. His shinbone is longer than the rickets woman's entire body. 

 

So on top of all of the asylum stuff, now there's all this craziness in there! 

 

Oh, also there are rumors of it being haunted too, cus…you know, why not!

 

While we couldn't find much in people talking about any haunted experiences, the Asylum and museum had made many lists of the most creepy haunted Asylums in the world. So we assume there's something there! 

 

Ok, that was Narranturm Asylum. Next, we'll head over to revisit our friends in Australia! We love you crazy fuckers down under! First, we're gonna check out the Beechworth asylum!

 

In the rolling hills of Beechworth, near Victoria, Australia, you'll find a dilapidated old building known as the Mayday Lunatic Asylum, once one of the largest asylums in all of Australia. When the Asylum closed its doors for good in 1995, numerous patients died during its 128-year reign.

 

Bone-chilling sightings, horrid smells of rotting flesh, and a history of inducing nightmares in even the most seasoned spook lovers – the Beechworth Lunatic Asylum has the fearsome reputation of one of the most haunted sites in Australia. Very few of its patients walked out of the institution alive from 1867 – to 1995. 

 

Built on a hill in Beechworth, Victoria, the site was chosen because of the belief the town's altitude would cleanse the patients of their illnesses, with the winds carrying away their mental afflictions. Seems reasonable…yea…

 

The hospital housed 1200 patients, 600 men, and 600 women, at its peak. As medication wasn't introduced until the 1950s, the center's doctors opted to restrain patients with straight jackets and shackles, and in some cases, they received electroshock treatment. Oh, yea…and of course… there were the lobotomies!!! All the lobotomies!! All it took was a pair of signatures to land you in Beechworth–the request of a friend or relative and that of a medical doctor. So if a husband wanted to get rid of his wife, all he had to do was get a doctor to agree she was unstable. Once there, the new patient would be interviewed by the ward physician. Beechworth was one of many mental institutions operating in Australia at the time, alongside Ardale Mental Hospital and the Sunbury Lunatic Asylum. Some physician interviews have survived to the present day. Unfortunately, they speak of troubled patients, brutal treatment, and little hope of escape. 

 

The patients' stories were taken down verbatim by a ward doctor, described by one patient as Dr. O'Brien, who made notes over time about their progress and prospects for work and recovery. 

 

One interview goes as follows:

 

Daniel Dooley, 59

 

23/8/1892

 

"I was brought by a policeman because I was silly, and I was in the habit of saying my prayers. I stayed a night out looking for a quartz reef. I value it at 100 pounds. I've been at Dunolly on an unemployment pass. I brought a tent. I saw a lot of larrikins there, and they burned my tent. When I came back I could not find the place. I met five men dressed like navvies (Irish workers). I spoke to them and they did not answer. I met more and I spoke and they said they were ghosts. I wanted to go into a house, but they said it was haunted. I then saw the Devil — like a steam engine. I then saw the BVM (Blessed Virgin Mary) and I spoke to her and shook hands with her. She took a tree up to make shelter for me and sent J. C. (Jesus Christ) to obtain another for me. She lifted up the tree as easy as I can this chair. And there was music and ejaculations of the Hail Mary. I asked for money and she had a bird in her hand and placed it on a perch, and one of the men had a purse with him but that money I've not got yet. I told a priest and he told me to be off."

 

There were 4 other accounts. Unfortunately, none of these 5 men that have these statements survived their time in the Asylum. 

 

Nathaniel Buchanan, a researcher for Aradale Ghost Tours, which covers the Ararat institution and the disused Mayday Hills Lunatic Asylum at Beechworth, said treatment in the mid to late 1800s was well behind modern practices.

 

"Treatment was mostly restraint," he said.

 

"There were none of the modern medicines, that mostly came in the 1950s."

 

"Restraint would start with a straight jacket, if that wasn't suitable the 'lunatic' could be placed in an isolation box until they settled down."

 

"There was no distinction between epilepsy and schizophrenia. In that time, there were four classifications for lunacy — mania, melancholia, dementia and paranoia."

 

"There number of conditions has increased from four to about 2000 since then."

 

"Many of the women in the institutions in the late 1800s were likely to have been suffering from post-natal depression, but that was just classified as melancholia," he said.

 

"Also it took just two signatures for somebody to be taken in. If a man wanted his wife gone, and his friends knew about it, he could get them to say his wife was mad, and she'd be taken.

 

"At one stage it also took two signatures to be discharged, but that was later increased to eight signatures, meaning it was a lot harder to get out."

 

Inmates were given work in an 1800s movement towards "moral treatment" — teaching patients proper morals by giving them trades and responsibilities.

 

Women were tasked with sewing and washing while men made shoes and tended farms.

 

One particularly cruel feature of Beechworth was what is known as "Ha-Ha walls." The key feature of a Ha-Ha wall was a trench built on the interior of the Asylum's walls. This made the wall appear low enough that inmates weren't imprisoned from the outside while ensuring that none of them could actually escape. 

 

Given the harsh treatment of the patients at Beechwood, it's no wonder that this Asylum is considered another of the most haunted in the world. 

 

Speaking to ABC News in 2008, Adam Win-Jenkins, who ran ghost tours of the site, said there are stories of mass shock treatments in which almost the entire patient population was shocked in one session.

 

The rooms where these treatments took place are where the paranormal activity seems to occur.

 

In 2015, a man named Gaurav Tiwari, the founder of the Indian Paranormal Society who has since passed away, saw a little girl kneeling in the darkness of the infamous wing.

 

Adelaide ghost hunter Allen Tiller also had an experience in a wing called the "bullpen," which housed aggressive young people aged between 18 and 25.

 

He heard a door slamming and "footsteps up the hallway," he told Nova100 in 2015.

 

But even before the center closed, it was plagued by ghost stories. Some buildings have since been demolished following an electrical fire.

 

In 1951, a fire swept through the male wing causing considerable damage. An article from The Herald Sun that year read:

 

"400 male patients, many naked, were rescued from Beechworth asylum today, minutes before a fire caused the blazing top storey of the mental hospital to collapse... 11 patients escaped into the surrounding mountainous country. Seven were later recaptured, but four — described as not dangerous — are still at large."

 

Bristol, one of the wards knocked down, was where a deceased male doctor could commonly be spotted roaming the halls.

 

The other common sighting is Matron Sharpe, who was often seen by the nurses. They report seeing the Matron sitting with patients facing electroshock treatment. Those who witnessed the figure say the room would turn icy cold, but her presence seemed to comfort the patients.

 

Its rooms each tell an eerie tale, too. One of which is the story of Jim Kelly - Ned Kelly's uncle.

 

After burning down his sister-in-law's house while a young Ned was inside (but escaped unscathed), Jim was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor by Sir Redman Barry - who later sentenced his nephew Ned Kelly to death.

 

As part of his sentence, Jim was sent to the institution to help build the hospital. However, after serving his time, his mind "was broken," so he spent the rest of his days as a patient at the hospital until he died in 1903.

 

Jim's body was laid to rest in an unmarked grave in the Beechworth cemetery, as were the rest of the Asylum's deceased patients.

 

Not until the 1980s did patients actually receive their own graves and headstone. Before this, they were also buried in the opposite direction to everyone else. Setting them apart from the rest of society as the Asylum had done while living.

 

Another story from the haunted grounds involves a man who disappeared. Despite desperate efforts by staff to find him, several weeks after he disappeared, a resident dog called Max was found chewing a leg near the grounds' entry.

 

This led to finding the man's body up a tree, presumably where he had attempted to escape. But, unfortunately, his body had been there so long that his leg had fallen off into Max's possession. This was also the cause of the stench that lingered on the hospital grounds.

 

Workmen at the hospital have reported hearing the sound of children laughing and playing; when they investigated the sound, they could not trace its source. Several years ago, a parent noticed their 10-year-old son talking to himself while on a ghost tour. When asked who he was talking to, the boy said he was talking to another boy called James, who lived there.

 

One patient, a big chain-smoking woman, was thrown out of a window to her death by another patient who wanted her cigarettes. Because the woman was Jewish, her body was not allowed to be moved until a Rabbi had seen it, so her body was left lying out the front of the hospital dead for 2 days while the Rabbi made the trip up from Melbourne. Her ghost has been seen on the spot where she fell by several witnesses over the last decade.

 

The gardens of Beechworth have long been subdivided into allotments; those who live nearby have seen the ghost of a man wearing a green woolen jacket. The spirit is thought to be a gardener named Arthur, who worked the gardens for many years earning ten shillings a week. He wore his green jacket in winter and summer, and no one could persuade him to remove it. After Arthur died, it was discovered why; Arthur had been secretly storing his wages in the seam of his jacket. When the nurses opened it, they found 140 pounds hidden inside, over four years of his wages. 

 

Well…we know you love this stuff, so we'll throw in another quick one! Gonjiam Psychiatric Hospital in South Korea! In 1982 the Gonjiam Psychiatric Hospital was established outside Gyeonggi-do, South Korea, by a Mr. Hong. The original building was just over 11,000m² and spread across three floors. Sometime during the early 1990s, two additional buildings were added, which increased the size by another 500m². In July 1996, the hospital closed a short time later and was left abandoned and unmaintained for over two decades.

 

Nefarious rumors began to spread about the hospital's closure, and ghost hunters and urban explorers started flocking to the spooky site in droves. As a result, Gonjiam Psychiatric Hospital quickly gained a reputation as one of the top three haunted buildings in South Korea. But until an article was published by CNN in 2012 featuring Gonjiam as one of the world's most terrifying locations, the hospital mainly had maintained its ghostly reputation domestically.

 

Sources discussing the history of Gonjiam and the hospital's fate aren't widespread on the English side of the internet, so the majority of research for this article was done using Korean sources. So, however, specific dates and versions of stories and events vary from reference to authority, so it's worth taking some information with a grain of salt. So enjoy Gonjiam Psychiatric Hospital for the creepy legacy it left behind, but don't consider it a perfect reflection of the history of psychiatric hospitals in South Korea.

 

So what's all the fuss about? What makes this particular abandoned hospital so terrifying?

 

It helps that the entire building looks like a living, breathing 'haunted insane asylum' trope:

• Collapsed ceilings.

• Long echoing corridors.

• Doors that shut on their own.

• Patient rooms are littered with old mattresses and forgotten personal items.

 

The main building is a concrete block with a zigzagging exterior staircase and windowless black holes peering into the eerie interior from the outside. The building just looks haunted. And what do creepy abandoned buildings need? A ghost story, of course. And it didn't take long for one to begin making the rounds.

 

According to legend, many patients at Gonjiam died mysteriously, forcing the hospital to shut down permanently. Some believe the murders were committed by the hospital owner, who was accused of keeping the patients' hostage. However, it's said that the owner fled to America after the victims' families and government authorities began investigating the unexplained deaths.

 

Another story says Gonjiam's doctors and director were driven to madness while working alongside the mentally ill patients, which led the director to end his own life. Finally, some believe his suicide was caused by a ghost who possessed his body and drove him to insanity.

 

And the many other ghosts that haunt Gonjiam's abandoned halls are the victims of the psychotic doctors and murderous owner. So while the hospital is closed for the living, the former patients of Gonjiam are trapped forever in the place where they met their gruesome end.

 

The real reason for the hospital's closure is much less exciting…

The hospital director didn't commit suicide, nor was Gonjiam closed due to the mistreatment or murder of patients. Business at Gonjiam Psychiatric Hospital actually came to an end because of finances, not mad doctors. With the implementation of the Water Source Protection Act in South Korea, a new sewage treatment facility became a sudden legal requirement for the hospital. This caused a disagreement between the owner and the director over whether or not it was worth the financial strain to install a new treatment facility. While talks were ongoing in 1997, the elderly owner passed away, and a new treatment facility was never installed, so the hospital remained closed. When the former owner's son took over the property, he neglected to maintain it, and the hospital fell into disrepair.

 

As for the former hospital's director, he was alive and well at the closing of Gonjiam and allegedly opened another psychiatric hospital in the province of Gangwon-do, east of Seoul.

 

Essentially, nothing about the legend surrounding Gonjiam Psychiatric Hospital is actually true. And a lot of the rumors seem to come from a South Korean television show called 이영돈 PD 논리로 풀다 (ENG: Solve with the logic of PD Lee Young-don), which had an episode featuring the reported hauntings at Gonjiam.

 

The Asylum is no longer standing, but it isn't hard to see why stories ran wild about this place. Just look at pictures of it before it was demolished. And despite the legends not being true, the reports of hauntings still existed until the day the place was destroyed. Many people did die there, so there is definitely that possibility. If you look around, you can find chilling stories about sneaking in and experiencing everything from strange sounds, screaming, and even apparitions and shadows moving about. 

 

We wanted to throw this one in because it looks creepy, and it's on a place we've not covered anything in yet.. plus the urban legends surrounding the site are pretty awesome in their own right!

 

Since we ended in South Korea, we're gonna do the best Korean horror movies as per rotten tomatoes!

https://editorial.rottentomatoes.com/guide/best-korean-horror-movies/

Jack the Ripper Part 2. Like Seriously. Who Was This guy?

Ep.151

Pt.2

Ripper suspects

 

This week in part 2…. Suspects in the jack the ripper case… there's a ton…like pretty much everyone alive at the time of the murders…and maybe some that weren't…who knows. So here we frigging go! 

 

Montague John Druitt:

 

Although there may not be any concrete, scientific evidence against him, the Jack, The Ripper murders in London's East End ended after Druitt's suicide convinced one London detective (Melville Leslie Macnaghten) that Druitt was, in fact, Jack The Ripper himself. 

 

Montague John Druitt, son of prominent local surgeon William Druitt, was a Dorset-born barrister. He also worked as an assistant schoolmaster in Blackheath, London, to supplement his income. Outside of work, his primary interest was cricket.

 

He played alongside the likes of Francis Lacey, the first man knighted for services to cricket. His numerous accolades in the game include dismissing John Shuter for a duck. The England batsman was playing for Bexley Cricket Club at the time.

 

On the recommendation of Charles Seymour and noted fielder Vernon Royle, Druitt was elected to the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) on May 26th, 1884. One of the minor matches for MCC was with England bowler William Attewell against Harrow School on June 10th, 1886. The MCC won by 57 runs.

 

Montague John Druitt's decomposed body was found floating in the Thames near Chiswick on December 31st, 1888. He had a return train ticket to Hammersmith dated December 1st, a silver watch, a cheque for £50 and £16 in gold (equivalent to £5,600 and £1,800 today).

 

He is believed to have committed suicide, a line of thought substantiated by the fact there were stones in his pockets. Possibly to keep his body submerged in the river.

 

The cause of his suicide is said to be his dismissal from his post at the Blackheath boys' school. The reason for his release is unclear. However, one newspaper, quoting his brother William's inquest testimony, reported being dismissed because he "had got into serious trouble." Although, it did not specify any further.

 

Several authors have suggested that Druitt may have been dismissed because he was a homosexual or a pederast. Another speculation is that the money found on his body would be used for payment to a blackmailer, or it could have simply been a final payment from the school.

 

Another possibility involving his dismissal and eventual death is an underlying hereditary psychiatric illness. His mother had already attempted suicide once by taking an overdose of laudanum. She died in an asylum in Chiswick in 1890. In addition, both his Grandmother and eldest sister committed suicide, while his aunt also attempted suicide.

 

A note written by Druitt and addressed to his brother William was found in Druitt's room in Blackheath. It read,

 

             "Since Friday I felt that I was going to be like mother, and the best thing for me was to die."

 

The last of the canonical five murders had taken place shortly before Druitt's suicide. Following his death, there were no more ripper murders.

 

In 1891, a member of parliament from West Dorchester, England, began saying that the Ripper was "the son of a surgeon" who had committed suicide on the night of the last murder.

 

Assistant Chief Constable Sir Melville Macnaghten named Druitt as a suspect in the case.

 

He did so in a private hand-written memorandum on February 23rd, 1894. Macnaghten highlighted the coincidence between Druitt's disappearance and death shortly after the last of the five murders.

 

He also claimed to have unspecified "private information." One that left "little doubt" that Druitt's own family believed him to have been the murderer.

 

The memorandum read:

 

 "I have always held strong opinions regarding him, and the more I think the matter over, the stronger do these opinions become. The truth, however, will never be known, and did indeed, at one time lie at the bottom of the Thames, if my conjections be correct!"

 

Macnaghten was convinced that Montague John Druitt was the serial killer they had long been looking for. However, he incorrectly described the 31-year old barrister as a 41-year-old doctor and cited allegations that he "was sexually insane" without specifying the source or details of the allegations.

 

Macnaghten did not join the force until 1889, after the murder of Kelly and the death of Druitt. He was also not involved in the investigation directly and is likely to have been misinformed.

 

There is also the case of Druitt playing Cricket games far away from London during many of the murders.

 

On September 1st, the day after the murder of Nichols, Druitt was in Dorset playing cricket. On the day of Chapman's murder, he played cricket in Blackheath. The day after the murders of Stride and Eddowes, he was in the West Country defending a client in a court case.

 

Some writers such as Andrew Spallek and Tom Cullen have argued that Druitt had the time and opportunity to travel by train between London and his cricket and legal engagements. He could have even used his city chambers as a base from which to commit the murders. However, several others have dismissed the claim as "improbable."

 

For instance, Druitt took 3 wickets in the match against the Christopherson brothers at Blackheath on September 8th, the day of the Chapman murder. He was on the field at 11.30 AM for the game and performed out of his skin. An event unlikely if he were walking the streets of London committing a murder at 5:30 AM.

 

Most experts now believe that the killer was local to Whitechapel. On the other hand, Druitt lived miles away on the other side of the Thames in Kent. Even Inspector Frederick Abberline appeared to dismiss Druitt as a serious suspect because the only evidence against him was the coincidental timing of his suicide shortly after the last canonical murder.

Aaron Kosminski:

 

Aaron Kosminski was not a stable man. In 1891, he was sent to Colney Hatch Asylum. Psychiatric reports made during Kosminski's time there state that Kosminski heard auditory hallucinations that directed him to do things. Although some claim that Kosminski wasn't violent, there is a record of him threatening his own sister with a knife. 

 

The "canonical five" murders which wrapped up the sum of the Ripper's official kills, stopped soon after Kosminski was put into an asylum. Present-day doctors think Kosminski might have been a paranoid schizophrenic, but it sure is suspicious that his institutionalization fits the timeline of Jack the Ripper. 

 

Kosminski threatened his sister with a knife. Jack the Ripper is infamous for the violent way he murdered his female victims. This serial killer did things like slashing throats, removing organs, and severely disfiguring faces. The crimes he committed were grisly and suggested a severe hatred of women. 

 

Kosminski definitely fits the description of hating women. He was terrible at socializing with women, and according to Chief Constable Melville Macnaghten, he was known for his profound resentment of women. 

 

Macnaghten wrote, "This man became insane due to indulgence in solitary vices for many years. He had a great hatred of women, especially of the prostitute class, & had strong homicidal tendencies." 

 

Hating prostitutes and suspected as being capable of murder? Kosminski is looking better and better as the chief Jack the Ripper suspect. 

 

On the night of one of the murders, a woman named Elizabeth Long said she heard the man's voice who led Jack the Ripper victim, Annie Chapman, to her death. Long said she listened to the man ask Annie, "Will you?" as they were discussing their sex work arrangement. Long described the man's voice as having an accent. 

 

Kosminski, as a Polish Jew, had an accent. A clue left on a Goulston Street wall in London suggested that Jack the Ripper had a native language other than English as well. The person who wrote the message spelled the word "Juwes" instead of "Jews." The entire statement read, "The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing." It was never understood what was actually meant by it. 

 

What's more, Macnaghten wrote this about a suspect spotted fleeing on the night of Catherine Eddowes' murder: "This man in appearance strongly resembled the individual seen by the City P.C. near Mitre Square." 

 

Care to guess who "the individual seen by the City P.C." Macnaughten referred to was? That's right. He was talking about Aaron Kosminski! Although reports of Jack the Ripper's appearance, in general, were inconsistent, Kosminski fit the appearance of someone spotted at one of the crime scenes. Macnaghten's report has been discredited, though, so take this information as you will. 

 

In 2007, a man named Russel Edwards wanted to confirm the identity of Jack the Ripper so severely that he acquired the shawl of Jack the Ripper victim Catherine Eddowes. He had the shawl's DNA tested and confirmed that the genetic material on the shawl traced back to one of Kosminski's living relatives. 

 

Edwards had written a book entitled, Naming Jack the Ripper, thus having something to gain, so people didn't believe this analysis. That is until the DNA was studied by an unrelated peer-reviewed science journal. In 2019, The Journal of Forensic Sciences confirmed that the DNA did indeed match Aaron Kosminski. The results were apparently sketchy and not tested again until 2019 by Liverpool John Moores University and the University of Leeds. The DNA presented matched the descendants of Kosminski and Eddowes. Although, the shawl was never documented in police custody.

 

Francis Craig: 

 

Born in 1837 in Acton, west London, Francis Spurzheim Craig was the son of a well-known Victorian social reformer.

 

His father, ET Craig, was a writer and advocate of phrenology – interpreting personality types by feeling the shape of the head – a so-called "science" that was already falling out of fashion by the Ripper murders.

 

However, the family moved into influential west London circles, counting William Morris, the socialist and founder of the Arts and Crafts movement, among their friends.

 

Craig, like his father, was a journalist but not a successful one. Friends described him as sensitive yet stubborn.

 

After a period in the United States from 1864 to 1866, Craig spent time in local newspapers but in the 1871 Census listed himself as a person of "No occupation."

 

By 1875 he had been appointed editor of the Bucks Advertiser and Aylesbury News.

 

Here, Craig's journalism career suffered an almost terminal blow when he was caught cribbing reports from The Daily Telegraph and was brutally exposed as a plagiarist by a rival publication.

 

It is not known how he met Elizabeth Weston Davies – it may have been at William Morris' social gatherings – but they married on Christmas Eve 1884 in Hammersmith.

 

Just a few months later – on May 19th, 1885 – she was seen entering a private hotel near their marital home in Argyll Square, King's Cross, with a "young man … at 10 o'clock at night".

 

The book says it was a crushing blow for Craig, who had been unaware of his wife's involvement in prostitution.

 

She left and went into hiding in the East End under the pseudonym Mary Jane Kelly.

 

In The Real Mary Kelly, author Wynne Weston-Davies suggests Craig suffered from a mental illness, namely schizo-typal personality disorder.

 

Craig followed her to Whitechapel, taking lodgings at 306 Mile End Road.

 

He tried to locate the only woman he had ever loved, and as time passed, his love for her turned to hatred.

 

Then, he plotted to murder her, disguising his involvement by killing a series of prostitutes beforehand, the book suggests.

 

A few months after the murder of Elizabeth/Mary Jane, Craig left the East End and returned to west London as editor of the Indicator and West London News, a job he held until 1896.

 

In 1903, while living in lodgings at Carthew Road, Hammersmith, Craig cut his throat with a razor, leaving his landlady a note which read: "I have suffered a deal of pain and agony."

 

He did not die until four days later, Sunday, March 8th, 1903, and in an inquest, the coroner recorded a verdict of "Suicide whilst of unsound mind and when irresponsible for his actions."

 

Dr. Weston-Davies plans to exhume Elizabeth/Mary Jane's body to carry out DNA analysis, which he believes will show the true identity of the Ripper's final victim and, therefore, prove Craig's motive for the murders.

 

Carl Feigenbaum:

 

Carl Feigenbaum was most certainly a convicted murderer.

 

Indeed, he was convicted of and executed for the murder of Mrs. Juliana Hoffman, a 56-year-old widow who lived in two rooms above a shop at 544 East Sixth Street, New York, with her 16-year-old son, Michael.

 

Feigenbaum told the Hoffman's that he had lost his job as a gardener and therefore had no money. However, he assured them that he had been promised a job as a florist and that, once he was paid, on Saturday, September 1st, 1894, he would be able to pay them the rent that he owed. The Hoffmans took him at his word, a trust that would prove fatal for Mrs. Hoffman.

 

As a consequence of their having a lodger, who was given the rear of the two rooms, mother and son shared the front room, Juliana sleeping in the bed, and Michael occupying a couch at the foot of her bed.

 

Shortly after midnight, in the early hours of September 1st, 1894, Michael was woken by a scream, and, looking across to his mother's bed, he saw their lodger leaning over her, brandishing a knife. Michael lunged at Feigenbaum, who turned around and came at him with the knife.

 

Realizing he would be no match against an armed man, Michael escaped out of a window and began screaming for help.

 

Looking through the window, Michael watched in horror as Feigenbaum stabbed his mother in the neck and then cut her throat, severing the jugular. Juliana made one final attempt to defend herself and advanced toward her attacker, but she collapsed and fell to the floor.

 

Feigenbaum then returned to his room. H escaped out of the window, climbed down into the yard, and washed his hands at the pump. He then made his way out into an alleyway that led to the street.

 

So, how did his name become linked to the Whitechapel murders of 1888?

 

In a nutshell, he reputedly confessed to having been Jack the Ripper shortly before his execution.

 

It is noticeable that the British press didn't pay much attention to the trial of Carl Feigenbaum - until, following his execution, one of his lawyers made an eleventh-hour confession public.

 

Suddenly, articles about his confession began appearing in British newspapers, one of which was the following report, which appeared in Reynolds's Newspaper on Sunday, 3rd, May 1896:-

 

             "An impression, based on an eleventh-hour confession and other evidence, prevails that Carl Feigenbaum, who was executed at Sing Sing on Monday, the real murderer of the New York outcast, nick-named Shakespeare, is possibly Jack the Ripper, of Whitechapel notoriety.

 

The proofs, however, are far from positive."

 

A week later, on Sunday, May 10th, 1896, Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper published a more detailed account of the confession, which had been made to his lawyer, William Stamford Lawton:-

 

"THE AMERICAN JACK THE RIPPER

Carl Feigenbaum, who was executed in the electric chair at Sing Sing last week, is reported to have left a remarkable confession with his lawyer.

 

The account of the lawyer reads:-

 

"I have a statement to make, which may throw some light on the murder for which the man I represented was executed. Now that Feigenbaum is dead and nothing more can be done for him in this world, I want to say as his counsel that I am absolutely sure of his guilt in this case, and I feel morally certain that he is the man who committed many, if not all, of the Whitechapel murders.

 

Here are my reasons, and on this statement, I pledge my honour.

 

When Feigenbaum was in the Tombs awaiting trial, I saw him several times.

 

The evidence in his case seemed so clear that I cast about for a theory of insanity. Certain actions denoted a decided mental weakness somewhere.

 

When I asked him point blank, "Did you kill Mrs. Hoffman?", he made this reply:- "I have for years suffered from a singular-disease, which induces an all absorbing passion; this passion manifests itself in a desire to kill and mutilate the woman who falls in my way.

 

At such times I am unable to control myself."

 

On my next visit to the Tombs I asked him whether he had not been in London at various times during the whole period covered by the Whitechapel murders?

 

"Yes, I was," he answered.

 

I asked him whether he could not explain some of these cases: on the theory which he had suggested to me, and he simply looked at me in reply."

 

The statement, which is a long one, proves conclusively that Feigenbaum was more or less insane, but the evidence of his identity with the notorious Whitechapel criminal is not satisfactory."

 

Hmmm... Of course, many disagree with this and do not believe the confession.

 

In truth, there is no compelling evidence to suggest that Lawton may have been lying about what his client had told him, and it might just have been that Feigenbaum may have thought that, in confessing to the Whitechapel murders, he would buy him a little extra time.

 

Walter Sickert: The English Painter

 

The name of Walter Sickert has been linked to the Jack the Ripper murders by several authors. However, his role in the killings has been said to have varied enormously over the years.

 

According to some authors, he was an accomplice in the Whitechapel Murders, while others depicted him as knowing who was responsible for the crimes and duly informing them.

 

But, according to the crime novelist Patricia Cornwell in her 2002 book "Portrait of a Killer - Jack the Ripper Case Closed," Sickert was, in fact, the man who carried out the crimes that became known as the Jack the Ripper Murders.

 

According to Cornwell's theory, Walter Sickert had been made impotent by a series of painful childhood operations for a fistula of the penis.

 

This impotence had scarred him emotionally and had left him with a pathological hatred of women, which, in time, led him to carry out the series of murders in the East End of London.

 

Doubts were raised about her theory when it was pointed out that St Mark's Hospital, where the operations on the young Sickert were supposedly performed, specialized in rectal and not genital fistulas.

 

Butts, not nuts.

 

So what evidence is there to suggest that Sickert possessed a pathological hatred of women?

 

Again, not shit, really. In "Portrait of a killer," Cornwell cites a series of Sickert's paintings inspired by the murder in 1908 of a Camden Town prostitute by Emily Dimmock. According to Patricia Cornwall's hypothesis, this series of pictures bears a striking resemblance to the post-mortem photographs of the victims of Jack the Ripper.

 

Now there is little doubt that Sickert was fascinated by murder and finding different ways to depict the menace of the crime and the criminal.

 

But, to cite this as evidence that he was actually a murderer - and, specifically, the murderer who carried out the Jack the Ripper killings - is hardly definitive proof.

 

As you passengers more than likely know, when looking at a particular Jack the Ripper suspect or any murder suspect, you need to be able to link your suspect with the crime.

 

You need to, for example, be able to place them at the scene of the crime, duh.

 

Here again, the case against Sickert unravels slightly since evidence suggests that he may not even have been in England when the murders were committed.

 

Many letters from several family members refer to him vacationing in France for a period corresponding to most of the Ripper murders.

 

Although it's been suggested that he might have traveled to London to commit the murders and then returned to France, no evidence has been produced to indicate that he did so.

 

Cornwall also contends that Sickert was responsible for writing most of the Jack the Ripper correspondence and frequently uses statements made in those letters to strengthen her case against him.

 

Authorities on the case and the police at the time, nearly all, share the opinion that none of the letters - not even the Dear Boss missive that gave him his name - was the work of the killer.

 

In addition, there is the problem that the style of the letters varies so significantly in grammatical structure, spelling, and hand-writing that it is almost impossible for a single author to have created all of them.

 

In her quest to prove Sickert's guilt, Cornwall also funded DNA tests on numerous stamps and envelopes, which she believed that Sickert had licked and compared the DNA to that found on the Ripper letters. Interestingly, a possible match was found with the stamp on the Dr. Openshaw letter.

 

Critics, however, have pointed out that the DNA comparisons focused on mitochondrial DNA, which could be shared by anything from between 1% and 10% of the population, so it was hardly unique to Sickert.

 

The last characters are generally considered the top suspects in the car; however that hasn't stopped many others from being implicated. Including known serial killers and even royalty.

 

H.H. Holmes:

 

He is known as "America's First Serial Killer," but some believe America was not his only hunting ground. 

 

Jeff Mudgett, a lawyer and former Commander in the U.S. Naval Reserve, claims that his great-great-grandfather, H.H. Holmes, was DUN DUN, Jack the Ripper. Mudgett bases his assertions on the writings in two diaries he inherited from Holmes, which detail Holmes's participation in the murder and mutilation of numerous prostitutes in London. Mudgett also claims that the man who died in the public hanging on May 7th, 1896, was not Holmes, but rather a man that Holmes tricked into going to the gallows in his place.

 

Travel documentation and witness accounts also lend themselves to the theory that Jack the Ripper and Holmes are the same.

The biggest issue with Holmes and the Ripper being the same psychopathic man is that one was in Chicago and the other in London when international travel was not as easy as it is now. Back then, traveling between the U.K. and the U.S. was by boat, which could take about a month. However, with the Ripper killings ending in early 1889 and the first Holmes killing at the end of 1889, the timeline is entirely possible.

 

It is recorded that a passenger by the name of H. Holmes traveled from the U.K. to the U.S. at that time. Holmes is a pretty popular last name, and H.H. Holmes' legal name was actually Herman Webster Mudgett, but it is possible.

 

In addition, based on accounts and descriptions of Jack the Ripper, multiple sketch artists were able to come up with a drawing of Jack the Ripper, which looked eerily similar to H.H. Holmes. However, another account describes Jack the Ripper as having "brown eyes and brown hair," which could really be anyone.

 

Experts deny that H.H. Holmes and Jack the Ripper are the same person because they had different motives.

While Jack the Ripper typically went after poor women who were sex workers, H.H. Holmes was naturally after money. He was adept at moving accounts and signing life insurance over to his many aliases. In addition, he'd try to find people disconnected from family or else murder entire families and siblings to take inheritances.

 

Of the deniers to the theory, Jeff Mudgett had this to say:

 

"There are too many coincidences for this to be another bogus theory," 

 

 "I know that the evidence is out there to prove my theory and I'm not going to give up until I find it."

 

Except for those diaries he claims to have. He refuses to show anyone, even going as far as to not print pictures of them in his book. His excuse for this is that it's "technically evidence" and could be confiscated by law enforcement because there is no statute of limitations on murder.

 

Prince Albert Victor: The guy with the dick jewelry name.

 

Everyone loves a conspiracy theory, and there have been few better than the theory of Prince Albert Victor impregnating a "shop girl" named Annie Crook. Obviously, the royal family had Queen Victoria's physician Dr. Gull brutalize her at a mental institution until she forgot everything. She then left the illegitimate child with prostitute Mary Kelly, who blabbed about the relationship to her friends (also prostitutes). With this scandalous knowledge, they were quickly and quietly disposed of – in a series of killings so grisly and high profile that we're still talking about them over a century later. There is also talk of him contracting syphilis from his many days of frolicking in East End brothels, causing him to become "insane" and, naturally, a serial killer. Unfortunately, the story is spoiled by his being out of London during the murders. Oh, and the total lack of evidence for any of this.

 

Lewis Carroll: Ya know, the Alice in Wonderland author.

 

Even though more than 500 people have been accused as Ripper suspects at one time or another, the most outlandish must be Richard Wallace's theory in his 1996 book, "Jack the Ripper, Light-Hearted Friend." Wallace took passages from Carroll's children's books and derived garbage anagrams from them, changing and leaving out letters as they suited his bizarre purposes. Watch the documentary "Sons of Sam for more idiocy like this." People always seem to find a way to contort information to fit their agendas. But I digress.

From The Nursery Alice, he took "So she wandered away, through the wood, carrying the ugly little thing with her. And a great job it was to keep hold of it, it wriggled about so. But at last she found out that the proper way was to keep tight hold of its left foot and its right ear" and turned it into "She wriggled about so! But at last Dodgson and Bayne found a way to keep hold of the fat little whore. I got a tight hold of her and slit her throat, left ear to right. It was tough, wet, disgusting, too. So weary of it, they threw up – Jack the Ripper". 

 

If that's proof, I don't know what isn't.

 

Dr. Thomas Neill Cream:

 

This doctor was hanged for an unrelated murder at Newgate Prison. His executioner, James Billington, swears Cream's last words were "I am Jack the …," Which is weird if your name is Thomas. It was taken by many as a confession to being Jack the Ripper, of course, but being cut off by his execution meant no one managed to quiz him on it. He was in prison at the time of the murders, and the notion that he was out killing prostitutes while a "lookalike" served his prison sentence for him is, to say the least, unlikely.

 

Mary' Jill the Ripper' Pearcey:

 

The only female suspect at the time, Mary Pearcey, was convicted of murdering her lover's wife, and some suspect her of being behind the Whitechapel killings as well – though the evidence is pretty much nonexistent. Sherlock creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle speculated that a woman could have carried around blood-stained clothing without suspicion if she had pretended to be a midwife. DNA results found by an Australian scientist in 2006 suggested the Ripper "may have been a woman" – but only because they were inconclusive.

 

Michael Ostrog:

 

Much of Michael Ostrog's life is wreathed in shadow; clearly, this was a man who liked to keep his secrets close to his chest.

 

Ostrog was born in Russia in approximately 1833. However, we know little of his life until he arrived in the U.K. in 1863. Unfortunately, it seems as though Michael Ostrog had already committed to a life of scams, robbery, and petty theft.

 

In 1863, he was arrested and jailed for 10 months for trying to rob the University of Oxford. He was also using the alias of 'Max Grief,' a trend that would continue later on in his life.

 

Michael Ostrog was not considered a Jack the Ripper suspect until his name was mentioned alongside several other notable Ripper suspects in a memorandum in 1894. Sir Melville Macnaghten was the Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in London between 1903 and 1913, yet he also played a role in the Whitechapel Murders case. In this memorandum, he proposed Michael Ostrog as one of the most likely Jack the Ripper suspects (in his opinion) alongside Montague John Druitt and Aaron Kosminski.

 

However, despite Macnaghten's belief in his guilt, it was never proven that Michael Ostrog committed any murders. Thefts, robberies, scams, and fraud – yes, but murders? The evidence remains inconclusive.

 

Francis Tumblety:

 

Born in 1833, Francis Tumblety's humble start in life is a mystery. Some sources say that he was born in Ireland, while others suggest he was born in Canada. Regardless, we know that he moved to Rochester, New York, with his family within his life's first decade or so.

 

Tumblety moved around a lot during the 1850s and 1860s, staying in various places across the U.S. and Canada but never truly settling or finding a permanent home for himself. He posed as a doctor on his travels, claiming to have secret knowledge of mystical cures and medicines from India, but, likely, this was simply fabricated to drum up more business and interest in his services.

 

He was arrested in Canada twice – once for performing illegal abortions, then again for a patient's sudden, suspicious death. In 1865, Tumblety lived in Missouri under the fake name of 'Dr Blackburn.' However, this backfired spectacularly when he was mistakenly taken for the real Dr. Blackburn, who was actually wanted by police in connection with the murder of Abraham Lincoln! As a result, Francis Tumblety was arrested once again. Dumbass.

 

Sometime in the intervening years, Tumblety moved across the pond - possibly to escape further arrests - and was known to be living in London by the summer of 1888. He again posed as a doctor and peddled his fabricated trade to unsuspecting Londoners.

 

The police began to investigate Tumblety in August of that year, possibly because he was a Jack the Ripper suspect and due to the nature of his business. Sadly, the files and notes from the Victorian investigation have been lost over the years. However, many Ripperologists have since weighed in to give their opinions.

 

Interestingly, at the time, there had been rumors that an American doctor had approached the London Pathology Museum, reportedly in an attempt to purchase the uteruses of deceased women. Could this have been Francis Tumblety, or was it just a strange coincidence? An unusual request, for sure. However, a line of inquiry like this would have been taken extremely seriously by detectives at the height of Jack the Ripper's reign of terror.

 

Eventually, Tumblety's luck ran out, and on November 7th, 1888, he was arrested in London. Although the arrest specifics are not known today, we see that he was arrested for "unnatural offences," which could have meant several different things. This could also have referred to homosexual relations or rape, as homosexuality was still illegal.

 

He was released on bail, which crucially means that he was accessible and potentially able to have committed the horrific murder of Mary Jane Kelly on November 9th, 1888. The timeframe fits, and evidently, the police came to this conclusion, too, as Tumblety was subsequently rearrested on November 12th and held on suspicion of murdering Mary Jane Kelly.

 

Released on bail once again on November 16th, Francis Tumblety took the opportunity to flee London. Instead, he headed to France before returning to the U.S. 

Tumblety then did a vanishing act and seemingly disappeared into the ether.

 

The next few years were a mystery, and Tumblety did not surface again until 1893, five years later. He lived out the remainder of his life in his childhood home in Rochester, New York, where he died in 1903 as a wealthy man.

 

The evidence certainly seems to point towards Tumblety's guilt, and indeed, the fact that he was arrested multiple times in connection with the Ripper murders suggests that he was undoubtedly one of the police's top Jack the Ripper suspects.

 

Today, many of the details have been lost over the years. The original Scotland Yard files are missing, meaning that we don't know why Tumblety was charged – or what he was charged with in connection to the Whitechapel Murders. However, we can learn from the arrests that the evidence brought against Tumblety could not have been watertight. Otherwise, he would never have been released on bail. It seems there was still an element of doubt in the minds of the detectives.

 

David Cohen:

 

The theory put together, pinning the chilling Whitechapel murders on one David Cohen, claims that this name was actually the 'John Doe' identity given to him at the time. He was taken in when found stumbling through the streets of East End London in December of 1888, a few short months after the autumn of terror. However, it is claimed that Cohen's real name was Nathan Kaminsky, a Polish Jew that matched the description of the wanted man known as 'Leather Apron,' who would later form the pseudonym of Jack the Ripper.

 

Cohen, born in 1865, was not actually named as a potential suspect in the Jack the Ripper case until Martin Fido's book 'The Crimes, Detection and Death of Jack the Ripper was published in 1987 – almost 100 years later. The book detailed Cohen's alleged erratic and violent behavior, making him a good fit for the killers' profile.

As per an 1895 article by Sir Robert Anderson, who was the Assistant Commissioner CID at Scotland Yard at the time of the murders, it becomes apparent that the killer was identified by a witness. The witness, however, refused to come forward in an official capacity, leading Anderson to write, "the only person who had ever had a good view of the murderer unhesitatingly identified the suspect the instant he was confronted with him; but he refused to give evidence against him."

 

Later, in his 1910 book 'The Lighter Side of My Official Life,' Anderson published a memoir hand-written by ex-Superintendent Donald S. Swanson, in which he named Aaron Kosminski as the suspect who matched the description of a Polish Jew. The passage reads: "The suspect had, at the Seaside Home where he had been sent by us with difficulty in order to subject him to identification, and he knew he was identified."

 

"On suspect's return to his brother's house in Whitechapel he was watched by the police (City CID) by day & night. In time, the suspect with his hands tied behind his back, he was sent to Stephney Workhouse and then to Colney Hatch and died shortly afterwards - Kosminski was the suspect – DSS."

 

Last one.

 

Lastly, on our list is one I didn't know anything about. As I was going through the research Moody so eloquently and diligently accrued, I stumbled up one more suspect. 

 

There is little information about the suspect, but apparently, he was a traveling charioteer with accessibility to and from the White Chapel district during the murders. Unfortunately, his birthdate is unknown, making his age impossible to gauge. The only thing Scotland Yard has on file is a single word found near 2 of the victims and a noise heard by a handful of citizens who were close to the scene of the crimes.

 

That word was "Candy," and that horrible, unsettling sound was that of a rattling wallet chain... 

 

Honestly, we could go on all day, but everything from here gets pretty convoluted. But, honestly, there's always a link if you stretch it far enough.

 

https://www.jack-the-ripper.org/films.htm

Episode 150! Who Was Jack the Ripper? Part 1

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London in 1888:

 

Victorian London was not a happy place to be, and the facts speak for themselves. Prostitution was rife, poverty and crime were prevalent, and 19th-century housing was barely habitable. Finding work in 1888 was extremely difficult for the residents of Whitechapel, feeding into the cycle of poverty and depravity.

 

Soot and smoke generally filled the air, and there were still grazing sheep in Regent's Park in the mid-Victorian period — it was said that you could tell how long the sheep had been in the capital by how dirty their coats were. They went increasingly from white to black over days.

 

The nights were riddled with gas lamp-lit streets and dark, foggy alleyways.

 

The city was steeped in poverty and all manner of crime and disease.

 

Many children were seen as a strain on their parents' resources, and it is believed that two in every ten died before reaching five years old.

 

breeding ground for crime and poor behavioral habits, including murder, prostitution, and violence – and vicious circles like these were rarely broken in such poor districts

 

Streets were dirty, and fresh food was scarce. Pollution and sewage smells filled the air.

 

Urine soaked the streets. There was an experiment in Piccadilly with wood paving in the midcentury. It was abandoned after a few weeks because the sheer smell of ammonia coming from the pavement was horrible. Also, the shopkeepers nearby said that this ammonia was discoloring their shop fronts.

 

London in the 19th century was basically filled with cesspools.

 

There'd be brick chambers, maybe 6 feet deep, about 4 feet wide, and every house would have them.

 

It was more common to have a cesspool in the basement in central London and in more crowded areas.

 

Above the cesspool would be where your household privy, or toilet, would be.

 

These made the general smell in crowded London pretty awful.

 

There would have been horses everywhere. By the 1890s, there were approximately 300,000 horses and 1,000 tons of horse droppings a day in London. The Victorians employed boys ages 12 to 14 to dodge between the traffic and try to scoop up the excrement as soon as it hit the streets.

 

Shit everywhere.

 

The streets were lined with "mud,"... except it wasn't mud. 

 

Life was much harder for women than men generally.

 

The lack of proper work and money led many women and girls into prostitution, a high-demand service by those wishing to escape their grim realities.

 

These women were commonly known as "unfortunates,"

 

They owned only what they wore and carried in their pockets - their dirty deeds would pay for their bed for the night.

 

There was an extraordinary lack of contraception for women.

 

Doctors performed unorthodox abortions in dirty facilities, including the back streets.

 

Many women would die of infection from these ill-performed surgeries or ingesting chemicals or poison.

 

The insides of the houses throughout the borough were no less uninviting and more reminiscent of slums.

 

Many of these dilapidated homes were makeshift brothels.

 

Prostitution was a dangerous trade, as diseases were passed from person to person very quickly, and doctors did not come cheap.

 

Most work came through casual or 'sweated' labor, like tailoring, boot making, and making matchboxes.

 

There was very little job security, and the work premises would more than likely be small, cramped, dusty rooms with little to no natural light.

 

Workhouses were another alternative, set up to offer food and shelter to the poorest of the community in return for hard, grueling labor in even worse conditions.

 

large portions of the population turned to drinking or drugs to cope with everyday life

 

Pubs and music halls were abundant in the East End, and booze was cheap, too, making it a viable means of escapism for many.

 

Crime rates spiraled and were unmanageable by London's police force in 1888. Petty crime like street theft was normality.

 

High levels of alcohol-related violence, gang crime, and even protection rackets were everywhere.

 

The high level of prostitution meant that vulnerable women were often forced to earn a living on the streets, leaving them easy targets for assault, rape, and even murder.

 

Police stations and the detectives at the helm lacked structure and organization, with many crimes being mislabelled, evidence going missing, or being tampered with was common. 

 

The maze of dingy alleyways and dark courtyards, each with multiple entrances and exit points, made the district even more difficult to police. There were even some parts of Whitechapel that police officers were afraid to enter, making them crime hotspots.

 

With that brief look into what it was like in Whitechapel, it is no wonder that Jack the Ripper could get away with his crimes. That being said, let's look at the crimes and victims.

 

Mary Ann Nichols:

 

Mary Ann Nichols led a brief life marked with hardships. Born to a London locksmith in 1845, she married Edward in 1864 and gave birth to five children before the marriage dissolved in 1880.

 

In explaining the roots of the separation, Nichols' father accused Edward of having an affair with the nurse who attended one of their children's births. For his part, Edward claimed that Nichols' drinking problem drove them to part ways.

 

After separating, the court required Edward to give his estranged wife five shillings per month, over 600 pounds today— a requirement he successfully challenged when he found out she was working as a prostitute.

 

Nichols then lived in and out of workhouses until her death. She tried living with her father, but they did not get along, so she continued to work as a prostitute to support herself. Though she once worked as a servant in a well-off family home, she quit because her employers did not drink.

 

On the night of her death, Nichols found herself surrounded by the same problems she'd had for most of her life: lack of money and a propensity to drink. On 31st August 1888, she left the pub where she was drinking and walked back to the boarding house where she planned to sleep for the night.

 

Nichols lacked the funds to pay for the entrance fee, so she went back out to earn it. But, according to her roommate, who saw her the night before someone killed her, she spent whatever money she did earn on alcohol.

 

That night Mary was wearing a bonnet that none of the other residents of the lodging house had seen her with before. Since she intended to resort to prostitution to raise the money for her bed, she felt this would be an irresistible draw to potential clients. So, she was escorted from the premises by the deputy lodging housekeeper. She laughed to him, "I'll soon get my doss money, see what a jolly bonnet I have now."

 

At 2.30 on the morning of 31st August, she met a friend named Emily Holland by the shop at the junction of Osborn Street and Whitechapel Road.

 

Mary was very drunk, and she boasted to Emily that she had made her lodging money three times over but had spent it.

 

Concerned at Mary's drunken state, Emily tried to persuade her to come back to Wilmott's with her. Mary refused, and, telling Emily that she must get her lodging money somehow, she stumbled off along Whitechapel Road.

 

That was the last time that Mary Nichols was seen alive.

 

At 3.45 a.m., a woman's body was found with her skirt pulled up to her waist, lying next to a gateway in Buck's Row, Just off Whitechapel Road. This location was around a ten-minute walk from the corner where Mary met Emily Holland.

 

According to some newspaper reports, the woman's throat had been cut back to the spine, the wound being so savagely inflicted that it had almost severed her head from her body.

 

Within 45 minutes, she had been placed on a police ambulance, which was nothing more than a wooden hand cart. She had been taken to the mortuary of the nearby Whitechapel Workhouse Infirmary.

 

Here, Inspector Spratling of the Metropolitan Police's J Division arrived to take down a description of the, at the time, unknown victim, and he made the horrific discovery that, in addition to the dreadful wound to the throat, a deep gash ran along the woman's abdomen - The killer had disemboweled her.

 

The funeral of Mary Ann Nichols took place amidst great secrecy to deter morbid sightseers on Thursday, 6th September 1888.

 

Strangely, the ruse used to get Mary Nichols's body to the undertaker's could be said to have included an element of foreshadowing.

 

Mary Nichols's body was brought out of the mortuary's back gate in Chapman's Court, from where it was taken to the undertaker's premises on Hanbury Street.

 

Two days later, the murderer struck again and murdered Annie Chapman in Hanbury Street.

 

Annie Chapman:

 

Annie Chapman didn't always lead a hard life. She lived for some time with her husband, John, a coachman, in West London.

 

However, after the couple had children, her life began to unravel: Her son, John, was born disabled, and her youngest daughter, Emily, died of meningitis. She and her husband both began to drink heavily and eventually separated in 1884.

 

After the separation, Chapman moved to Whitechapel to live with another man. While she still received ten shillings per week from her husband, she sometimes worked as a prostitute to supplement her income.

 

When her husband died from alcohol abuse, that money stopped. According to her friends, Chapman "seemed to have given away all together." Then, a week before she died, Chapman got into a fistfight with another woman over an unreturned bar of soap.

 

At 5 p.m. on Friday, 7th September, Annie met her friend, Amelia Palmer, in Dorset Street. Annie looked extremely unwell and complained of feeling "too ill to do anything."

 

Amelia met her again, ten minutes later, still standing in the same place, although Annie was trying desperately to rally her spirits. "It's no use giving way, I must pull myself together and get some money or I shall have no lodgings," were the last words Amelia Palmer heard Annie Chapman speak.

 

At 11.30 p.m. that night, Annie turned up at Crossingham's lodging house and asked Timothy Donovan if she could sit in the kitchen.

 

Since he hadn't seen her for a few days, Donovan asked her where she had been? "In the infirmary," she replied weakly. He allowed her to go to the kitchen, where she remained until Saturday morning, 8th September 1888.

 

At 1.45 a.m., Donovan sent John Evans, the lodging house's night watchman, to collect the fourpence for her bed from her. He found her a little drunk and eating potatoes in the kitchen. When he asked her for the money, she replied wearily, "I haven't got it. I am weak and ill and have been in the infirmary."

 

Annie then went to Donovan's office and implored him to allow her to stay a little longer. But instead, he told her that if she couldn't pay, she couldn't stay.

 

Annie turned to leave, but then, turning back, she told him to save the bed for her, adding, "I shall not be long before I am in. I shall soon be back, don't let the bed."

 

John Evans then escorted her from the premises and watched her head off along Dorset Street, observing later that she appeared to be slightly tipsy instead of drunk.

 

At 5.30 that morning, Elizabeth Long saw her talking with a man outside number 29 on Hanbury Street. Since there was nothing suspicious about the couple, she continued on her way, hardly taking any actual notice.

 

Thirty minutes later, at 6 a.m., John Davis, an elderly resident of number 29, found her horrifically mutilated body lying between the steps and the fence in the house's backyard.

 

Annie had been murdered, and her body mutilated. She had a cut across her neck from left to right and a gash in her abdomen made by the same blade.

 

Her intestines had been pulled out and draped over her shoulders, and her uterus had been removed. The doctor conducting the post-mortem was so appalled by the damage done to her corpse that he refused to use explicit detail during the inquest. Police determined that she died of asphyxiation and that the killer mutilated her after she died. 

 

She was later identified by her younger brother, Fountain Smith.

 

The severing of the throat and the mutilation of the corpse were similar to that of the injuries sustained by Mary Ann Nichols a week previously, leading investigators to believe the same assailant had murdered them.

 

At this point, the killings were known as 'The Whitechapel Murders."

 

Elizabeth Stride:

 

The Swedish-born domestic servant arrived in England in 1866, at which point she had already given birth to a stillborn baby and been treated for venereal diseases.

 

Stride married in 1869, but they soon split, and he ultimately died of tuberculosis in 1884. Stride would instead tell people that her husband and children (which they never actually had) were killed in an infamous 1878 Thames River steamship accident. She allegedly sustained an injury during that ordeal that explained her stutter.

 

With her husband gone and lacking a steady source of income, like so many of Jack the Ripper's victims, Stride split the remainder of her life living between work and lodging houses. 

 

On Saturday, 29th September 1888, she had spent the afternoon cleaning two rooms at the lodging house, for which the deputy keeper paid her sixpence, and, by 6.30 p.m., she was enjoying a drink in the Queen's Head pub at the junction of Fashion Street and Commercial Street.

 

Returning to the lodging house, she dressed, ready for a night out, and, at 7.30 p.m., she left the lodging house.

 

There were several sightings of her over the next five hours, and, by midnight, she had found her way to Berner Street, off Commercial Road.

 

At 12.45 a.m., on 30th September, Israel Schwartz saw her being attacked by a man in a gateway off Berner Street known as Dutfield's Yard. Schwarz, however, assumed he was witnessing a domestic argument, and he crossed over the road to avoid getting dragged into the quarrel.

 

Schwartz likely saw the early stages of her murder.

 

At 1 a.m. Louis Diemschutz, the Steward of a club that sided onto Dutfield's Yard, came down Berner Street with his pony and costermongers barrow and turned into the open gates of Dutfield's Yard. Immediately as he did so, the pony shied and pulled left. Diemschutz looked into the darkness and saw a dark form on the ground. He tried to lift it with his whip but couldn't. So, he jumped down and struck a match. It was wet and windy, and the match flickered for just a few seconds, but it was sufficient time for Diemschutz to see a woman lying on the ground.

 

He thought that the woman might be his wife and that she was drunk, so he went into the club to get some help in lifting her.

 

However, he found his wife in the kitchen, and so, taking a candle, he and several other members went out into the yard, and, by the candle's light, they could see a pool of blood gathering beneath the woman.

 

The crowd sent for the police, and a doctor was summoned, pronouncing the woman dead. It was noted that, as in the cases of the previous victims, the killer had cut the woman's throat. However, the rest of the body had not been mutilated. This led the police to deduce that Diemschutz had interrupted the killer when he turned into Dutfield's Yard.

 

The body was removed to the nearest mortuary - which still stands, albeit as a ruin, in the nearby churchyard of St George-in-the-East, and there she was identified as Elizabeth Stride.

 

On the night of her burial, a lady went to a police station in Cardiff, and made the bizarre claim that she had spoken with the spirit of Elizabeth Stride. In the course of a séance, the victim had identified her murderer.

 

Nothing ever came of this…obviously.

 

CATHERINE EDDOWES:

 

Unlike the other Jack the Ripper victims, Catherine Eddowes never married and spent her short life with multiple men.

 

At age 21, the daughter of a tin plate worker met Thomas Conway in her hometown of Wolverhampton. The couple lived together for 20 years and had three children together. But, according to her daughter, Annie, the pair split "entirely on account of her drinking habits."

 

Eddowes met John Kelly soon after. She then became known as Kate Kelly and stayed with John until her death.

 

According to her friends and family, while Catherine was not a prostitute, she was an alcoholic. The night of her murder — the same night Elizabeth Stride was killed — a policeman found Catherine lying drunk and passed out on Aldgate Street.

 

She was taken to Bishopsgate Police Station, locked in a cell to sober up. But instead, she promptly fell fast asleep.

 

By midnight, she was awake and was deemed sober enough for release by the City jailer PC George Hutt. Before leaving, she told him that her name was Mary Ann Kelly and gave her address as 6 Fashion Street.

 

Hutt escorted her to the door of the police station, and he told her to close it on her way out. "Alright. Goodnight old cock" was her reply as she headed out into the early morning.

 

At 1.35 a.m., three men - Joseph Lawende, Joseph Hyam Levy, and Harry Harris saw her talking with a man at the Church Passage entrance into Mitre Square, located on the eastern fringe of the City of London.

 

Ten minutes later, at 1.45 a.m. Police Constable Alfred Watkins walked his beat into Mitre Square and discovered her horrifically mutilated body lying in the darkness of the Square's South West corner. The killer had disemboweled her. But, in addition, the killer had targeted her face, carving deep "V"s into her cheeks and eyelids. He had also removed and gone off with her uterus and left kidney. Finally, he had cut open her intestines to release fecal matter.

 

Dr. Frederick Brown, who performed the post-mortem examination of Eddowes' body, concluded that the killer must have some knowledge of anatomy if he could remove her organs in the dark.

Mary Jane Kelly:

 

She is the victim about whom we know the least.

 

We know virtually nothing about her life before she arrives in the East End of London. What we do know is based on what she chose to reveal about her past to those she knew, and the integrity of what she did tell is challenging to ascertain. Indeed, we don't even know that her name was Mary Kelly.

 

According to her boyfriend, Joseph Barnett, with whom she lived until shortly before her death, she had told him that she was born in Limerick, in Ireland, that her father's name was John Kelly, and that she had six or seven brothers and one sister.

 

The family moved to Wales when she was a child, and when she was sixteen, she met and married a collier named Davis or Davies. Unfortunately, her husband was killed in a mine explosion three years later, and Mary moved to Cardiff to live with a female cousin who introduced her to prostitution.

 

Mary moved to London around 1884, where she met a French woman who ran a high-class brothel in Knightsbridge, in which establishment Mary began working. She told Barnett that, during this period in her life, she had dressed well, had been driven about in a carriage, and, for a time, had led a lady's life.

 

She had, she said, made several visits to France at this time, and had accompanied a gentleman to Paris, but, not liking it there, she had returned to London after just two weeks.

 

She began using the continental version of her name and often referred to herself as Marie Jeannette Kelly.

 

After that, her life suffered a downward spiral, which saw her move to the East End of London, where she lodged with a Mrs. Buki in a side thoroughfare off Ratcliff Highway. Soon after her arrival, she enlisted her landlady's assistance in returning to the West End to retrieve a box that contained dresses of a costly description from the French lady.

 

Mary had now started drinking heavily, which led to conflict between her and Mrs. Buki. Relations between them became so strained that Mary moved out and went to lodge at the home of Mrs. Mary McCarthy at 1 Breezer's Hill Pennington Street, St. George-in-the-East.

 

By 1886 she had moved into Cooley's typical lodging house in Thrawl Street, and it was while living here that, on Good Friday, 6th April 1887, she met Joseph Barnett, who worked as a porter at Billingsgate Fish Market.

 

The two were soon living together, and, by 1888, they were renting a tiny room at 13 Miller's Court from John McCarthy, who owned a chandler's shop just outside Miller's Court on Dorset Street.

 

She and Barnett appear to have lived happily together until, in mid-1888, he lost his market job, and she returned to prostitution, which caused arguments between them. During one heated exchange, a pane in the window by the door of their room had been broken.

 

The precariousness of their finances had resulted in Mary falling behind with her rent, and by early November, she owed her landlord twenty-nine shillings in rent arrears.

 

On 30th October 1888, Joseph Barnett moved out, although he and Mary remained on friendly terms, and he would drop by to see her, the last time being at around 7.30 on the evening of Thursday 8th November, albeit he didn't stay long.

 

Several people claimed to have seen her during the next fourteen hours.

 

One of them was George Hutchinson, an unemployed laborer, who met her on Commercial Street at 2 a.m. on 9th November. She asked him if he would lend her sixpence, to which he replied that he couldn't as he'd spent all his money.

 

Replying that she must go and find some money, she continued along Commercial Street, where a man coming from the opposite direction tapped her on the shoulder and said something to her, at which point they both started laughing.

 

The man put his arm around Mary, and they started walking back along Commercial Street, passing Hutchinson, who was standing under the lamp by the Queen's Head pub at the junction of Fashion Street and Commercial Street.

 

Although the man had his head down with his hat over his eyes, Hutchinson stooped down and looked him in the face, at which point the man gave him what Hutchinson would later describe as a stern look.

 

Hutchinson followed them as they crossed into Dorset Street, and he watched them turn into Miller's Court. He waited outside the court for 45 minutes, by which time they hadn't reemerged, so he left the scene.

 

At around 4 a.m., two of Mary's neighbors heard a faint cry of "Murder," but because such cries were frequent in the area - often the result of a drunken brawl - they both ignored it.

 

At 10. Forty-five on the morning of the 9th November, her landlord, John McCarthy, sent his assistant, Thomas Bowyer, round to Mary's room, telling him to try and get some rent from her.

 

Bowyer marched into Miller's Court and banged on her door. There was no reply. He tried to open it but found it locked. He, therefore, went round to the broken window pane, reached in, pushed aside the shabby muslin curtain that covered it, and looked into the gloomy room.

 

Moments later, an ashen-faced Bowyer burst into McCarthy's shop on Dorset Street. "Guvnor," he stammered, "I knocked at the door and could not make anyone answer. I looked through the window and saw a lot of blood."

 

"Good God, you don't mean that," was McCarthy's reply, and the two men raced into Miller's Court, where McCarthy stooped down and looked through the broken pane of glass.

 

McCarthy would later recall the horror of the scene that greeted him. "The sight we saw I cannot drive away from my mind. It looked more the work of a devil than of a man. I had heard a great deal about the Whitechapel murders, but I declare to God I had never expected to see such a sight as this. The whole scene is more than I can describe. I hope I may never see such a sight as this again."

 

Someone immediately sent for the police, and one of the first officers at the scene was Walter Dew, who, many years later, would recall the horror of what he saw through that window:- "On the bed was all that remained of the young woman. There was little left of her, not much more than a skeleton. Her face was terribly scarred and mutilated. All this was horrifying enough, but the mental picture of that sight which remains most vividly with me is the poor woman's eyes. They were wide open, and seemed to be staring straight at me with a look of terror."

 

Possible victims:

 

Martha Tabram

 

On Tuesday 7th August, following a Monday bank holiday, prostitute Martha Tabram was murdered at about 2:30 a.m. Her body was found at George Yard Buildings, George Yard, Whitechapel, shortly before 5:00 a.m. She had been stabbed 39 times about her neck, torso, and genitals with a short blade. With one possible exception, a right-handed individual had inflicted all her wounds.

 

Based on statements from a fellow prostitute and PC Thomas Barrett, who was patrolling nearby, Inspector Reid put soldiers at the Tower of London and Wellington Barracks on an identification parade, but without positive results. Police did not connect Tabram's murder with the earlier murder of Emma Smith, but they did connect her death with later murders.

 

Most experts do not connect Tabram's murder with the others attributed to the Ripper because she had been repeatedly stabbed, whereas later victims typically suffered slash wounds and abdominal mutilations. However, investigators cannot rule out a connection.

 

Rose Mylett

 

On Thursday 20th December 1888, a patrolling constable found the strangled body of 26-year-old prostitute Rose Mylett in Clarke's Yard, off Poplar High Street. Mylett (born Catherine Millett and known as Drunken Lizzie Davis and Fair Alice Downey) had lodged at 18 George Street, as had Emma Smith.

 

Four doctors who examined Mylett's body thought she had been murdered, but Robert Anderson thought she had accidentally hanged herself on the collar of her dress while in a drunken stupor. At Anderson's request, Dr. Bond examined Mylett's body, agreeing with Anderson. Commissioner Monro also suspected it was a suicide or natural death as there were no signs of a struggle. The coroner, Wynne Baxter, told the inquest jury that "there is no evidence to show that death was the result of violence." Nevertheless, the jury returned a verdict of "wilful murder against some person or persons unknown," and the case was added to the Whitechapel file.

 

Alice McKenzie:

 

Alice McKenzie was possibly a prostitute and was murdered at about 12:40 a.m. on Wednesday 17th July 1889 in Castle Alley, Whitechapel. Like most of the previous murders, her left carotid artery was severed from left to right, and there were wounds on her abdomen. However, her injuries were not as deep as in previous murders, and the killer used a shorter blade. Commissioner Monro and one of the pathologists examining the body, Bond, believed this to be a Ripper murder. However, another of the pathologists, Phillips, and Robert Anderson, disagreed, as did Inspector Abberline. Later writers are also divided and either suggest that McKenzie was a Ripper victim or that the unknown murderer tried to make it look like a Ripper killing to deflect suspicion from himself. At the inquest, Coroner Baxter acknowledged both possibilities and concluded: "There is great similarity between this and the other class of cases, which have happened in this neighbourhood, and if the same person has not committed this crime, it is clearly an imitation of the other cases."

 

Pinchin Street torso:

 

A woman's torso was found at 5:15 a.m. on Tuesday 10th September 1889 under a railway arch in Pinchin Street, Whitechapel. Extensive bruising about the victim's back, hip, and arm indicated that the killer had severely beaten her shortly before her death, which occurred approximately one day before discovering her torso. The victim's abdomen was also extensively mutilated in a manner reminiscent of the Ripper, although her genitals had not been wounded. The dismembered sections of the body are believed to have been transported to the railway arch, hidden under an old chemise. The age of the victim was estimated at 30–40 years. Despite a search of the area, no other sections of her body were ever found, and neither the victim nor the culprit were ever identified.

 

Chief Inspector Swanson and Commissioner Monro noted that blood within the torso indicated that death was not from hemorrhage or cutting of the throat. The pathologists, however, pointed out that the general bloodlessness of the tissues and vessels told that bleeding was the cause of death. Newspaper speculation that the body belonged to Lydia Hart, who had disappeared, was refuted after she was found recovering in hospital after "a bit of a spree." Another claim that the victim was a missing girl called Emily Barker was also refuted, as the torso was from an older and taller woman.

 

Swanson did not consider this a Ripper case and instead suggested a link to the Thames Torso Murders in Rainham and Chelsea and the "Whitehall Mystery". Monro agreed with Swanson's assessment. These three murders and the Pinchin Street case are suggested to be the work of a serial killer, nicknamed the "Torso killer," who could either be the same person as "Jack the Ripper" or a separate killer of uncertain connection. Links between these and three further murders—the "Battersea Mystery" of 1873 and 1874, two women were found dismembered, and the 1884 "Tottenham Court Road Mystery"—have also been postulated. Experts on the murders—colloquially known as "Ripperologists"—such as Stewart Evans, Keith Skinner, Martin Fido, and Donald Rumbelow, discount any connection between the torso and Ripper killings based on their different modi operandi.

 

Monro was replaced as Commissioner by Sir Edward Bradford on 21st June 1890, after a disagreement with Home Secretary Henry Matthews over police pensions.

 

Frances Coles:

 

The last murders in the Whitechapel file were committed on Friday 13th February 1891, when prostitute Frances Coles was murdered under a railway arch in Swallow Gardens, Whitechapel. Her body was found only moments after the attack at 2:15 a.m. by PC Ernest Thompson, who later stated he heard retreating footsteps in the distance. As contemporary police practices dictated, Thompson remained at the scene.

 

Coles was lying beneath a passageway under a railway arch between Chamber Street and Royal Mint Street. She was still alive but died before medical help could arrive. Minor wounds on the back of her head suggest that she was thrown violently to the ground before her throat was cut at least twice, from left to right and then back again. Otherwise, there were no mutilations to the body, leading some to believe Thompson had disturbed her assailant. Superintendent Arnold and Inspector Reid arrived soon afterward from the nearby Leman Street police station, and Chief Inspectors Donald Swanson and Henry Moore, who had been involved in the previous murder investigations, arrived by 5 a.m.

 

A man named James Sadler, who had earlier been seen with Coles, was arrested by the police and charged with her murder. A high-profile investigation by Swanson and Moore into Sadler's history and his whereabouts at the previous Whitechapel murders indicates that the police may have suspected him of being the Ripper. However, Sadler was released on 3rd March for lack of evidence.

 

https://www.imdb.com/list/ls079111466/?sort=user_rating,desc&st_dt=&mode=detail&page=1&title_type=movie&ref_=ttls_ref_typ

What Are the Archives of Terror?

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Archives of terror

Archivos del Terror were found on december 22, 1992 by a lawyer and human rights activist, strange how those two titles are in the same sentence, Dr. Martín Almada, and Judge José Agustín Fernández. Found in a police station in the suburbs of Paraguay known as Asunción.

 

Fernandez was looking for files on a former prisoner. Instead, stumbled across an archive describing the fates of thousands of Latin Americans who had been secretly kidnapped, tortured, and killed by the security services of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay with the help of our friendly neighborhood CIA. Known as Operation Condor.

 

“Operation Condor was a U.S. backed campaign of political repression and state terror involving intelligence operations and assassination of opponents.”

 

Let’s go back a ways toward the beginning. One day, a young guy, wanted to fuck up the world and created the CIA. JK… but not really.

 

So we go back to 1968 where General Robert W. Porter said that "in order to facilitate the coordinated employment of internal security forces within and among Latin American countries, we are ... endeavoring to foster inter-service and regional cooperation by assisting in the organization of integrated command and control centers; the establishment of common operating procedures; and the conduct of joint and combined training exercises."

 

According to former secret CIA documents from 1976, plans were developed among international security officials at the US Army School of the Americas and the Conference of American Armies in the 1960s and early 1970s to deal with perceived threats in South America from political dissidents, according to American historian J. Patrice McSherry. "In early 1974, security officials from Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Bolivia convened in Buenos Aires to prepare synchronized attacks against subversive targets," according to a declassified CIA memo dated June 23, 1976.

 

Following a series of military-led coups d'états, particularly in the 1970s, the program was established:

• General Alfredo Stroessner took control of Paraguay in 1954
• General Francisco Morales-Bermúdez takes control of Peru after a successful coup in 1975
• The Brazilian military overthrew the president João Goulart in 1964
• General Hugo Banzer took power in Bolivia in 1971 through a series of coups
• A military dictatorship seized power in Uruguay on 27 June 1973
• Chilean armed forces commanded by General Augusto Pinochet bombed the presidential palace in Chile on 11 September 1973, overthrowing democratically elected president Salvador Allende
• A military dictatorship headed by General Jorge Rafael Videla seized power in Argentina on 24 March 1976

 

According to American journalist A. J. Langguth, the CIA organized the first meetings between Argentinian and Uruguayan security officials regarding the surveillance (and subsequent disappearance or assassination) of political refugees in these countries, as well as its role as an intermediary in the meetings between Argentinian, Uruguayan, and Brazilian death squads.

 

According to the National Security Archive's documentary evidence from US, Paraguayan, Argentine, and Chilean files, "Founded by the Pinochet regime in November 1975, Operation Condor was the codename for a formal Southern Cone collaboration that included transnational secret intelligence activities, kidnapping, torture, disappearance, and assassination." Several persons were slain as part of this codename mission. "Notable Condor victims include two former Uruguayan legislators and a former Bolivian president, Juan José Torres, murdered in Buenos Aires, a former Chilean Minister of the Interior, Bernardo Leighton, and former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier and his 26-year-old American colleague, Ronni Moffitt, assassinated by a car bomb in downtown Washington D.C.," according to the report.

 

Prior to the formation of Operation Condor, there had been cooperation among various security services with the goal of "eliminating Marxist subversion." On September 3, 1973, at the Conference of American Armies in Caracas, Brazilian General Breno Borges Fortes, the chief of the Brazilian army, urged that various services "expand the interchange of information" in order to "fight against subversion."

 

Representatives from Chile, Uruguay, and Bolivia's police forces met with Alberto Villar, deputy chief of the Argentine Federal Police and co-founder of the Triple A killing squad, in March 1974 to discuss collaboration standards. Their purpose was to eliminate the "subversive" threat posed by Argentina's tens of thousands of political exiles. Bolivian immigrants' bodies were discovered at rubbish dumps in Buenos Aires in August 1974. Based on recently revealed CIA records dated June 1976, McSherry corroborated the kidnapping and torture of Chilean and Uruguayan exiles living in Buenos Aires during this time.

 

On General Augusto Pinochet's 60th birthday, November 25, 1975, in Santiago de Chile, heads of the military intelligence services of Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay met with Manuel Contreras, commander of the Chilean secret police, to officially establish the Plan Condor. General Rivero, an intelligence officer in the Argentine Armed Forces and a former student of the French, devised the concept of Operation Condor, according to French writer Marie-Monique Robin, author of Escadrons de la death, l'école française (2004, Death Squads, The French School).

 

Officially, the targets were armed groups (such as the MIR, the Montoneros or the ERP, the Tupamaros, etc.) based on the governments' perceptions of threats, but the governments expanded their attacks to include all types of political opponents, including their families and others, as reported by the Valech Commission, which is known as The National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture Report. The Argentine "Dirty War," for example, kidnapped, tortured, and assassinated many trade unionists, relatives of activists, social activists such as the founders of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, nuns, university professors, and others, according to most estimates.

 

The Chilean DINA and its Argentine counterpart, SIDE, were the operation's front-line troops from 1976 forward. The infamous "death flights," which were postulated in Argentina by Luis Mara Menda and deployed by French forces during the Algerian War (1954–62), were widely used. Government forces flew or helicoptered victims out to sea, where they were dumped to die in premeditated disappearances. According to reports, the OPR-33 facility in Argentina was destroyed as a result of the military bombardment. Members of Plan Condor met in Santiago, Chile, in May 1976, to discuss "long-range collaboration... [that] went well beyond intelligence exchange" and to assign code names to the participating countries. The CIA acquired information in July that Plan Condor participants planned to strike "against leaders of indigenous terrorist groups residing overseas."

 

Several corpses washed up on beaches south of Buenos Aires in late 1977 as a result of extraordinary storms, providing evidence of some of the government's victims. Hundreds of newborns and children were removed from women in prison who had been kidnapped and later disappeared; the children were then given to families and associates of the dictatorship in clandestine adoptions. According to the CIA, Operation Condor countries reacted positively to the concept of cooperating and built their own communications network as well as joint training programs in areas like psychological warfare. 

 

The military governments in South America were coming together to join forces for security concerns, according to a memo prepared by Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America Harry W. Shlaudeman to Kissinger on August 3, 1976. They were anxious about the growth of Marxism and the consequences it would have on their dominance. This new force worked in secret in the countries of other members. Their mission: to track out and murder "Revolutionary Coordinating Committee" terrorists in their own nations and throughout Europe.Shlaudeman voiced fear that the members of Operation Condor's "siege mindset" could lead to a wider divide between military and civilian institutions in the region. He was also concerned that this would further isolate these countries from developed Western countries. He argued that some of these anxieties were justified, but that by reacting too harshly, these countries risked inciting a violent counter-reaction comparable to the PLO's in Israel.

 

Chile and Argentina were both active in using communications medium for the purpose of transmitting propaganda, according to papers from the United States dated April 17, 1977. The propaganda's goal was to accomplish two things. The first goal was to defuse/counter international media criticism of the governments involved, and the second goal was to instill national pride in the local population. "Chile after Allende," a propaganda piece developed by Chile, was sent to the states functioning under Condor. The paper, however, solely mentions Uruguay and Argentina as the only two countries that have signed the deal. The government of Paraguay was solely identified as using the local press, "Patria," as its primary source of propaganda. Due to the reorganisation of both Argentina's and Paraguay's intelligence organizations, a meeting scheduled for March 1977 to discuss "psychological warfare measures against terrorists and leftist extremists" was canceled.

 

One "component of the campaign including Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina envisages unlawful operations beyond Latin America against expatriate terrorists, primarily in Europe," according to a 2016 declassified CIA study titled "Counterterrorism in the Southern Cone." "All military-controlled regimes in the Southern Cone consider themselves targets of international Marxism," the memo stated. Condor's fundamental characteristic was highlighted in the document, which came to fruition in early 1974 when "security officials from all of the member countries, except Brazil, agreed to establish liaison channels and to facilitate the movement of security officers on government business from one country to the other," as part of a long-tested "regional approach" to pacifying "subversion." Condor's "initial aims" included the "exchange of information on the Revolutionary Coordinating Junta (RCJ), an organization...of terrorist groups from Bolivia, Uruguay, Chile, Argentina, and Paraguay" with "representatives" in Europe "believed to have been involved in the assassinations in Paris of the Bolivian ambassador to France last May and a Uruguayan military attache in 1974." Condor's primary purpose, according to the CIA assessment, was to eliminate "top-level terrorist leaders" as well as non-terrorist targets such as "Uruguayan opposition figure Wilson Ferreira, if he should travel to Europe, and some leaders of Amnesty International." Condor was also suspected by the CIA of being "involved in nonviolent actions, including as psychological warfare and a propaganda campaign" that used the media's power to "publicize terrorist crimes and atrocities." Condor also urged citizens in its member countries to "report anything out of the norm in their surroundings" in an appeal to "national pride and national conscience." Another meeting took place in 1980, and Montensero was apprehended. The RSO allegedly promised not to kill them if they agreed to collaborate and provide information on upcoming meetings in Rio.

 

So, after all of this mumbo jumbo, let's recap. 

 

50,000 people were killed, 30,000 disappeared, and 400,000 were imprisoned, according to the "terror archives."  A letter signed by Manuel Contreras, the chief of Chile's National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) at the time, inviting Paraguayan intelligence personnel to Santiago for a clandestine "First Working Meeting on National Intelligence" on November 25, 1975, was also uncovered. The presence of intelligence chiefs from Argentina, Bolivia, and Uruguay at the meetings was also confirmed by this letter, indicating that those countries were also involved in the formulation of Operation Condor. Colombia, Peru, and Venezuela are among the countries named in the archives as having collaborated to varying degrees by giving intelligence information that had been sought by the security agencies of the Southern Cone countries. Parts of the archives, which are presently housed in Asunción's Palace of Justice, have been used to prosecute former military officers in some of these countries. Those records were used extensively in Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón's prosecution against Chilean General Augusto Pinochet. Baltasar Garzón interviewed Almada twice after he was a Condor victim.

 

"[The records] represent a mound of shame and lies that Stroessner [Paraguay's ruler until 1989] used to blackmail the Paraguayan people for 40 years," Almada said. He wants the "terror archives" to be listed as an international cultural site by UNESCO, as this would make it much easier to get funds to maintain and protect the records.

 

In May 2000, a UNESCO mission visited Asunción in response to a request from the Paraguayan government for assistance in registering these files on the Memory of the World Register, which is part of a program aimed at preserving and promoting humanity's documentary heritage by ensuring that records are preserved and accessible.

 

Now that we are all caught up, let's talk about a few noteworthy events. First we go to Argentina.

 

Argentina was ruled by military juntas from 1976 until 1983 under Operation Condor, which was a civic-military dictatorship. In countless incidents of desaparecidos, the Argentine SIDE collaborated with the Chilean DINA. In Buenos Aires, they assassinated Chilean General Carlos Prats, former Uruguayan MPs Zelmar Michelini and Héctor Gutiérrez Ruiz, and former Bolivian President Juan José Torres. With the support of Italian Gladio operator Stefano Delle Chiaie and Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, the SIDE aided Bolivian commander Luis Garca Meza Tejada's Cocaine Coup (see also Operation Charly). Since the release of secret records, it has been revealed that at ESMA, there were operational units made up of Italians who were utilized to suppress organizations of Italian Montoneros. Gaetano Saya, the Officer of the Italian stay behind next - Operation Gladio, led this outfit known as "Shadow Group." The Madres de la Square de Mayo, a group of mothers whose children had vanished, began protesting every Thursday in front of the Casa Rosada on the plaza in April 1977. They wanted to know where their children were and what happened to them. The abduction of two French nuns and other founders of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in December 1977 drew worldwide notice. Their corpses were later recognized among the deceased washed up on beaches south of Buenos Aires in December 1977, victims of death planes.

 

In 1983, when Argentina's democracy was restored, the government established the National Commission for Forced Disappearances (CONADEP), which was chaired by writer Ernesto Sabato. It gathered testimony from hundreds of witnesses about regime victims and known atrocities, as well as documenting hundreds of secret jails and detention sites and identifying torture and execution squad leaders. The Juicio a las Juntas (Juntas Trial) two years later was mostly successful in proving the crimes of the top commanders of the numerous juntas that had composed the self-styled National Reorganization Process. Most of the top officers on trial, including Jorge Rafael Videla, Emilio Eduardo Massera, Roberto Eduardo Viola, Armando Lambruschini, Ral Agosti, Rubén Graffigna, Leopoldo Galtieri, Jorge Anaya, and Basilio Lami Dozo, were convicted and sentenced to life in prison.

 

Following these trials, Ral Alfonsn's administration implemented two amnesty laws, the 1986 Ley de Punto Final (law of closure) and the 1987 Ley de Obediencia Debida (law of due obedience), which ended prosecution of crimes committed during the Dirty War. In an attempt at healing and reconciliation, President Carlos Menem pardoned the junta's leaders who were serving prison sentences in 1989–1990.

 

Due to attacks on American citizens in Argentina and revelations about CIA funding of the Argentine military in the late 1990s, and despite an explicit 1990 Congressional prohibition, US President Bill Clinton ordered the declassification of thousands of State Department documents relating to US-Argentine relations dating back to 1954. These documents exposed American involvement in the Dirty War and Operation Condor.

 

Following years of protests by the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and other human rights organizations, the Argentine Congress overturned the amnesty legislation in 2003, with the full support of President Nestor Kirchner and the ruling majority in both chambers. In June 2005, the Argentine Supreme Court deemed them unlawful after a separate assessment. The government was able to resume prosecution of crimes committed during the Dirty War as a result of the court's decision. 

 

Enrique Arancibia Clavel, a DINA civil agent who was charged with crimes against humanity in Argentina in 2004, was sentenced to life in prison for his role in the death of General Prats. Stefano Delle Chiaie, a suspected Italian terrorist, is also said to have been involved in the murder. In Rome in December 1995, he and fellow extreme Vincenzo Vinciguerra testified before federal judge Mara Servini de Cubra that DINA operatives Clavel and Michael Townley were intimately involved in the assassination. Judge Servini de Cubra demanded that Mariana Callejas (Michael Townley's wife) and Cristoph Willikie, a retired Chilean army colonel, be extradited in 2003 because they were also accused of being complicit in the murder. Nibaldo Segura, a Chilean appeals court judge, declined extradition in July 2005, claiming that they had already been prosecuted in Chile.

 

Twenty-five former high-ranking military commanders from Argentina and Uruguay were charged on March 5, 2013, in Buenos Aires with conspiring to "kidnap, disappear, torture, and kill" 171 political opponents throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Former Argentine "presidents" Jorge Videla and Reynaldo Bignone, both from the El Proceso era, are among the defendants. Prosecutors are relying on declassified US records collected by the National Security Archive, a non-governmental entity established at George Washington University in Washington, DC, in the 1990s and later.

 

On May 27, 2016, fifteen former military personnel were found guilty. Reynaldo Bignone was sentenced to 20 years in prison. Fourteen of the remaining 16 defendants were sentenced to eight to twenty-five years in prison. Two of the defendants were found not guilty.  A lawyer for the victims' relatives, Luz Palmás Zalda, claims that "This decision is significant since it is the first time Operation Condor's existence has been proven in court. It's also the first time former Condor members have been imprisoned for their roles in the criminal organization." 

 

Anyone wanna go to Brazil?

 

In the year 2000, President Fernando Henrique Cardoso ordered the publication of some military documents related to Operation Condor. There are documents proving that in that year, attorney general Giancarlo Capaldo, an Italian magistrate, investigated the "disappearances" of Italian citizens in Latin America, which were most likely caused by the actions of Argentine, Paraguayan, Chilean, and Brazilian military personnel who tortured and murdered Italian citizens during Latin American military dictatorships. There was a list containing the names of eleven Brazilians accused of murder, kidnapping, and torture, as well as several high-ranking military personnel from other countries involved in the operation.

 

"(...) I can neither affirm nor deny because Argentine, Brazilian, Paraguayan, and Chilean soldiers [military men] will be subject to criminal trial until December," the Magistrate said on October 26, 2000.

 

According to the Italian government's official statement, it was unclear whether the government would prosecute the accused military officers or not. As of November 2021, no one in Brazil had been convicted of human rights violations for actions committed during the 21-year military dictatorship because the Amnesty Law had protected both government officials and leftist guerrillas.

 

In November 1978, the Condor Operation expanded its covert persecution from Uruguay to Brazil, in an incident dubbed "o Sequestro dos Uruguaios," or "the Kidnapping of the Uruguayans." Senior officials of the Uruguayan army crossed the border into Porto Alegre, the capital of the State of Rio Grande do Sul, with the permission of the Brazilian military administration. They kidnapped Universindo Rodriguez and Lilian Celiberti, a political activist couple from Uruguay, as well as her two children, Camilo and Francesca, who are five and three years old.

 

The unlawful operation failed because an anonymous phone call notified two Brazilian journalists, Veja magazine reporter Luiz Cláudio Cunha and photographer Joo Baptista Scalco, that the Uruguayan couple had been "disappeared." The two journalists traveled to the specified address, a Porto Alegre apartment, to double-check the facts. The armed men who had arrested Celiberti mistook the journalists for other political opposition members when they came, and they were arrested as well. Universindo Rodriguez and the children had already been brought to Uruguay under the table.

 

The journalists' presence had exposed the secret operation when their identities were revealed. It was put on hold. As news of the political kidnapping of Uruguayan nationals in Brazil made headlines in the Brazilian press, it is thought that the operation's disclosure avoided the death of the couple and their two young children. It became a worldwide embarrassment. Both Brazil's and Uruguay's military governments were humiliated. Officials arranged for the Celibertis' children to be transported to their maternal grandparents in Montevideo a few days later. After being imprisoned and tortured in Brazil, Rodriguez and Celiberti were transferred to Uruguayan military cells and held there for the next five years. The couple were released after Uruguay's democracy was restored in 1984. They confirmed every element of their kidnapping that had previously been reported.

 

In 1980, two DOPS (Department of Political and Social Order, an official police unit in charge of political repression during the military administration) inspectors were found guilty of arresting the journalists in Lilian's apartment in Porto Alegre by Brazilian courts. Joo Augusto da Rosa and Orandir Portassi Lucas were their names. They had been identified as participants in the kidnapping by the media and Uruguayans. This occurrence confirmed the Brazilian government's active involvement in the Condor Operation. Governor Pedro Simon arranged for the state of Rio Grande do Sul to legally recognize the Uruguayans' kidnapping and compensate them financially in 1991. A year later, President Luis Alberto Lacalle's democratic government in Uruguay was encouraged to do the same.

 

The Uruguayan couple identified Pedro Seelig, the head of the DOPS at the time of the kidnapping, as the guy in charge of the operation in Porto Alegre. Universindo and Llian remained in prison in Uruguay and were unable to testify when Seelig was on trial in Brazil. Due to a lack of proof, the Brazilian cop was acquitted. Later testimony from Lilian and Universindo revealed that four officers from Uruguay's secret Counter-Information Division – two majors and two captains – took part in the operation with the permission of Brazilian authorities. In the DOPS headquarters in Porto Alegre, Captain Glauco Yanonne was personally responsible for torturing Universindo Rodriquez. Universindo and Lilian were able to identify the Uruguayan military men who had arrested and tortured them, but none of them were prosecuted in Montevideo. Uruguayan individuals who committed acts of political repression and human rights violations under the dictatorship were granted pardon under the Law of Immunity, which was approved in 1986. Cunha and Scalco were given the 1979 Esso Prize, considered the most significant prize in Brazilian journalism, for their investigative journalism on the case.  Hugo Cores, a former political prisoner from Uruguay, was the one who had warned Cunha. He told the Brazilian press in 1993: All the Uruguayans kidnapped abroad, around 180 people, are missing to this day. The only ones who managed to survive are Lilian, her children, and Universindo.

 

Joo "Jango" Goulart was the first Brazilian president to die in exile after being deposed. On December 6, 1976, he died in his sleep in Mercedes, Argentina, of a suspected heart attack. The true cause of his death was never determined because an autopsy was never performed. On April 26, 2000, Leonel Brizola, Jango's brother-in-law and former governor of Rio de Janeiro and Rio Grande do Sul, claimed that ex-presidents Joo Goulart and Juscelino Kubitschek (who died in a vehicle accident) were assassinated as part of Operation Condor. He demanded that an investigation into their deaths be launched. On January 27, 2008, the newspaper Folha de S.Paulo published a report featuring a declaration from Mario Neira Barreiro, a former member of Uruguay's dictatorship's intelligence service. Barreiro confirmed Brizola's claims that Goulart had been poisoned. Sérgio Paranhos Fleury, the head of the Departamento de Ordem Poltica e Social (Department of Political and Social Order), gave the order to assassinate Goulart, according to Barreiro, and president Ernesto Geisel gave the permission to execute him. A special panel of the Rio Grande do Sul Legislative Assembly concluded in July 2008 that "the evidence that Jango was wilfully slain, with knowledge of the Geisel regime, is strong."

 

The magazine CartaCapital published previously unreleased National Information Service records generated by an undercover agent who was present at Jango's Uruguayan homes in March 2009. This new information backs up the idea that the former president was poisoned. The Goulart family has yet to figure out who the "B Agent," as he's referred to in the documents, might be. The agent was a close friend of Jango's, and he detailed a disagreement between the former president and his son during the former president's 56th birthday party, which was sparked by a brawl between two employees. As a result of the story, the Chamber of Deputies' Human Rights Commission agreed to look into Jango's death.

 

Later, Maria Teresa Fontela Goulart, Jango's widow, was interviewed by CartaCapital, who revealed records from the Uruguayan government confirming her accusations that her family had been tracked. Jango's travel, business, and political activities were all being watched by the Uruguayan government. These data date from 1965, a year after Brazil's coup, and they indicate that he may have been targeted. The President Joo Goulart Institute and the Movement for Justice and Human Rights have requested a document from the Uruguayan Interior Ministry stating that "serious and credible Brazilian sources'' discussed an "alleged plan against the former Brazilian president."

 

If you thought it wasn't enough, let's talk about Chile. No not the warm stew lie concoction you make to scorn your buddy’s stomach, but the country.

 

Additional information about Condor was released when Augusto Pinochet was detained in London in 1998 in response to Spanish magistrate Baltasar Garzón's request for his extradition to Spain. According to one of the lawyers requesting his extradition, Carlos Altamirano, the leader of the Chilean Socialist Party, was the target of an assassination attempt. He said that after Franco's funeral in Madrid in 1975, Pinochet contacted Italian neofascist terrorist Stefano Delle Chiaie and arranged for Altamirano's murder. The strategy didn't work out. Since the bodies of victims kidnapped and presumably murdered could not be found, Chilean judge Juan Guzmán Tapia established a precedent concerning the crime of "permanent kidnapping": he determined that the kidnapping was thought to be ongoing, rather than having occurred so long ago that the perpetrators were protected by an amnesty decreed in 1978 or the Chilean statute of limitations. The Chilean government admitted in November 2015 that Pablo Neruda may have been murdered by members of Pinochet's administration.

 

Assassinations

 

On September 30, 1974, a car bomb killed General Carlos Prats and his wife, Sofa Cuthbert, in Buenos Aires, where they were living in exile. The Chilean DINA has been charged with the crime. In January 2005, Chilean Judge Alejandro Sols ended Pinochet's case when the Chilean Supreme Court denied his request to strip Pinochet's immunity from prosecution (as chief of state). In Chile, the assassination of DINA commanders Manuel Contreras, ex-chief of operations and retired general Ral Itturiaga Neuman, his brother Roger Itturiaga, and ex-brigadiers Pedro Espinoza Bravo and José Zara was accused. In Argentina, DINA agent Enrique Arancibia Clavel was found guilty of the murder.

 

After moving in exile in Italy, Bernardo Leighton and his wife were severely injured in a botched assassination attempt on October 6, 1975. Bernardo Leighton was critically injured in the gun attack, and his wife, Anita Fresno, was permanently crippled. Stefano Delle Chiaie met with Michael Townley and Virgilio Paz Romero in Madrid in 1975 to plan the murder of Bernardo Leighton with the help of Franco's secret police, according to declassified documents in the National Security Archive and Italian attorney general Giovanni Salvi, who led the prosecution of former DINA head Manuel Contreras. Glyn T. Davies, the secretary of the National Security Council (NSC), said in 1999 that declassified records indicated Pinochet's government's responsibility for the failed assassination attempt on Bernardo Leighton, Orlando Letelier, and General Carlos Prats on October 6, 1975.

 

In a December 2004 OpEd piece in the Los Angeles Times, Francisco Letelier, Orlando Letelier's son, claimed that his father's killing was part of Operation Condor, which he described as "an intelligence-sharing network employed by six South American tyrants of the time to eliminate dissidents."

 

Letelier's death, according to Michael Townley, was caused by Pinochet. Townley admitted to hiring five anti-Castro Cuban exiles to set up a booby-trap in Letelier's automobile. Following consultations with the terrorist organization CORU's leadership, including Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch, Cuban-Americans José Dionisio Suárez, Virgilio Paz Romero, Alvin Ross Daz, and brothers Guillermo and Ignacio Novo Sampoll were chosen to carry out the murder, according to Jean-Guy Allard. The Miami Herald reports that Luis Posada Carriles was there at the conference that decided on Letelier's death as well as the bombing of Cubana Flight 455.

 

During a public protest against Pinochet in July 1986, photographer Rodrigo Rojas DeNegri was burned alive and Carmen Gloria Quintana received significant burns. The case of the two became known as Caso Quemados ("The Burned Case"), and it drew attention in the United States because Rojas had fled to the United States following the 1973 coup. [96] According to a document from the US State Department, the Chilean army set fire to both Rojas and Quintana on purpose. Rojas and Quintana, on the other hand, were accused by Pinochet of being terrorists who lit themselves on fire with their own Molotov cocktails. Pinochet's reaction to the attack and killing of Rojas, according to National Security Archive analyst Peter Kornbluh, was "contributed to Reagan’s decision to withdraw support for the regime and press for a return to civilian rule."

 

Operación Silencio

 

Operación Silencio (Operation Silence) was a Chilean operation that removed witnesses from the country in order to obstruct investigations by Chilean judges. It began about a year before the "terror archives" in Paraguay were discovered. Arturo Sanhueza Ross, the man accused of assassinating MIR leader Jecar Neghme in 1989, departed the country in April 1991. 

 

According to the Rettig Report, Chilean intelligence officers were responsible for Jecar Neghme's killing. Carlos Herrera Jiménez, the man who assassinated trade unionist Tucapel Jiménez, flew out in September 1991. Eugenio Berros, a chemist who had cooperated with DINA agent Michael Townley, was led by Operation Condor agents from Chile to Uruguay in October 1991 in order to avoid testifying in the Letelier case. He used passports from Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Brazil, prompting suspicions that Operation Condor was still active. In 1995, Berros was discovered dead in El Pinar, Uruguay, near Montevideo. His corpse had been mangled to the point where it was hard to identify him by sight.

 

Michael Townley, who is now under witness protection in the United States, recognized linkages between Chile, DINA, and the incarceration and torture camp Colonia Dignidad in January 2005. The facility was founded in 1961 by Paul Schäfer, who was arrested and convicted of child rape in Buenos Aires in March 2005. Interpol was notified about Colonia Dignidad and the Army's Bacteriological Warfare Laboratory by Townley. This lab would have taken the place of the previous DINA lab on Via Naranja de lo Curro, where Townley collaborated with chemical assassin Eugenio Berros. According to the court reviewing the case, the toxin that allegedly murdered Christian-Democrat Eduardo Frei Montalva could have been created at this new lab in Colonia Dignidad. Dossiê Jango, a Brazilian-Uruguayan-Argentine collaboration film released in 2013, accused the same lab in the alleged poisoning of Brazil's deposed president, Joo Goulart.

 

Congressman Koch

 

The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents was released in February 2004 by reporter John Dinges. He reported that in mid-1976, Uruguayan military officers threatened to assassinate United States Congressman Edward Koch (later Mayor of New York City). The CIA station commander in Montevideo had received information about it in late July 1976. He advised the Agency to take no action after finding that the men were inebriated at the time. Colonel José Fons, who was present at the November 1975 covert meeting in Santiago, Chile, and Major José Nino Gavazzo, who led a team of intelligence agents working in Argentina in 1976 and was responsible for the deaths of over 100 Uruguayans, were among the Uruguayan officers.

 

Koch told Dinges in the early twenty-first century that CIA Director George H. W. Bush informed him in October 1976 that "his sponsorship of legislation to cut off US military assistance to Uruguay on human rights concerns had prompted secret police officers to 'put a contract out for you'." Koch wrote to the Justice Department in mid-October 1976, requesting FBI protection, but he received none. It had been more than two months after the meeting and the assassination of Orlando Letelier in Washington. Colonel Fons and Major Gavazzo were sent to important diplomatic postings in Washington, D.C. in late 1976. The State Department ordered the Uruguayan government to rescind their appointments, citing the possibility of "unpleasant publicity" for "Fons and Gavazzo."  Only in 2001 did Koch learn of the links between the threats and the position appointments.

 

Paraguay

The US supported Alfredo Stroessner's anti-communist military dictatorship and played a "vital supporting role" in Stroessner's Paraguay's domestic affairs. As part of Operation Condor, for example, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Thierry of the United States Army was deployed to assist local workers in the construction of "La Technica," a detention and interrogation center. La Technica was also renowned as a torture facility. Pastor Coronel, Stroessner's secret police, washed their victims in human vomit and excrement tubs and shocked them in the rectum with electric cattle prods. They decapitated Miguel Angel Soler [es], the Communist party secretary, with a chainsaw while Stroessner listened on the phone. Stroessner asked that tapes of inmates wailing in agony be presented to their relatives.

 

Harry Shlaudeman defined Paraguay's militarized state as a "nineteenth-century military administration that looks nice on the cartoon page" in a report to Kissinger. Shlaudeman's assessments were paternalistic, but he was correct in observing that Paraguay's "backwardness" was causing it to follow in the footsteps of its neighbors. Many decolonized countries regarded national security concerns in terms of neighboring countries and long-standing ethnic or regional feuds, but the United States viewed conflict from a global and ideological viewpoint. During the Chaco War, Shlaudeman mentions Paraguay's amazing fortitude in the face of greater military force from its neighbors. The government of Paraguay believes that the country's victory over its neighbors over several decades justifies the country's lack of progress. The paper goes on to say that Paraguay's political traditions were far from democratic. Because of this reality, as well as a fear of leftist protest in neighboring countries, the government has prioritized the containment of political opposition over the growth of its economic and political institutions. They were driven to defend their sovereignty due to an ideological fear of their neighbors. As a result, many officials were inspired to act in the interest of security by the fight against radical, communist movements both within and beyond the country. The book Opération Condor, written by French writer Pablo Daniel Magee and prefaced by Costa Gavras, was published in 2020. The story chronicles the life of Martin Almada, a Paraguayan who was a victim of the Condor Operation.

 

The Peruvian Case

 

After being kidnapped in 1978, Peruvian legislator Javier Diez Canseco announced that he and twelve other compatriots (Justiniano Apaza Ordóñez, Hugo Blanco, Genaro Ledesma Izquieta, Valentín Pacho, Ricardo Letts, César Lévano, Ricardo Napurí, José Luis Alvarado Bravo, Alfonso Baella Tuesta, Guillermo Faura Gaig, José Arce Larco and Humberto Damonte). All opponents of Francisco Morales Bermudez's dictatorship were exiled and handed over to the Argentine armed forces in Jujuy in 1978 after being kidnapped in Peru. He also claimed that declassified CIA documents and WikiLeaks cable information account for the Morales Bermudez government's ties to Operation Condor.

 

Uruguay

 

Juan Mara Bordaberry declared himself dictator and banned the rest of the political parties, as was customary in the Southern Cone dictatorships of the 1970s. In the alleged defense against subversion, a large number of people were murdered, tortured, unjustly detained and imprisoned, kidnapped, and forced into disappearance during the de facto administration, which lasted from 1973 until 1985. Prior to the coup d'état in 1973, the CIA served as a consultant to the country's law enforcement institutions. Dan Mitrione, perhaps the most well-known example of such cooperation, had taught civilian police in counterinsurgency at the School of the Americas in Panama, afterwards renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation.

 

Maybe now we can talk about the U.S involvement? The U.S never gets involved in anything so this might be new to some of you.

 

According to US paperwork, the US supplied critical organizational, financial, and technological help to the operation far into the 1980s.

The long-term hazards of a right-wing bloc, as well as its early policy recommendations, were discussed in a US Department of State briefing for Henry Kissinger, then Secretary of State, dated 3 August 1976, prepared by Harry Shlaudeman and titled "Third World War and South America." The briefing was an overview of security forces in the Southern Cone. The operation was described as a joint effort by six Latin American countries (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay) to win the "Third World War" by eliminating "subversion" through transnational secret intelligence operations, kidnapping, torture, disappearance, and assassination. The research begins by examining the sense of unity shared by the six countries of the Southern Cone. Kissinger is warned by Shlaudeman that the "Third World War" will trap those six countries in an ambiguous position in the long run, because they are trapped on one side by "international Marxism and its terrorist exponents," and on the other by "the hostility of uncomprehending industrial democracies misled by Marxist propaganda." According to the report, US policy toward Operation Condor should “emphasize the differences between the five countries at all times, depoliticize human rights, oppose rhetorical exaggerations of the ‘Third-World-War’ type, and bring potential bloc members back into our cognitive universe through systematic exchanges.” According to CIA papers from 1976, strategies to deal with political dissidents in South America were planned among international security officials at the US Army School of the Americas and the Conference of American Armies from 1960 to the early 1970s. "In early 1974, security officials from Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay, and Bolivia convened in Buenos Aires to arrange synchronized attacks against subversive targets," according to a declassified CIA memo dated June 23, 1976. Officials in the United States were aware of the situation.

 

Furthermore, the Defense Intelligence Agency revealed in September 1976 that US intelligence services were well aware of Operation Condor's architecture and intentions. They discovered that "Operation Condor" was the covert name for gathering intelligence on "leftists," Communists, Peronists, or Marxists in the Southern Cone Area. The intelligence services were aware that the operation was being coordinated by the intelligence agencies of numerous South American nations (including Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay, and Bolivia), with Chile serving as the hub. Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile, according to the DIA, were already aggressively pursuing operations against communist targets, primarily in Argentina.

 

The report's third point reveals the US comprehension of Operation Condor's most malevolent actions. "The development of special teams from member countries to execute out operations, including killings against terrorists or sympathizers of terrorist groups," according to the paper. Although these special teams were intelligence agency operatives rather than military troops, they did work in structures similar to those used by US special forces teams, according to the study. Operation Condor's preparations to undertake probable operations in France and Portugal were revealed in Kissinger's State Department briefing - an issue that would later prove to be immensely contentious in Condor's history.

 

Condor's core was formed by the US government's sponsorship and collaboration with DINA (Directorate of National Intelligence) and other intelligence agencies. According to CIA papers, the agency maintained intimate ties with officers of Chile's secret police, DINA, and its leader Manuel Contreras.  Even after his role in the Letelier-Moffit killing was discovered, Contreras was kept as a paid CIA contact until 1977. Official requests to trace suspects to and from the US Embassy, the CIA, and the FBI may be found in the Paraguayan Archives. The military states received suspect lists and other intelligence material from the CIA. In 1975, the FBI conducted a nationwide hunt in the United States for persons sought by DINA.

 

In a February 1976 telegram from the Buenos Aires embassy to the State Department, intelligence said that the US was aware of the impending Argentinian coup. According to the ambassador, the Chief of the Foreign Ministry's North American desk revealed that the "Military Planning Group" had asked him to prepare a report and recommendations on how the "future military government can avoid or minimize the sort of problems the Chilean and Uruguayan governments are having with the US over human rights issues." The Chief also indicated that "they" (whether he is talking to the CIA or Argentina's future military dictatorship, or both) will confront opposition if they start assassinating and killing people. Assuming this is so, the envoy notes that the military coup will "intend to carry forward an all-out war on the terrorists and that some executions would therefore probably be necessary." Despite already being engaged in the region's politics, this indicates that the US was aware of the planning of human rights breaches before they occurred and did not intervene to prevent them. "It is encouraging to note that the Argentine military are aware of the problem and are already focusing on ways to avoid letting human rights issues become an irritant in US-Argentine Relations." This is confirmation.

 

Professor Ruth Blakeley says that Kissinger "explicitly expressed his support for the repression of political opponents" in regards to the Argentine junta's continuous human rights violations.  When Henry Kissinger met with Argentina's Foreign Minister on October 5, 1976, he said, ” Look, our basic attitude is that we would like you to succeed. I have an old-fashioned view that friends ought to be supported. What is not understood in the United States is that you have a civil war. We read about human rights problems but not the context. The quicker you succeed the better ... The human rights problem is a growing one. Your Ambassador can apprise you. We want a stable situation. We won't cause you unnecessary difficulties. If you can finish before Congress gets back, the better. Whatever freedoms you could restore would help.”

 

The démarche was never provided in the end. According to Kornbluh and Dinges, the decision not to deliver Kissinger's directive was based on Assistant Secretary Harry Shlaudeman's letter to his deputy in Washington, D.C., which stated: "you can simply instruct the Ambassadors to take no further action, noting that there have been no reports in some weeks indicating an intention to activate the Condor scheme."

 

President Bill Clinton ordered the State Department to release hundreds of declassified papers in June 1999, indicating for the first time that the CIA, State, and Defense Departments were all aware of Condor. According to a 1 October 1976 DOD intelligence assessment, Latin American military commanders gloat about it to their American colleagues. Condor's "joint counterinsurgency operations" sought to "eliminate Marxist terrorist activities," according to the same study; Argentina developed a special Condor force "structured much like a US Special Forces Team," it said. According to a summary of documents disclosed in 2004, The declassified record shows that Secretary of State Henry Kissinger was briefed on Condor and its "murder operations" on August 5, 1976, in a 14-page report from [Harry] Shlaudeman [Assistant Secretary of State]. "Internationally, the Latin generals look like our guys," Shlaudeman cautioned. "We are especially identified with Chile. It cannot do us any good." Shlaudeman and his two deputies, William Luers and Hewson Ryan, recommended action. Over the course of three weeks, they drafted a cautiously worded demarche, approved by Kissinger, in which he instructed the U.S. ambassadors in the Southern Cone countries to meet with the respective heads of state about Condor. He instructed them to express "our deep concern" about "rumors" of "plans for the assassination of subversives, politicians and prominent figures both within the national borders of certain Southern Cone countries and abroad."

 

Kornbluh and Dinges come to the conclusion that "The paper trail is clear: the State Department and the CIA had enough intelligence to take concrete steps to thwart the Condor assassination planning. Those steps were initiated but never implemented." Hewson Ryan, Shlaudeman's deputy, subsequently admitted in an oral history interview that the State Department's treatment of the issue was "remiss." "We knew fairly early on that the governments of the Southern Cone countries were planning, or at least talking about, some assassinations abroad in the summer of 1976. ... Whether if we had gone in, we might have prevented this, I don't know", In relation to the Letelier-Moffitt bombing, he remarked, "But we didn't."

 

Condor was defined as a "counter-terrorism organization" in a CIA document, which also mentioned that the Condor countries had a specific telecommunications system known as "CONDORTEL."  The New York Times released a communication from US Ambassador to Paraguay Robert White to Secretary of State Cyrus Vance on March 6, 2001. The paper was declassified and disseminated by the Clinton administration in November 2000 as part of the Chile Declassification Project. General Alejandro Fretes Davalos, the chief of staff of Paraguay's armed forces, told White that the South American intelligence chiefs engaged in Condor "kept in touch with one another through a United States communications installation in the Panama Canal Zone that covered all of Latin America."

 

According to reports, Davalos stated that the station was "employed to coordinate intelligence information among the southern cone countries". The US was concerned that the Condor link would be made public at a time when the killing of Chilean former minister Orlando Letelier and his American aide Ronni Moffitt in the United States was being probed."it would seem advisable to review this arrangement to insure that its continuation is in US interest." White wrote to Vance. "Another piece of increasingly weighty evidence suggesting that U.S. military and intelligence officials supported and collaborated with Condor as a secret partner or sponsor." McSherry rebutted the cables. Furthermore, an Argentine military source told a U.S. Embassy contact that the CIA was aware of Condor and had played a vital role in establishing computerized linkages among the six Condor governments' intelligence and operations sections.

 

After all this it doesn't stop here. We even see France having a connection. The original document confirming that a 1959 agreement between Paris and Buenos Aires set up a "permanent French military mission" of officers to Argentina who had participated in the Algerian War was discovered in the archives of the Quai d'Orsay, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It was kept at the offices of the Argentine Army's chief of staff. It lasted until 1981, when François Mitterrand was elected President of France. She revealed how the administration of Valéry Giscard d'Estaing secretly coordinated with Videla's junta in Argentina and Augusto Pinochet's tyranny in Chile.

 

Even Britain and West Germany looked into using the tactics in their own countries. Going so far as to send their open personnel to Buenos Aires to discuss how to establish a similar network. 

MOVIES

 

https://www.imdb.com/search/keyword/?keywords=military-coup&sort=num_votes,desc&mode=detail&page=1&title_type=movie&ref_=kw_ref_typ

https://islandora.wrlc.org/islandora/object/terror%3Aroot

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archives_of_Terror

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Condor

https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-20774985

https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB239d/index.htm

Who was the Texarkana Moonlight Murderer?

The Texarkana Moonlight Murders

 

Were a series of murders in the spring of 1946 where 8 people were attacked, 5 of which murdered. Similar to the Zodiac and the Monster of Florence, the attacker focused on male/female couples. Also similar to those cases, the attacker has never been caught.

 

OK, first off, what the hell is Texarkana? You’re probably thinking “that’s not a state I’ve ever heard of.” and you, passenger, would be correct. 

 

Texarkana began as a railroad and lumber center and is considered the two county area between Texarkana, Arkansas in Miller County and Texarkana, Texas in Bowie County and according to the US Office of Management and Budget, the Texarkana metropolitan statistical area (or MSA) has the area with around 137,000 people living in it, as of the 2020 census.

 

The Red River Army Depot and Lone Star Ammunition Plant seemed to drive the jobs to the area, mainly due in part to that little skirmish called World War 2, in the 1940’s.

 

It was founded in 1873 and has three possibilities of how it acquired its name. 

 

First, there was a Red River steamboat that tugged around the area named “The Texarkana” and the settlers just liked the name.

 

Second, a storekeeper named “Swindle” from Louisiana made up a drink called “Texarkana Bitters” and the settlers were a bunch of drunks who liked that name. My kinda folks!

 

Third, it was named by railroad surveyor, Colonel Gus Knobel, who took one look out his front door and said:

 

“Well, there’s Texas over there, Arkansas over there and Louisina down there. Hmmm… I got it! “Arkanexasiana!” No… That won’t do. Think, Colonel, think! “Louie’s Assless Exes!” Dammit! No… Texarkana! Eureka! That’s the stuff!”

 

The area is also home to the Fouke Monster, which resides in Boggy Creek and seems to be their version of the one and only Moody, I MEAN SASQUATCH! 

 

The four violent attacks took place from February to May in 1946, which doesn’t seem like spring but let’s just go with it. The attacker had his sights on couples. Male/female couples to be exact. Although focusing on gay couples would have made the area and the attacker quite progressive for the time. Or much worse.

 

The first attack was on Friday, February 22 of 1946, right around 11:45 at night. 25 year old Jimmy Hollis and his 19 year old girlfriend, Mary Jeanne Larey decided to head to lovers lane after seeing a movie together. I’m not sure what movie they saw but it was probably either Song of the South, The Stranger or Strangler of the Swamp.

 

Regardless, after the movie they wanted to do some neckin’ and proceed to park at lovers lane, which was about 300 ft past the last row of houses in that area. Ten minutes later, as they were sitting in the secluded and dark area, probably talking about how the moon was made of cheese, a flashlight suddenly shined through Jimmy’s driver side window. As he looked up, all he could see was a figure resembling a man with a white cloth mask and eye holes cut out, standing outside his door. The mask was said to look like a pillowcase with eye holes. Which is frightening in and of itself.

 

Jimmy, thinking it may be a joke, told the guy to fuck off and that he had the wrong car, to which the man said: “I don’t want to kill you, fella, so do what I say.”

 

The masked man then ordered Jimmy and his girlfriend, Mary Jeanne, out of the car, through the drivers door when the man yelled, “Take off your goddamn britches!” This order was directed at Jimmy and as he was doing what the terrifying man said to do, the attacker pulled out a pistol and cracked Jimmy in the head, twice. Later on, Mary Jeanne would say that the sound of him hitting Jimmy was so loud, she thought they were gunshots. Instead, those sounds were Jimmy’s skull fracturing.

 

Rightfully so, Mary Jeanne assumed the dude with the gun was trying to rob them. She grabbed Jimmy’s wallet and showed the man that he was broke as a joke, when the man smacked her in the head with a blunt object, presumably the gun handle or the flashlight.

 

The attacker told her to get on her feet and as she stood, he told her to run. She took off running toward a ditch but the man yelled at her and told her to run up the road.

 

“Not toward the ditch, woman! There’s snakes in there! I hate snakes! Head up the road like a civilized victim!”

 

Mary Jeanne hightailed it up the road and spotted a car but there was no one inside. Then, as she turned around and like she was magically whisked away to an 80’s slasher flick, the attacker was standing there, asking her why she was running. For some reason, that part freaks me out. Maybe because he’s obviously toying with her or maybe because I was traumatized by Friday the 13th, as a child.

 

Mary Jeanne responded to the man by telling him that he had told her to run. This set him off and he yelled “Liar!” He then knocked her to the ground and proceeded to sexually assault her… with the barrel of his pistol. YUCK!

 

After the assault, Mary Jeanne gathered herself up and ran to a house nearby where she banged on the door, waking the residents, who then helped her call the police.

 

During this time, or shortly after, Jimmy had regained consciousness and flagged down a passing car who ran and called the police, as well. 

 

Bowie County Sheriff Presley and three officers arrived on the scene, short of 30 minutes, but the attacker was nowhere to be found. Mary Jeanne spent the night in the hospital for her head wound and Jimmy was there for several days with multiple skull fractures.

 

When asked to give detailed descriptions of their attacker, Jimmy and Mary Jeanne had slightly different details. Well, they both agreed that he was around 6 feet tall but Mary Jeanne claimed that she could see under the man’s mask and that he was a light skinned black man. Jimmy, however, said the guy was a tanned white man, around 30 years old but couldn’t really see more than that due to the flashlight being blared into his face. 

 

The police continuously questioned Mary Jeannes account of the attack and they believed that the couple knew their attacker and were just covering for him. 

 

Could it have been a jilted ex of Mary Jeanne’s? Is that why Jimmy was pistol whipped and she had only a minor injury? Is this why she said it was a black man instead of giving up the perpetrators real identity?

 

The morning of Sunday, March 24th, 1946, a passing motorist saw a parked car on lovers lane, just south of the highway and decided to check if they needed help or to just be nosey. What they first believed to be two people asleep in their vehicle, turned out to be the lifeless bodies of 29 year old Richard Griffin and his girlfriend, 17 year old Polly Ann More.

 

Richard was found shot twice, on his knees between the front seats, hands crossed, his head laying on his hands and his pockets turned inside out. Polly Ann was lying face down in the back seat with evidence suggesting they had been murdered outside of the car and then placed there. A blood soaked patch of soil and congealed blood on one of the running boards, as it appeared to have flowed out from the bottom of the car door.

 

They were both fully clothed and both had been shot in the back of the head and a .32 caliber shell was found and investigators believed it may have been fired from a pistol wrapped in a blanket.

 

There were no pathologist examinations of the bodies, which seems odd, but 1946 Texarkana, I guess. This didn’t stop the rumors from flying around saying that Polly Ann had been sexually assaulted. These rumors were put to rest with later reports.

 

17 year old Paul Martin picked up his 15 year old girlfriend, Betty Jo Booker from the local VFW (The VFW or veterans of foreign wars is an establishment set up for former military personnel who had fought in wars, and expeditions on foreign land, waters, or airspace.) after a musical performance on Sunday, April 14th right around 1:30 in the morning.

 

Later, at approximately 6:30 that morning, Paul’s lifeless body was found on the side of a nearby road, lying on its left side. His body had been riddled with bullet holes through his nose, through his ribs from the back, through his right hand and one through the back of his neck. Investigators found blood on the opposite side of the road, leading them to believe that he was allegedly alive when he crossed the road, after being shot four times. 

 

Paul’s girlfriend, Betty Jo was found at approximately 11:30am by a search party. Her body was lying almost 2 miles away from Paul’s, hidden behind a tree. She was fully clothed, laying on her back with her right hand inside the pocket of the buttoned up overcoat she was wearing. 

 

She had been shot twice, once in the face and the other shot went through her chest. According to investigators, the weapon used was a .32 caliber Colt pistol, the same pistol type used in the first set of murders.

 

Paul’s car wasn’t found near his body but instead was found 3 miles away from where his body was found. The car was sitting parked, keys in the ignition, at Spring Lake Park. 

 

The investigators couldn’t determine if Paul or Betty Jo had been shot first. According to the sheriff and Captain Manuel Gonzaullas of the Texas Rangers, their investigations determined that both of the victims put up a hell of a fight.

 

Tom Albritton, a friend of Paul’s, stated that he didn’t believe there was an argument between the couple and that Paul didn’t have any enemies.

 

So on Friday, May 3rd in the same year, around 9 at night, 37 year old Virgil Starks and his wife Katie were in their home, set on a 500 acre farm. Now I’m pretty sure there's a few movies based on similar events such as this one. Their home was just off the local highway, 67 East, which was about ten miles northeast of Texarkana.

 

Virgil was sitting quietly in his armchair in the living room. He was reading some quality information from his local newspaper when suddenly, he was shot TWICE in the back of the head from a closed double window.

 

With all the ruckus and the sound of broken glass, Katie hurriedly ran into the living room to see her husband stand up then slowly slump back into the armchair he was sitting in.

She went to check on her husband, only to realize he was dead. In a panic, she quickly went to the old school style, wall-crank phone to call the police. With two rings of the phone she too was shot twice from the same damn window. This time in the face. She fell to the floor, but to the shooter’s dismay, she quickly regained her footing and rushed to grab a pistol from another room. Let’s just say she was a badass, am I right? With the wounds she suffered, she was blinded by her own blood, and was not able to grab the pistol she was looking for.

 

Hearing the sound of the killer quickly approaching from the back of the house, she burst out of the front door with only her nightgown on, and ran barefoot across the street to her brother and sister-in-law's house.

 

After trying to get someone to come to the door and being unsuccessful, she took off down the street to her neighbors house, A. V. Prater, where she was only able to let out a gasp and say “Virgil’s dead”, and then she fell over and passed out.

 

Prater proceeded to fire his rifle into the air to alert another neighbor, Elmer Taylor. Prater had Taylor grab his car so they could all take Katie to the hospital.

 

While at the hospital, Katie was questioned by sheriff Davis. The Sheriff questioned her again about 4 days later to verify his original statement. She, the sheriff, was then able to confirm that a rumor regarding Virgil was false. This rumor was that he believed he heard a car outside their home for several nights in a row and he feared being killed prior to his murder.

 

Some good news, though! Katie Starks did, somehow, survive her wounds. Those shots, as crazy as it sounds, did not kill or severely injure her. One bullet went through the right cheek beside the nose, emerging behind the left ear. The other bullet went in her lower jaw below the lip; breaking her jaw and splintering several teeth, where the bullet was lodged right under her tongue. Holy shit, what a strong woman!

 

Katie lived to the ripe old age of 84. She remarried and is currently buried between both of her husbands in Hillcrest cemetery.

INVESTIGATIONS:

As mentioned before, the police never believed Mary Jeanne Larey’s story and that she and her boyfriend knew the perpetrator. I’m not entirely sure why they would cover up the attack, but Mary Jeanne came back to the area after the first set of murders. Supposedly, she wanted to help in the investigation and link the murderer to her and her boyfriend’s attacker. However, the Texas Rangers insisted that she knew who it was. Was she there to throw them off the trail? Did she just want to see what they knew? 

 

Their attack wasn’t even connected to the murders until the Texarkana Gazette published their interview with Mary Jeanne. This was only when the police asked the public to come forward if they had any knowledge of the murders or any unexplained absences when the murders occured. 

 

The first set of murders launched a huge, citywide investigation. The Texas Police, Arkansas Police, The Texas Rangers (headed by the Texas Department of Public Safety, both Miller and Cass county sheriff's offices and the FBI were all involved in questioning over 200 people. Unfortunately, almost all were false leads.

 

There were three different people with bloody clothing found, but all three were cleared.

 

The second double murder case had the police working in 24 hour shifts, questioning everyone and bringing in potential suspects from up to 100 miles away.

 

At one point, law enforcement attempted to set up a sting operation by asking teenagers to act as decoys in parked cars with the police patiently waiting nearby. Some police would even act as decoys with their partners or even mannequins sitting in their cars next to them. There were even a few officers that would hide in trees in Spring Lake Park in the hopes of seeing and potentially catching some nutjob doing some dirty shit.

 

After the 3rd set of attacks and the murder of Mr. Starks and the attempted murder of Mrs. Starks, blockades were set up. Anyone driving around in the area were stopped and questioned, including several men who were hanging around.

 

2 days after the Starks attacks, the investigation had 47 officers involved, trying to solve the case. They even brought in a mobile radio station and a teletype machine, along with twenty additional police from Arkansas to assist in their efforts.

 

Unofficially, law enforcement believed they had a “sex maniac” on their hands because the attacker left large amounts of money and Mrs. Starks purse in the home. Robbery was obviously not the motive.

 

At first, the police offered a $500 reward for any new information, but this only brought in over 100 crappy leads that went nowhere. It was then bumped up to $1700, then $7,025 after the Starks attack and within the ten days following, it was up to $10,000.

 

The police debated on whether or not the Stark’s attack was even related to the other crimes, due to the type of weapon that was used. The sheriff believed it was a .22 caliber rifle as opposed to a .32 caliber pistol. 

 

Eventually, law enforcement stated that the Stark’s attack was NOT related to the other two double murders.

 

Obviously, the public was scared shitless. Without even knowing about the first set of attacks, the fact that two teenagers that were involved with the church had been murdered, sent the town into a frenzy, calling the killer “The Phantom.”

 

Where once there were unlocked homes, the townspeople began locking their doors, arming themselves, nailing sheets over their windows, nailing windows completely down and using makeshift window guards. 

 

They set up curfews for businesses to attempt to keep people from going out at night but as the news of Virgil Starks, being murdered, especially in his own home, attached itself to the horrific story, it was all over the news in and around the surrounding areas.

 

Stores ran out of guns, ammo, locks, window shades and blinds and the search for guard dogs increased.

 

News outlets even stated that “the killer might strike again at any moment, at any place, and at anyone.”

 

With its heightened sense of alert and everyone toting guns, Texarkana, once easy going and peaceful, became an area of danger. It was so bad that when the police would answer calls or check on disturbances, they had to turn on their sirens, stand in front of the headlights and yell “HEY! IT’S THE FUZZ!” so they wouldn’t be shot at by some scared, nervous homeowner.

 

This was only exacerbated when Texas Ranger Gonzaullas told “oil up their guns and see if they are loaded” and to “not hesitate” if people were inclined to bust a cap in someone’s suspicious ass.

 

Gun sales and fear reached other cities, as well, including Oklahoma City, some 5 hours away. Luckily, the people’s concern diminished after about 3 months, with no other attacks happening, in that time.

 

Of course the rumors of the murderer being caught, being held in the county jail or sent off to another jail were flying around and the Texas Rangers had to hold a press conference to tell everyone to shut the fuck up because those rumors were making their investigation that much more difficult. Stating the rumors were “a hindrance to the investigation and harmful to innocent persons.”, the same press conference informed the folks around town that the murderer had NOT been caught, despite the rumors suggesting otherwise. Gonzaullas also said “Rumors only take the officers from the main route of the investigation. It is so important that we capture this man that we cannot afford to overlook any lead, no matter how fantastic it may seem.” This was mainly because a lot of innocent people were accused of being “The Phantom.”

 

Then there were the vigilantes. Teenagers sitting in parked cars HOPING to catch the criminal. One instance had a couple of police officers walk up on a parked car with a couple inside and as the officers announced who they were, a girl inside said “It’s a good thing you told me who you are,” as she showed them the .25 caliber pistol she had pointed at them.

 

Texas Ranger Gonzaullas gave a statement to the Gazette, telling people that vigilantism was “a good way to get killed.”

 

SUSPECTS

The “Phantom”, as he was dubbed by the Texarkana Daily News and was continuously called by other news outlets at the time, was described as being around 6 feet tall, wearing a white mask with eye and mouth holes cut out. However, the first attack, where the police were weary of their conflicting statements, was the only time a description was able to be given of the perpetrator. He attacked late at night, on the weekends, focused on young couples, took a 3 week cooling off period and used a .32 caliber pistol. Even though they came out and officially said that the Stark’s attack wasn’t affiliated with the “Phantom Murders”, due to the type of gun used, a lot of law enforcement and citizens believed it was.

 

Texas Ranger Gonzaullas believed the murderer was a “shrewd criminal who had left no stone unturned to conceal his identity and activities,” was a “cunning individual who would go to all lengths to avoid apprehension” and that his attacks were clever and baffling.  

 

Sheriff Presley stated, “This killer is the luckiest person I have ever known. No one sees him, hears him in time, or can identify him in any way." 

 

A psychologist at the Federal Correctional Institution in Texarkana, Dr. Anthony Lapalla, believed that the one person committed all five murders and that he was planning on killing people the way he murdered Virgil Starks. In their homes with no one to stop him. He also believed he was motivated by a strong sex drive and sadism.

 

His shift from the parked cars on the dark and desolate roads to the farmhouse of the Starks also leads Lapalla to believe that the killer was smart enough to know that he had to change his behavior. He also stated that there was evidence of “deep planning, that he worked alone, told no one of his crimes and could shift his crimes to a distant community or overcome the desire to assault and kill people.”

 

However, this dickhead is the same person that said he didn’t believe the murderer was a black man because… AND I QUOTE… “In general, negro criminals are not that clever.” What the fuck.

 

Almost 400 suspects were arrested throughout this case.

Of course there were a shit ton of false confessions. There were at least nine people who confessed to being the Phantom, but their shit didn’t line up with the facts of the case.

In the first attack case where no one was murdered, no suspects were ever apprehended. Remember, that’s the one where law enforcement believed the victims were covering for someone.

 

Ok, let’s talk about Youell Swinney

According to Wikipedia

Youell Swinney was a 29-year-old car thief and counterfeiter. He was arrested in July by Tackett, who was investigating car thefts after realizing that on the night of the Griffin-Moore murders a car had been stolen in the area and a previously stolen car had been found abandoned. Tackett was able to locate the former car and arrested Swinney's wife Peggy when she came to retrieve it. Peggy confessed in great detail that Swinney was the Phantom Killer and had killed Booker and Martin. Her story changed in some details across several interviews, and police believed she was withholding information due to fear of Swinney or of incriminating herself.

Police were able to independently verify some details of Peggy's confession, such as the location of a victim's possessions where she said Youell had discarded them. There was considerable circumstantial evidence against Swinney, but Peggy's confession was the most critical part of the case. However, Peggy recanted her confession, was considered an unreliable witness, and could not be compelled to testify against her husband.

Law enforcement officers worked for six months trying to validate Peggy's confession and tie Swinney to the murders. They found that on the night of the Booker-Martin murders, the Swinneys were sleeping in their car under a bridge near San Antonio. Swinney was never charged with murder and was instead tried and imprisoned as a habitual offender for car theft. Presley reported in his 2014 book that investigators in the Swinney case later said that the sentence was effectively a plea bargain, though the case files indicated no formal agreement. Swinney was apparently concerned about being sentenced to death for the murders, so agreed to not contest the habitual offender charge and in fact tried to plead guilty despite the charge requiring a jury trial.

H. B. "Doodie" Tennison

Henry Booker "Doodie" Tennison was an 18-year-old university freshman who died by suicide on November 4, 1948, leaving behind cryptic instructions which directed investigators to a suicide note in which Tennison confessed to the Booker, Martin, and Starks murders. He had played trombone in the same high-school band as Booker, but they were not friends. Investigators were unable to find any other evidence linking Tennison to the murders. James Freeman, a friend of Tennison, provided an alibi for the night of the Starks murder, stating that they had been playing cards that evening when they heard the news of the attack.

Ralph B. Baumann

Ralph B. Baumann, a 21-year-old ex-Army Air Force (AAF) machine-gunner, claimed to have awoken from a fugue state of several weeks on the day of the Starks murder, with his rifle missing. He said that he heard about a suspect matching his description and hitchhiked to Los Angeles, feeling like he was running from murder. On May 23, he told Los Angeles police that he thought he might be the Phantom. "I'm my own suspect," he said.

Police arrested him but Gonzaullas stated that several parts of the man's story had little basis in fact. Baumann said that he'd been discharged from the AAF for being a psychoneurotic, and he had previously confessed to killing three people in Texarkana in a period of three days (which did not match the timeline of killings).

 

Saxophone peddler

Investigators had hoped that Booker's saxophone, which she had played the night of her murder and which was missing, might lead them to a suspect. On April 27, a suspicious man was arrested in Corpus Christi, Texas, for trying to sell a saxophone to a music store. He had asked about selling the instrument to the store but became evasive and fled from the store manager." Although no saxophone was found in his possession, the police found a bag of bloody clothing in his hotel room. After several days of questioning,the man was cleared as a suspect. Booker's saxophone was located on October 24, six months after her murder, in underbrush near the place her body had been found.

German prisoner of war

On May 8, it was announced that an escaped German prisoner of war—who was already being hunted as "a matter of routine"—was considered a suspect. He was described as a stocky 24-year-old, weighing 187 pounds (85 kg), with brown hair and blue eyes. He had stolen a car in Mount Ida, Arkansas, and attempted to buy ammunition in several eastern Oklahoma towns. The police kept searching for the POW, but it was said that he had "vanished into thin air."

Unknown hitchhiker

On May 7, a hitchhiker armed with a pistol carjacked and robbed a man, threatening to kill him and stating that he had killed five people in Texarkana, naming Martin and Booker. The hitchhiker went on to say that he was not finished killing people. Gonzaullas said that police were doubtful that this man was the Phantom Killer, noting that the killer had gone to lengths to conceal his identity while the hitchhiker boasted to a living witness.

 

Atoka County suspect

On May 10, in Atoka, Oklahoma, a man assaulted a woman in her home, ranting that he might as well kill her because he had already killed three or four people, and that he was going to rape her. He then fled. A widespread search for the man included 20 officers and 160 residents. Two days later, police arrested a suspect but did not believe this man was the Phantom. According to the man's story, he could not have been in Texarkana at the time of the Starks murder.

 

Sammie

Sammie is a pseudonym given to a longtime Texarkana resident with a good reputation whom the police were reluctant to name as a suspect. His vehicle's tire tracks were found across the road from Martin's corpse. He failed a polygraph test so the police decided to have him hypnotized by psychiatrist Travis Elliott. Elliott concluded that Sammie had no criminal tendencies, that he had pulled his vehicle to the side of the road in order to urinate, and that he subsequently visited a married woman with whom he was having an affair—concealing this caused Sammie to fail the polygraph test. After police verified the details, they cleared Sammie as a suspect.

Taxi driver

A taxi driver became a major suspect in the Booker-Marin murders because his cab was seen in the vicinity of the crime scene that morning, but he was soon cleared.

Earl McSpadden

On May 7, at approximately 6 a.m., the body of Earl Cliff McSpadden was found on the Kansas City Southern Railway tracks 16 miles (26 km) north of Texarkana, near Ogden. The body's left arm and leg had been severed by a freight train a half-hour earlier. The coroner's jury's verdict stated, "death at the hands of persons unknown", and that "he was dead before being placed on the railroad tracks." Because the murder is unsolved, locals have speculated that McSpadden was the Phantom's sixth victim. A prominent rumor exists claiming that McSpadden was the Phantom, and had committed suicide by jumping in front of a train.

 

The Texarkana Moonlight Murders are, to this day, still unsolved.

 

https://screenrant.com/best-small-town-thrillers/

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Simo Hayha, ”The White Death”

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Simo Hayha

 

Let’s talk about Finland

 

officially called the Republic of Finland.

 

The country’s name was said to be found on three runestones. 

 

has about 168,000 lakes and 179,000 islands.

 

Helsinki is capital 

 

As for weather, In Helsinki, the summers are comfortable and partly cloudy and the winters are long, freezing, snowy, windy, and mostly cloudy. Over the course of the year, the temperature typically varies from 17°F to 71°F and is rarely below -3°F or above 79°F.

 

Member of the EU

 

338,455 square kilometres (130,678 sq mi) with a population of 5.5 million people.

 

Helsinki is capital 

According to an American study, an average of 7,000 rifle-caliber shots were required to achieve one combat kill during the First World War. During the Vietnam War this number had increased to more than 25,000. So, for Simo Häyhä’s more than 505 kills, more than 13,550,000 bullets would have been needed in Vietnam.

Simo Was born December 17th, 1905

 

In the Kiiskinen hamlet of the Rautjärvi, Viipuri Province, In southern Finland.

 

Not far from the Russian border.

 

His father, Juho Häyhä, was the owner of the Mattila farm while Simo's mother, Katriina was known as a “loving and hard-working farmer's wife”.

 

He was the the second youngest of eight children, 

 

Went to school in the village of Miettilä in Kivennapa parish

 

Working on his family's farm and hunting in the Finnish wilderness made him tough, yet very patient.

 

Built his own farm along with his eldest brother. 

 

Proficient farmer, hunter, and skier.

 

At 17, Simo joined the Finnish voluntary Militia Civil Guard, kind of like the National Guard in the US. 

 

Was only 5’ 3”

 

Was great at marksmanship and won several shooting competitions, having many trophies and awards in his home.

 

Was a shy guy that wasn’t a big fan of the spotlight

 

At 19, Simo started a 15 month mandatory military service, called Conscription, in the Bicycle Battalion 2 in Raivola. 

 

He didn’t even start sniper training until he was 20.

 

Simo was supposedly able to estimate distances up to 150 meters (500 ft) within 1 meter or 3.3 ft. That’s over 1 and a half football fields in length. 

 

An author that wrote about Simo said that he once hit a target 16 times from 150 meters away in only one minute. “This was an unbelievable accomplishment with a bolt action rifle, considering that each cartridge had to be manually fed with a fixed magazine that held together five cartridges.” That’s insane.

 

Simo went back to his farm until the invasion happened.

 

THE WAR

 

The Soviets didn’t trust Germany and wanted a buffer zone.

 

In the autumn of 1939, the Soviet Union demanded that Finland move their border back 25 kilometers from Leningrad. 

 

The Finnish government refused.

 

The Soviet Union staged an incident at the border, using it as an excuse to attack Finland.

 

This started the Winter War.

 

Stalin sent over 750,000 Russian soldiers to invade Finland. Finland’s army had only 300,000, a few tanks and just over 100 aircraft.

 

Russia had almost 6000 tanks and over 3000 aircraft.

 

Stalin thought Finland would be a pushover. He was wrong. 

Simo was called up. He pulled out his old gun, joined the Finnish army and entered the Winter War between 1939 and 1940.

 

This war was between Finland and Russia and the temperatures were between -40 and -4 degrees Fahrenheit.  

 

Simo dressed in all white camo where the Russian troops weren’t given any camo, making them easier targets.

 

They wore their standard Green greatcoats.

 

This disorganization was due to Stalin freaking out and killing most of his superior generals, leaving confusion and a lack of leadership.

 

ON A SIDE NOTE 

 

The Finns were also smart in their tactics, the most notable of which were known as “Motti”-tactics. Since the Soviets would invade by the roads, the Finns would hide out in the surrounding wilderness. They would then let the invaders cross the border, and attack them from behind.

 

the Finns faced both the 9th and 14th Soviet Armies, and at one point were fighting against as many as 12 divisions - about 160,000 soldiers. Also at one point in the same area, there were only 32 Finns fighting against over 4,000 Soviets

 

The Russian army supposedly gave him the name “white Death”, but some speculation believes it was propaganda created by Finland. Kind of like the new “Ghost Of Kiev”.

 

Russian prisoners claimed that “white death” was referring to how cold it gets in the deepest parts of the forests. 

 

The Finnish newspapers used the name and the likeness of an “invisible soldier” to create and proport a hero for the war. 

 

He was also called the “magic shooter”.

 

Even rumors that captured Russian soldiers were disappointed to not get to meet Simo.

 

AS A SNIPER

 

All 500 of Simos kills were supposedly done in less than 100 days.

 

That’s an average of 5 kills a day.

Not a lot of sunlight during this time of the year.

 

On February 17th, 1940 Simo was awarded an honorary rifle.

 

Given by Commander Svensson, for 219 confirmed kills with a rifle and 219 with a submachine gun.

 

December 21, 1939 was his daily high kill count of 25. 

 

Army chaplain Rantamaa claims it was more like 542 confirmed kills, starting from the beginning of the war until he was injured

 

Some Finnish documents say he had:

 

138 sniper kills in 22 days, published on December 22, 1939

 

199 sniper kills published on January 26th, 1940

 

219 Sniper kills published on February 17th, 1940

 

259 Sniper kills (40 in 18 days) published on March 7th, 1940

 

In Simo’s memoirs found in 2017, he had a “sin list” that claims around 500 kills.

 

Finnish historian Marjomaa claims the number to be like “more than 200 kills” due to the absence of bodies and the use of the press's propaganda. Still a lot.

 

Simo’s gun of choice was his SAKO M/28-30, a Finnish version of a Mosin-Nagant, known as “The Spitz” because of its front sights resembling the head of a dog. Also, a popular bolt action rifle in the video game, Call of Duty.

 

Simo liked iron sights, not scopes. He claimed that he could keep his head lower and it gave him a smaller target.

 

Iron sights were dependable where scopes could fog up in cold weather and made the gun easier to hide. Not to mention the reflection of light from the scope’s lens could show enemies where the sniper was positioned.

 

Simo knew how cold it could be out there so he dressed for the weather wearing multiple layers. This meant he could stay out in the cold longer, waiting for his attack or to wait after.

 

He kept sugar and bread in his pockets.

 

He would eat them for calories to help keep him warm.

 

Unlike most snipers, Simo didn’t fire from the prone position; he preferred sitting up. 

 

Being shorter helped him as he hid from enemies.

 

He would go out at night, improve his favorite shooting positions, and perform meticulous maintenance on his rifle so that it would never jam, especially in the cold conditions.

 

He would head to his spot for the day before sunrise and stay there until after the sun had set.

 

Daylight only lasted for roughly 3 hours a day.

 

Simo would pile the snow or pour water on it in a way that the blast from his barrel wouldn’t disturb the snow in front of him and even kept snow in his mouth to keep his breath from showing the enemy where he was.

 

He’d place his gloves on the snow and his rifle on top of them to lessen the recoil.

 

In the early days of the fighting, a Soviet sniper had killed three junior platoon leaders and an NCO. Simo’s platoon leader told him to take out the sniper.

As the sun was setting, the Soviet sniper carelessly abandoned his position. As he did, the sunlight glinted off his sniper scope. Simo put a round through his face.

 

Later another Soviet sniper kept Häyhä’s unit pinned down. Again, Simo was called upon  and began to search for his target.  Using another Finnish lieutenant as a spotter, he took the Soviet sniper out with a single shot from 400 meters.

 

Simo told a writer that snipers didn’t aim for headshots. “The head is a small size compared to the torso and for that reason, I always fired at the center of the torso. Shooting an enemy should only be done so when the probability of killing the enemy is at its highest, and if aiming at his head, a slight misjudgment leads to a miss which can give away your position with no gain taken.”

 

WOUNDED

 

Russia ordered counter snipers and artillery missions to SPECIFICALLY take out Simo.

 

Most failed.

 

Simo was almost killed on March 6th, 1940.

 

Shot in the face by an explosive, incendiary round, which explodes on impact.

 

Hit his lower left jaw, removing his upper jaw, most of his lower jaw and most of his left cheek.

 

Russians thought he was dead and threw him on a pile of bodies.

 

Finnish soldiers went looking for him and noticed a leg twitching in the pile of bodies.

 

The soldiers took him to get help and said “half his face was missing.”

 

Rumors of Simo’s death were everywhere.

 

One week later, he regained consciousness. The day that peace was declared.

 

The Finnish Army was exhausted, its ammunition nearly out, and its defensive lines close to being overrun. So, Finland was forced to sign the Treaty of Moscow on March 12, 1940. Under the treaty, it ceded 11 percent of its territory to the Soviet Union, more than the Soviets demanded prior to the start of the conflict.

 

Took him over 14 months to recover after 26 surgeries.

 

Saw a story about his death in a newspaper. He sent them a letter saying he was alive.

 

After recovery, he wanted to go back out to fight but wasn’t permitted.

 

AWARDS

 

Simo received the first and second class medals of liberty.

 

And The Kollaa fighters medal

 

Was promoted from the lowest ranked non commissioned officer (yes, that was his rank while he did all of this) to First military rank of an officer. 

 

Nominated as a Knight of the Mannerheim Cross, which is considered the greatest Finnish Military honor.

 

Was given his own farm in southeastern Finland. Fittingly, it was located near the Russian border. Probably to remind them of what he did last time.

 

AFTER THE WAR

 

Became a successful moose hunter and dog breeder.

 

Received death threats from people who thought what he accomplished was wrong.

 

Never talked about the war or what he had been through.

 

When asked how he became such a bad ass his response was, “practice.”

 

When asked if had any remorse he said, “"I did what I was told to do, as well as I could. There would be no Finland unless everyone else had done the same".

 

Simo died in 2002 at the age of 96 while living in a war veterans nursing home. He never married or had children. 

 

Nobody in history has ever been credited with more confirmed kills than Simo Häyhä.

 

OH AND BY THE WAY.

Despite gaining around 22,000 square miles of Finnish land, the Soviets lost the Winter War with most of their troops having been killed by the defending Finns. A Russian general later remarked that the land they had conquered was “just enough to bury their dead”.

https://knowledgeeager.com/best-sniper-movies/

MK Ultra. Yeah, That Happened.

MKULTRA/PROJECT ARTICHOKE/SPELLBINDER

 

• MKULTRA- What is it

• Code name given for the illegal experimentation done on humans
• Done by the C.I.A.
• Aim was to develop procedures and drugs to weaken individuals during interrogations and produce confessions
• Brainwashing and psychological warfare
• Use of LSD
• Numerous methods to manipulate subjects’ mental states and brain functions through high doses of psychoactive drugs and other chemicals, electroshock, hypnosis, sensory deprivation, isoloation, and verbal and sexual abuse, as well as other forms of torture.
• Preceded by Project Bluebird and Project Artichoke. We’ll discuss these later on.

1. MKULTRA background

• According to author Stephen Kinzer, who is a former New York Times correspondent, who also wrote several books and writes for multiple newspapers and news agencies.( Kind of hard to get an unbiased opinion when one guy writes for most of the news.) Kinzer wrote that the CIA project “was a continuation of the work begun in WWII-era Japanese Facilities and Nazi concentraion camps on subduing and controlling human minds”.
• Kinzer also wrote that MKUltra’s use of mescaline on people had begun in the Dachau concentration camp.
• Kinzer proposed evidence of the continuation of the Nazi agenda
• Kinzer Cited the CIA’s secret recruitment of Nazi torturers and vivisectionists( surgery conducted for experiemnts on living organisms with a central nervous system to view internal structure.) to continue the expriemtns on thousands of people
• Nazis brought abck to Fort Detrick, Maryland to teach CIA officers on the lethal use of sarin gas
• Project headed by Sidney Gottlieb but began with the order from Allen Dulles in 1953.
• They wanted to develop mind controlling drugs to be used against the soviets in response to alleged Soviet, Chinese, and North Korean use of mind control techniques on US POWs during the Korean War.
• CIA was interested in using techniques on their own captives and wanted to manipulate forewwign leaders as well
• Even creating schemes to drug Fidel Castro
• Obviously most experiments were done without the consent of its subjects’
• Academic researchers were funded through grants from CIA fronts and completely unaware that the CIA was using their work.

1. Sheer scale of project- excerpt from 1977 Senate Hearing on MKULTRA summarized by Wikipedia

• Substances which will promote illogical thinking and impulsiveness to the point where the recipient would be discredited in public.
• Substances which increase the efficiency of mentation and perception.
• Materials which will prevent or counteract the intoxicating effect of alcohol.
• Materials which will promote the intoxicating effect of alcohol.
• Materials which will produce the signs and symptoms of recognized diseases in a reversible way so they may be used for malingering, etc.
• Materials which will render the induction of hypnosis easier or otherwise enhance its usefulness.
• Substances which will enhance the ability of individuals to withstand privation, torture, and coercion during interrogation and so-called "brain-washing".
• Materials and physical methods which will produce amnesia for events preceding and during their use.
• Physical methods of producing shock and confusion over extended periods of time and capable of surreptitious use.
• Substances which produce physical disablement such as paralysis of the legs, acute anemia, etc.
• Substances which will produce "pure" euphoria with no subsequent let-down.
• Substances which alter personality structure in such a way the tendency of the recipient to become dependent upon another person is enhanced.
• A material which will cause mental confusion of such a type the individual under its influence will find it difficult to maintain a fabrication under questioning.
• Substances which will lower the ambition and general working efficiency of men when administered in undetectable amounts.
• Substances which promote weakness or distortion of the eyesight or hearing faculties, preferably without permanent effects.
• A knockout pill which can be surreptitiously administered in drinks, food, cigarettes, as an aerosol, etc., which will be safe to use, provide a maximum of amnesia, and be suitable for use by agent types on an ad hoc basis.
• A material which can be surreptitiously administered by the above routes and which in very small amounts will make it impossible for a person to perform physical activity.

• Project BLUEBIRD-1952

• Focused on hypnosis and behavioral modification as a means of preventing any Agency members from disclosing information to allies. (Sleeper Agents?)
• Dr. Colin A. Ross wrote a 10 page summary on the Deliberate Creation of Multiple Personality by Psychiatrists
• This summary was made to “blow the whistle on extensive political abuse of psychiatry in North America in the second half of the 20th century.”
• Bluebird was approved in 1950 and then renamed Artichoke in 1951
• Bluebird and Artichoke aimed to establish the Manchurian Candidate
• Bluebird/Artichoke was rolled over into MKUltra in 1953 and then into MKSearch in 1964 and ran until 1972. We’ll discuss the turn of events that transpired here later on in the broadcast.
• Through electroshock and hypnosis treatment and experimnetation, subjects would be basically given a split personality that had no recollection of the other frame of mind.
• This personality was given access codes, protocols/procedures, identities, and several missions to be carried out within the experiment.
• Think sleeper agents. Like The Winter Soldier. You say a couple words or show some pictures and it would trigger the other personality to come forth and then the subject would act entirely differently. Much like someone you may know. A.k.a. Lee Harvey Oswald. Its speculation and entirely conspiratorial but is likely that he was under said experiments.

• Project ARTICHOKE

• Bluebird was basically designed to alter the personality of subjects through drugs, electroshock, hypnosis, and other forms of torture. Which would allow a person to withhold certain pieces of information, influence certain parties without their knowing, or even carry out specific actions. All while never being aware of their doing so.
• Artichoke was similar but this time the project was to be used in subjects to force them to do the government's bidding against their will and even against the laws of nature such as self preservation.
• They carried out testing within the states and even overseas
• Using LSD, hypnosis and total isolation as forms of physiological harassment for interrogations of subjects.
• Started off at first using cocaine, marijuana, heroin, peyote and mescaline. They saw that LSD was the most promising though.
• Subjects who were able to leave the program had amnesia, and their memories were fogged resulting in faulty and vague recounts of their time.
• LSD was even given to unsuspecting CIA agents to see how the drug affects those who aren't entirely of the program
  • One Record shows that a single subject was kept on LSD for 77 days
• Artichoke even did research on the potential use of dengue fever and other diseases.
  • One declassified  ARTICHOKE memo read: “Not all viruses have to be lethal… the objective includes those that act as short-term and long-term incapacitating agents.”
    • COVID Anyone?
• It was found in the declassified documents that the CIA had a goal of using hypnosis to  to create an assassin to assassinate a prominent politician or American official.
• Overseas operations included bases in Europe, Japan, southeast asia and the philippines. 
  • They wanted to use aliens( foreign peoples of the area) as test subjects  at these foreign installments.

• MKSEARCH

• So to fuck with you guys even more lets talk about MKSEARCH.
• MKSEARCH was the name given to the continuation of MKULTRA.
• It was divided in to two projects named MKOFTEN and MKCHIKWIT
• The whole premise of MKSEARCH was incapacitating agents
• They wanted to test biological, chemical and radioactive materials and systems to make predictable human behaviors and psychological changes.
• The CIA was interested in bird migration patterns for use with chemical and biological warfare.
• Subproject 139 designated “Bird Disease Studies” at Penn State.
  • Again using a front to give research studies’ grants and using the findings for their own use with in MKULTRA/SEARCH.
  • Conspiracies of the bird disease program was the transfer of diseases from avian species to the carrying of said diseases around the world.
• MKOFTEN dealt with testing and toxicological transmissivity( tests to show exposure of transmissive diseases and chemical agents) and their behaviors in animals and then humans
  • Covid… anyone?
• MKCHICKWIT wanted to understand drug development in europe and asia and also acquiring samples.
• There are a couple hundred different projects under the umbrella of MKULTRA. It would take hours to talk about all of them, so we are just talking about the popular ones and some of the unknown projects. So now let's talk about the experiments themselves.
  • (Project Monarch was another covert front used to determine monarch butterflies' migratory patterns and the usefulness of radiological transmissions and diseases within the group.)
  • (Project Spellbinder was creating the Manchurian Candidate with the sole purpose of assassinating Fidel Castro)

• Experiments

• LSD
  • LSD-25 or acid as the kids call it, was the main drug used in MKULTRA 
  • Effects of acid are typically intensified thoughts, emotions, and sensory perception.
  • High doses create visual hallucinations but can also create auditory ones as well
  • Can take about 30 minutes to kick in but can last for up to 20 hours.
  • Considered non-addictive and low abuse potential.
  • Frequent use creates exceptionally quick tolerance which leads to higher doses
  • Known to create intermittent or chronic visual hallucinations even without further use.
  • LSD overdose is unknown(HA!) but death or injury has been noted from accidents stemmed from psychological impairment
  • Adopted by the counterculture movement in the 60’s because it allegedly expanded consciousness. Or it was just more CIA Propaganda to monitor subjects without the use of interrogation tactics.
  • LSD was given to mental patients, prisoners, drug addicts, and even prostitutes at the beginning of the MKULTRA trials
    • “People who could not fight back”
    • Given to one mental health patient in Kentucky for over 174 days
    • Even given to other agents, doctors, other government personnel, and even the general public. All without their knowledge.
      • Clear violation of the Nuremberg Code we agreed to follow after WWII
  • Idea was to create a truth serum in a sense. A substance to bring out deep confessions or to wipe a subject's mind clean and reprogram them.
  • In one attempt, Operation MIdnight Climax, the CIA setup brothels at agency safehouses in San Francisco to gather men too embarrassed to talk about the events at said brothels.
    • Men were given LSD and the brothels had one-way mirrors put in to monitor and film sessions. These sessions were to be used to observe at later times.
  • Some people in events were given LSD and then interrogated under bright lights and told they would make their tip even longer if they didn't give up secrets. At one point, heroin abusers were even told they would receive more heroin as a reward for their answers during these events.
  • The Chemist who directed MKULTRA, Dr. Sidney Gottlieb, had other ideas for using the drug.
    • He felt it could be used in covert operations since it’s effects were temporary. 
    • Given to high ranking officials to alter the course of important meetings, speeches or other important events. (President Regan perhaps?)
  • Gottlieb realized there was a difference between subjects that were given the substance in laboratory experiments and those that were given it in “normal” situations.
  • He created more experiments where he gave it to people without warning. Going so far as to say that the surprise trips were considered an occupational hazard of CIA employees at the time.
  • Like nobody could have seen this coming but adverse reactions to the drug often occurred.
    • One reaction coming from an operative who was dosed in his morning coffee and became psychotic and ran across Washington seeing a monster in every car that passed.
    • Another event where Frank Olson, an American scientist who studied bacteriology and biological warfare and was even employed to the United States Army Biological Warfare Laboratories and worked at Fort Detrick. 
      • He had never taken LSD
      • Was given some covertly from his CIA Supervisor
      • Nine days later jumped out of his 13th story New York hotel room
      • Supposedly from depression as a result of being on LSD
  • LSD deemed too unpredictable
    • Gave up on the notion that LSD was “the secret that was going to unlock the universe”
  • Still used however in cloak and dagger operations
  • That is until 1962 where a super-hallucinogen was created known as BZ.
  • After BZ, LSD was pretty much given up on.
    • BZ is just the codename of an even stronger version of LSD like drug
  • Now lets go one step further in experiments. We head to Canada!
• Canadian Experiments
  • The CIA recruited British psychiatrist Donald Ewen Cameron who created the psychic driving concept.
    • Psychic driving was a treatment where you were given a muscular paralytic drug and were forced to listen to an audio tape on repeat. Some patients were exposed to HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF REPETITIONS!
    • Idea was to depatternize subjects or basically destroy their personality and give them a new one. Kind of like the Multiple personality procedure we talked about earlier.
    • Original intent was to cure schizophrenia by erasing previous memories and reprogramming patients’ psyche.
    • He was unknowingly paid by the CIA to further his experiments.
    • One such experiment was giving his patients LSD or paralytic drug and shocking said patient at thirty to forty times the normal power
    • Known to put patients in a drug induced coma for weeks at a time or even up to 3 months and all while playing a tape on loop to the patient during the coma
• Other experiments were done elsewhere around the world. These were called detention centers though.
  • The CIA would capture “Enemies of the State” or other “Expendable” people and bring them to these detention centers to avoid criminal prosecution.
  • These prisoners were interrogated all while being administered psychoactive drugs, electroshocked, and even exposed to extreme temperatures and sensory isolation, just to develop a better understanding of how to destroy and to control human minds.

• End to MKULTRA?

• In 1973 during a government-wide panic caused by the Watergate scandal, CIA Director Richard Helms ordered all MKULTRA files to be destroyed.
• This caused a deep investigation into the matter nearly impossible until a large cache of up to 20,000 documents were found because they had been incorrectly filed and stored.
• These files aided in the investigation led by Frank Church in the CHurch Committee as well as the Rockefeller Commission.
  • These groups wanted to investigate the practices of the US intelligence agencies.
  • Because of these investigations, President Gerald Ford in 1976 issued the first Executive Order on Intelligence Activities, which prohibited “experimentation with drugs on human subjects, except with the informed consent, in writing and witnessed by a disinterested party, of each such human subject.”
  • This order led to President Carter and Regan expanding to any human experimentation.
• The issue took longer to surface in Canada though.
  • 1984 the issue came to light on a CBC news show, The Fifth Estate. 
  • People learned that not only did the CIA fund Dr. Cameron but the Canadian Government had full knowledge and funded him as well.
  • The Canadian Government settled out of court and gave $100,000 dollars to each of the 127 patients in the tests.
  • Unfortunately Dr Cameron died of a heart attack in 1967 while he was mountain climbing with his son. After his death no personal documentation was found showing his involvement in MKULTRA since his family decided to destroy all of his records after his death.
• With a large portion of the documents being destroyed, the number of deaths still remains uncertain from these experiments.
• As well as how many other types of projects the governments had designed during this time.

 

MOVIES

https://www.imdb.com/search/keyword/?keywords=government-conspiracy&sort=moviemeter,asc&mode=detail&page=1&title_type=movie&ref_=kw_ref_typ 

 

Who Is The Monster of Florence?

A little about Florence, Italy.

• It is the Capital of Tuscany, in Central Italy. Built on both sides of the Arno river.
• Florence was Founded as a roman military colony in the first century bce.
• Florence’s vernacular became the italian language
• Noteworthy celebrities that flourished here were Leonardo da Vinci, Filipp Brunelleschi, Niccolò Machiavelli, Michelangelo, Dante, and Galileo.
• Some famous buildings that reside here are the Baptistery of St. John, the Gothic Duomo, and the Uffizi Gallery.
• Economy is largely based around tourism… duh duh duuuuuuuuun.

 

What happened

• • Between 1968 and 1985, 14 to 16 people were murdered in florence italy, in what leading criminologists and police officials have declared as one of the most puzzling crimes of their time.
    • Mostly all couples
  • First Known victims were Antonio Lo Bianco and his Sardinian lover Barbara Locci
    • Killed on August 21, 1968
    • Small town near florence
    • Locci’s 6 year old son, Natalino Mele, asleep in the back seat. (saw somewhere that they were having sex in the car and kid was asleep in back seat).
    • Kid woke up and found his mother dead and he fled.
      • Kid ran two kilometers and knocked on the door of a house.
      • Kid banged on the door and told the homeowner “open the door and let me in, I'm sleepy and my daddy is sick in bed. THen you have to drive me home, because my mother and my uncle are dead in their car.”
      • Kid was questioned by authorities as to how he ran alone in the dark two kilometers on unpaved country road.
      • Kid originally said that he was scared and alone but changed his story later on saying that his father or an uncle drove him to the house.
      • Kid said years later that he was alone but was too shocked to really remember what happened.
    • Uncle was the name given to the mothers lovers.
    • Mother had the nickname of ape regina or queen bee, due to the countless affairs she had.
    • Lover of several men including 3 brothers; Giovanni, Salvatore and Francesco Vinci. Manual laborers and petty criminals
      • Salvatore lived with Locci and Mele in their own home for a short time.
    • Lovers were shot and killed in the car by a .22 caliber pistol.
    • Suspected killer was Loccis’s husband, Stefano Mele.
      • Considered to be older and mentally slow
    • Cops found a glove that was his that was tested and shown to have gun fire residue.
    • Mele confessed but retracted his confession, and then confessed again but accused the vinci brothers of being involved, but later confessed to doing it alone.
    • Despite changing his story and his son changing stories numerous times, the cuckolded husband was convicted and sent to prison for 14 years
      • Given a light sentence due to suffering from “infirmity of the mind” and deemed mentally dysfunctional.
    • Mele said that he dropped the gun at the crime scene but it was never recovered.
    • Considered a cut and dry case of a simple crime of passion.

• UNTIL…

• • Saturday night of September 14th, 1974.
    • Young couple, Stefania Pettini and Pasquale Gentilcore were regulars to a small secluded spot in the gentle suburban countryside on the outskirts of Florence, so they can spend some “private time alone”.
    • The young couple was found dead the next morning.
      • The young man was found inside the car leaning on the door
      • Young lady was found in the grass behind the vehicle.
      • Her body was nude and there had been stab wounds found.
        • Not deep
        • Surface wounds
        • Stabbed or “Pricked” over 90 TIMES!!!!
        • Raped? With a thin olive branch
        • An author by the name of Magdalen Nabb wrote in her novel “The Monster Of Florence” -which was a fictional adaptation of the case- saw the act as a sign that the killer was impotent, writing: “He tries to rape the girl, but isnt able, so he violates her with an olive vine instead”.
    • No money was stolen but it was noted that a few pieces of jewelry were stolen from Stefania
    • Florence officials considered this a one-off event
  • Seven years go by

• Saturday Night June 6th,1981

• • • Carmela de Nuccio and Giovanni Faggi were parked on a dirt road just outside of Florence, known as Scandicci which is close to the popular night club, the “Anastasia Club”.
    • They made it a habit to go to this spot alone
    • Next morning bodies were found dead
      • Both shot and stabbed
      • Giovanni was found in the driver's seat with half of his clothes on.
      • Carmela was found 20 feet away from the car with her jeans pulled down and her pubic area had been cut out and taken away.
    • Ballistics were run and the same gun, a .22 caliber long rifle, had been used with each of the  Winchester bullets having the letter “H” embossed on the back of the casing.
    • Police were certain that the 1974 murder was not just a “one-off” and that they may have a maniac on the loose.
    • Police also were certain that the killer was strong. Seeing as how the woman was not dragged, but instead carried out of the car and down a hill where her body was found.
    • Police decide to look into a common issue plaguing Florence - peeping toms.
  • With Florence being surrounded by hills, woods and countryside, just driving less than 20 minutes would find you in a secluded field or wooded area. Deprived of witnesses or townsfolk.
    • During this time it was common for many Italians to live at home until they were married. Which means that couples didn't really get much privacy or robust ability to be alone together.
      • Lovemaking in cars was common and couples would typically wait for night and secluded areas.
    • Having a culture like this makes it a little easier for the occasional “Peeping-Tom” to have their gross fun.
    • Most onlookers or peeping-toms went into the woods with just a pair of binoculars, although it wasn't uncommon to find the Professional peeping-tom.
      • Armed with advanced night vision goggles or cameras so they could take pictures or even film unaware lovers
    • Disgusting of an act as this may be, the police thought that the “toms” may come in handy to the investigation of the Monster of Florence.
    • Hoping that these people may be able to give tips or see something that could aid in their investigation.
    • Apparently it did help as one “Tom” gave some info.
    • Police had nothing and jumped at this chance.
  • Enzo Spalletti was a husband and a father.
    • Taken into custody after seeing two dead bodies in the woods.
    • Main reason he was being incarcerated was his unwillingness to divulge any information as to why he just so happened to be in the woods at the time the crime took place and knowing about the crime before it was officially reported.
      • Eyewitnesses placed him and his vehicle at the crime scene at the time of the murder, although he denied every any part of being apart of the crime.

• Thursday night October 22nd, 1981

• • • Susanna Cambi and Stefano Baldi had parked their vehicle on a country road just outside of florence.
    • Couple was not known for visiting this spot and police believed they stopped on a whim with the sudden urge of intimacy.
    • Bodies were found in the morning.
      • Stefano was found outside of the car wearing just a shirt and underwear.
      • Susanna had been carried to a spot nearby and her private areas had been horribly disfigured
      • Nothing was stolen from these victims either
    • This murder is known to this day as an anomaly since it happened on a thursday even though the day after, friday, was a national labor strike.
    • The other crimes also took place in the summer where this was in the fall.
    • That evening was also a very bright, moonlit night.
      • Officials believe that the murderer acted out as to throw off the police to the investigation.
    • This anomaly also gave one strong clue to the police that wasn't available prior, a size 44(u.s size 10) shoe print found in the mud.
      • Police believed that the culprit was a “Tall”(Hahahaha) and robust person.
    • With this new crime happening they released Enzo from custody.

• Saturday Night June 19th, 1982

• • • Antonella Migliorini and Paolo Mainardi were parked by some bushes in Baccaiano which is south of Florence.
    • Vehicle was able to be seen clearly from the street.
      • Friends of theirs have driven by and seen the two in the car and could clearly identify who was in it.
      • Antonella chose this area because it wasn't as private for fears of running into the monster of Florence
    • This particular case could show to be a turning point in the investigation.
      • The monster had shot the couple.
      • What made things interesting however was the shot on Paolo did not kill him right away.
        • He was able to turn on the vehicle and attempt to drive away.
        • Car was facing away from the street so any attempt at fleeing would have to have been done in reverse.
        • Hard to drive in reverse while being shot at
        • Monster shot the headlights out to avoid any attention.
        • Paolo unfortunately got the vehicle stuck in a ditch while trying to flee.
      • Neither of the victims were stabbed nor were there any ritualistic disfigurements of Antonella.
        • Mainly because the Monster most likely had to flee from the disruptive scene, plus it was a rather busy area.
      • Very shortly after the incident, another vehicle passed by
        • Assuming the vehicle was stuck they got out to help
        • Found the blood bath and immediately called for an ambulance and police.
        • Paolo was still breathing when help arrived and drove him to the hospital where he shortly died from his wounds.
      • The prosecutor who was investigating this case at the time, Silvia della Monica, decided to try and create a trap for the Monster.
        • She had the newspapers print off saying that Paolo was able to say some words about what happened before he passed.
        • Hoping to make the Monster second guess everything or at the very least, make a mistake.
  • Shortly after the incident at Baccaiano, an envelope arrived at the Carabinieri police station in Florence.
    • Contents of envelope
      • Newspaper clipping with article dating back to the 1968 killing of the two lovers that were shot by the alleged jealous husband, Stefano Mele.
      • Written on top of the clipping was the statement ‘Why dont you take another look at this case?’
  • The spent casings of the bullets that were fired in 1968 were still archived.
    • Ballistics tests were ran
    • Ballistics proved that the same gun had been used that day and with the other cases with similar incidents.
      • The bullets were the same type and were to have been from the same box of ammo as well.
  • How could this be?
    • The Man that killed the first couple was still in prison.
      • Remember he dropped the gun at the time of the crime allegedly.
    • Since officials had no other leads they decided to look into the Sardinian brothers who Mele accused of being accomplices.
      • Giovanni, Salvatore and Francesco Vinci
        • Salvatore and Francesco being the two more likely suspects due to connections with Mele and past crimes.
  • Shortly after the latest killings in Baccaiano, Francesco’s car was found in the south of Tuscany, hidden in the woods.
    • Francesco was then taken into custody on suspicion of being the Monster of Florence!
  • One year later with Francesco behind bars,

• Friday September 9th, 1983

• • • In Galluzzo, which is a residential area of Florence.
      • Two German tourists
        • Uwe Rush and Horst Meyer
        • Chillaxing in their VW camper van
      • One man, at a quick look, could have been mistaken for a woman.
    • Shots fired from outside the van through the window had shattered the glass, but none of it fell on the ground.
      • Killer had to reposition due to lack of visibility in the van
        • Continued firing but on the other side of the window.( since first window was shattered)
        • Killer then entered the vehicle to finish the job but found that he had killed two men and therefore could not do the ritualistic disfigurement they had previously done on other women
    • One piece of evidence officials gained from this incident was the rough guesstimate of the killer's height.
      • Van was taller than a car
      • Bullet entry point gave clear idea on height of killer
      • At least 80 centimeters or 5 foot 10 inches tall.
  • Francesco was released but his brother Salvatore was brought in.
  • Mele’s brother Giovanni and his brother-in-law, Piero Mucciarini, were also brought in for questioning due to the inconsistent ramblings of Mele during his confession and their names were mentioned.
    • It was believed that due to Mele’s Wifes’ promiscuous nature and also changing lovers on a weekly basis; Officials thought that the Mele and Mucciarini family were embarrassed by this and thought she would tarnish their familys’ name, so they wanted her out of the picture.
    • Now they are suspects too

• Sunday July 29th, 1984

• • • Pia Rontini and Claudio Stefanacci.
      • Parked in usual spot in a wooded area near Florence
      • Both were shot and stabbed to death
      • Pia’s body was dragged this time to a nearby area and the killer performed the disgusting ritualistic disfigurement on Pia.
      • This time they went one step farther though.
      • Killer cut off Pia’s left breast.
    • Killer left behind some clues this time
      • Hand print on top of the car
        • Investigators believed the killer was right handed and steadied himself atop the car with his left hand
      • Knee marks were found on the side of the car confirming the height of the killer to be around 1,80 - 1,85 meters tall. Or 5’9” and 6’1”
    • Because this all happened while the Sardinian brothers were still in custody they released them.

• Sunday September 8th, 1985

• • • In a town outside of florence
      • Nadine Mauriot and Jean Michel Kravechvili
        • Took privacy a step forward
          • Pitched a tent near their car just off the main road in a clearing behind trees
      • Couple was french
        • Last few couples had been foreign
      • Most likely Florence residents didn't want to venture into isolated areas any longer
      • Foreign tourists wanted to do so even though the city posted signs everywhere to not be alone in isolated areas
      • Jean was a young and strong man who was a trained sprinter.
        • Killer opened up the tent and Jean was able to break free and run away with only being shot in the arm.
          • Jean ran the wrong way and instead of going to the street for help, ran deeper into the woods.
          • Killer caught up to Jean and finished him off, then went back to the tent to finish his ritualistic disfigurement on Nadine.
  • The next day, Silvia Della Monica, received another envelope.
    • Looked like a ransom letter with the letters all different shapes and sizes.
    • Spelling error with Repubblica spelled with one “B”
      • Perhaps uneducated and didn't know a common Italian spelling?
    • Contents had no letter
      • But a sliver of Nadine's breast was found inside
  • Officials thought that this was a warning of more and worse crimes to come
    • The french couple were the last victims of the .22 caliber killer though.
  • Perhaps this was a sign-off from the killer?

• Lead Suspect

• • • In 1985 right after the incident with the french tourists, police received an anonymous letter telling them to look into a man named Pietro Pacciani
      • Pietro was known for being abusive and violent
      • Investigators decided to use a new tool at the time of the letter, the personal computer.
      • The made a list of all people who had been convicted of a sexual crime and was released from prison during the years of the murders.
      • Pietro was one of few names on this short list.
      • Looking into Pietro’s past they found that he stabbed a man to death in 1951
        • He saw his girlfriend at the time going off with another man.
        • Followed them and right when they were going to get intimate, he jumped out and killed the man
        • Forced his girlfriend ot have sex with him next to the dead man
        • Stole the man's wallet
        • Convicted for 13 years
      • Pietro was a farm worker his whole life and was uneducated
      • Known to have a short fuse
      • Pietro’s daughters testified against him in court and said that not only did he rape abd abuse them and their mother, but were also fed dog food to save money.
      • Known to be a peeping tom
      • Was a self taught artist and poet
      • Basically his rage and artistic ability gave investigators a reason to believe he could be the Monster of Florence.
      • Was convicted of the few circumstantial pieces of evidence in 1994
      • Went to appeals court and was overturned and he was free in 1996
    • A second trial was held based on the testimony of witnesses that the prosecution brought up in court just before Pietro’s initial conviction were to be overturned.
      • Witnesses were at multiple crimes.
      • Witnesses included: a prostitute, Gabriella Ghiribelli, her ‘keeper’ Norberto Galli, and a friend of Pietro’s Giancarlo Lotti
      • According to Gabriella and Norberto, the car of Lotti was found parked near the scene of the attack in 1985
      • Lotti was investigated further
      • They tapped his phone and he confessed to being present at some of the crimes
    • Lotti said it was Pietro that shot the victims and a friend of Pietro that used the knife
      • Friend was Mario Vanni
    • Lotti’s role was lookout
    • Once pressured by police, Lotti confessed to shooting the van with the German men inside.
    • This led to Lotti and Mario’s conviction and were sent to jail.
    • Because of these two there was to be another trial for Pietro
      • Pietro died of a heart attack in 1998 though
    • Lotti was not deemed a valuable enough witness by many because he was an alcoholic living in a halfway house at the time
      • Believed he only confessed to receive recognition to improve his living conditions. 
        • By going to prison he would get three meals a day and a warm roof over his head.

• Even though Lotti and Mario were convicted, the Monster of Florence case is still open.

 

MOVIES

https://www.imdb.com/search/keyword/?keywords=sexual-murder&sort=moviemeter,asc&mode=detail&page=1&title_type=movie&ref_=kw_ref_typ

Monster of Florence

http://www.florencewebguide.com/monster-of-florence.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monster_of_Florence

https://criminalminds.fandom.com/wiki/The_Monster_of_Florence

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Monster_of_Florence

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Monster-of-Florence

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2006/07/the-monster-of-florence/304981/

https://www.magentaflorence.com/new-monster-of-florence-suspect/

https://filmschoolrejects.com/the-monster-of-florence-true-story/

http://www.italianinsider.it/?q=node/5688

Women Pirates!

Research borrowed from:

https://www.rmg.co.uk/stories/topics/were-there-female-pirates

 

https://www.piratesquest.co.uk/top-10-famous-female-pirates/

 

Mentalfloss.com

 

https://www.badassoftheweek.com/teuta

There have been dramatic Tales of women sailing the open oceans and seas throughout history. Most of these legends began from the Golden Age of Piracy (1650 to 1720). However, there are stories of female pirates dating back thousands of years. 

 

According to history, women weren't permitted to stay on ships once they had set sail. Sailor superstitions thought that women on merchant and military vessels were bad luck and could mean disaster at sea.

The presence of women was believed to anger the water gods, which might cause storms, violent waves, and weather. Others thought that women would just distract the male sailors at sea and fall victim to harassment and even violence. 

Women weren't allowed to hold jobs at sea until the 20th Century. Some women would disguise themselves as men, using a fake name, but there could be severe penalties if they were caught. So the only way for most women to participate in running a merchant vessel before 1900 was through their relations or marriage. 

Only recently, women were allowed at sea within the British Royal Navy. In October 1990, during the Gulf War, the HMS Brilliant carried the first women officially to serve on a functioning warship. In 1998, Commander Samantha Moore became one of the first female officers to command a Royal Navy warship, HMS Dasher. 

 

The superstitions and old-school customs for military and commercial vessels were also held for pirates. Historically, women who remained on ships at sea would have to do so illegitimately and in disguise.

They would also need to learn the critical skills necessary for a life at sea before setting sail. Without this knowledge, it would have been tough to be a female sailor, let alone a pirate. 

Piracy was a criminal act, so becoming a pirate could mean being arrested and even killed. It wasn't a decision taken lightly. Although pirates are often portrayed as swashbuckling heroes or villains, many were ordinary men and women forced into piracy to survive difficult times. 

 

Piracy has been around since people first hopped on a boat, so it's likely women dressed like the women or as sailors of their time. But unfortunately, many of the depictions of male and female pirates we see today are glamorized accounts of the 17th Century's golden age of piracy.

The rise of popular fiction tales in the 1800s dramatically affected our understanding of pirate attire.

One example is "The Penny Dreadful," a famous book series of the 1860s - both in the United States and the British Empire. These cheap books told sensational stories of adventure. They featured pirates and highwaymen, likely a leading source for many tales and imagery of female pirates today. 

As we mentioned, many women who became sailors often had to hide their identity and conceal their gender by dressing like men. However, the stories of Grace O'Malley, Mary Read, and Anne Bonny show that these pirates did not hide their gender. They wore whatever they wanted, depending on what they were doing. In the pamphlet "The Tryals of Captain John Rackam and other Pirates" published in 1721, people of the time said:

"When they saw any Vessel, gave Chase, or Attacked, they wore Men's Cloaths; and, at other Times, they wore Women's Cloaths."

 

Ok, let's talk about some of the more famous lady pirates. 

 

Queen Teuta of Illyria

Queen Teuta of the Illyrians was a badass Classical Age warrior queen who oversaw a fleet of hardcore pirates. She tormented the Spartans in their own backyard, led armies and navies that conquered cities and islands along the Adriatic coast, and told the Romans to eat a bag of dicks. Then she went out on her own terms by hurling herself off a mountain after supposedly burying 6,000 pounds of gold in a secret location at a place called Devil's Island. Her last words were a curse that doomed the Albanian city of Durres to "never have a seafaring tradition." Yet, she's still a national heroine of Albania, appears on their 100 lek coin (basically the $1 bill), and is generally depicted in full armor with a take-no-prisoners demeanor. 

 

Queen Teuta's husband was King Agron, a pretty brutal warrior-type dude. He ruled over one of the more powerful Illyrian tribes. Illyria is what Greeks called anyone who lived on the Adriatic coast north of Greece. Still, Agron and Teuta were almost certainly from present-day Albania. This detail bears mentioning mostly because the Albanians don't really like being confused with Serbs or Croats.

In 231 BC, King Agron put together an awe-inspiring army, conquered Illyria in a whirlwind of blood, and set his sights south towards Greece. One tribe near the Greek border that was really pissing him off was the Aetolians. So when they laid siege on a city allied with Agron, the Illyrian King responded by launching 5,000-guys in a water-based night attack from the Adriatic Sea. The King captured the high ground, charged downhill with heavy infantry, destroyed their camp, and broke their Army's spirit. The victory was considered so awesome that everyone just went nuts and had this colossal rager party. In all of his amazingness, King Agron got so drunk that his lungs exploded.

 

Rule of the Illyrians technically passed to Agron's son, but he was only two years old. Teuta took over as the boss. She went right to work taking over where her hubby King Agron left off plundering, conquering, destroying everything in sight, and so on. She sent armies to the Peleponnese, sacking and ravaging the lands Sparta was supposed to defend. Her troops captured Phoenice, the wealthiest city in the Northern Greek region of Epirus. She held it for ransom and then gave it back to its people in exchange for money, slaves, treasure, and the undying loyalty of its citizens. When she wasn't dispatching armies to loot and plunder her enemies, she told any Albanian man with a rowboat and a scimitar to step up. She wasn't going to punish them if they raided, pirated, and plundered ships along the Adriatic… as long as she received a percentage of the profits.

For the next few years, no ships were safe. The Illyrian pirate fleet destroyed Greek and Roman shipping, dominating the wealthiest and most trade-heavy waters on earth, taking whatever they wanted.

Yes, they were killing it. However, this craziness didn't really go down well with the new power in the Mediterranean-- the Roman Republic. So Rome sent two brothers to talk to Teuta and tell her to knock it off. 

They met her in her throne room in the city of Scoda. They demanded that she order a cease-fire on all Illyrian piracy and pay Rome reparations for all the ships and goods they lost. 

Teuta was busy managing the Siege of Issa and all the other conquests she was undertaking. So (according to Roman sources), she told the brothers that "it was contrary to the custom of the Illyrian kings to hinder their subjects from winning booty from the sea." Or, eat one!

Well, as you probably guessed, the Romans didn't like hearing this, especially from a woman.

The ambassadors basically started lecturing Queen Teuta on manners, respect, and yadda yadda yadda.

Naturally, Queen Teuta had that dude's throat cut, and his brother chucked into an Albanian prison.

 

Things were great until five or six years into Queen Teuta's reign when the Romans showed up with a big ol fleet and 20,000 legionnaires. All battle-hardened from the War with Carthage and drilled by professional Roman drill instructors. Teuta rallied the Illyrian defenses, but she was immediately betrayed by her top General named Demetrius. Teuta fought heroically but ultimately was forced to surrender to Rome in 227 BC. There are rumors that she took a bunch of treasure she'd accumulated from her pirates and armies and buried it in a cave on an island somewhere in her domain.  

The Romans allowed Teuta to rule a small domain after she surrendered. Still, they made that traitor Demetrius the regent for King Agron's young son. Not long after, Rome decided to get rid of Demetrius, and of course, our fearless Queen. Upon hearing of Rome's plans, Teuta fled her palace. She climbed to the top of a nearby mountain, placed a curse on the city of Risan so that they'd never be able to build a good ship again, and then hurled herself off a mountain to her death. 

Teuta is a pretty common name in Albania to this day. She appears on their money and has a special place in the hearts of the Albanian people. Go to the city of Durres. You'll see that the National Bank of Albania has a statue of her reclining on a chaise lounge and wearing nothing but a spear, a shield, and a helmet.

Ladgerda

Ladgerda (also spelled Lagertha) was a Danish Viking pirate who lived in the 9th Century AD.

She was a shieldmaiden - Viking women who carried a sword and shield, known for their ferocity and skills in battle on land and sea. 

With only a few accounts of her life known to exist, historians have controversy whether Ladgerda is, in fact, a legendary figure and a substitute for the actions of a group of women.

One story suggests that she rescued her husband's fleet from a warring tribe but, on saving him, murdered him with a concealed knife and took his place as the leader of the tribe. You may have heard of her from the show "Vikings," kicking ass and taking names.

 

Jeanne de Clisson

Jeanne de Clisson, the Lioness of Brittany. Noblewoman, wife, mother, pirate. Jeanne swore revenge against the French King after the execution of her husband. She raised a fleet of ships that terrorized the French and led a loyal army to sack many French strongholds for over a decade. And she did so alone in the 14th Century.

Jeanne de Belleville was born in 1300 in Belleville-sur-Vie into the French nobility. She married her first husband, Geoffrey de Châteaubriant VIII, at only 12 years old. He was seven years her senior. In fourteen years of marriage, they had two children. In 1326, Jeanne was widowed.

In 1328, she married Guy of Penthièvre, though this marriage was short-lived and annulled in 1330.

The same year, Jeanne married for the third time, which would lead to her infamy. Olivier de Clisson IV was a wealthy Breton nobleman whose property included Château de Clisson, a manor house in Nantes, and lands at Blain. Jeanne had also inherited land in the province of Poitou, south of the Breton border, and these combined assets made them a real power couple of the 14th Century.

Their marriage resulted in five children, including their son, Olivier V de Clisson, later known as 'The Butcher', due to his brutality in battle. Their eldest child, Isabeau, was born in 1325. At the time, Jeanne was still married to her first husband and Olivier to his first wife, who died in 1329. We know little of their relationship, but it's easy to note the timing of the annulment of her second marriage, in 1330, to the death of Olivier's wife a year prior. Their marriage was likely a rare love match.

Amidst a complex backdrop of conflict, like so many wars, Jeanne and her husband supported Charles de Blois as Duke of Brittany. But for reasons unknown, Charles de Blois was mistrustful of Olivier de Clisson, questioning his loyalty. 

Sources differ on the cause for this mistrust. Some claim that Olivier defected to join the English side.

Another story points to Olivier's capture by the English during the capture of the city of Vannes in 1342. Olivier de Clisson had been acting as military commander alongside Hervé VII de Léon, in defense of the city when it fell. What is strange, however, was the terms of Olivier's release. He was released in exchange for Ralph de Stafford, 1st Earl of Stafford, a prisoner of the French, and for a suspiciously low ransom. Hervé VII de Léon, meanwhile, was never released. It is thought that the low ransom for Olivier's freedom gave Charles de Blois reason to distrust him. He made a devil's deal!

Due to Charles de Blois' suspicion, in 1343, Olivier was captured with fifteen other Breton Lords at a tournament and taken to Paris to be tried in court.

On August 2 1343, Olivier de Clisson was found guilty on several counts of treason and sentenced to be executed by beheading immediately.

Olivier's trial shocked the nobility due to his guilt's lack of available evidence. However, his death was equally shocking, as the public desecrating/exposing a body was usually reserved for low-class criminals rather than members of the nobility.

The death of her third husband was a turning point in Jeanne's life, and it is fair to say that she was never the same again. She took her two young sons to Nantes to show them the head of their father, displayed on a pike at the Sauvetout gate. She did this with the intention of searing hatred in their hearts. She swore her revenge against the French King, Phillip VI, and Charles de Blois in her fury. She considered her husband's execution to be an act of cowardice and murder.

She sold the de Clisson estates, using the money to raise an army of men who had been loyal to her husband.

Leading this Army, she attacked many French strongholds. First, her Army massacred the entire garrison, except for a sole survivor. Then, her Army rampaged along the Normandy coast, burning many villages to the ground.

In 1343, Jeanne was found guilty of treason, confiscating her remaining lands. However, it seems she otherwise escaped the charge without punishment. That same year, King Edward III granted Jeanne income from English-owned lands in Brittany.

Soon, she turned her attention to piracy, building a fleet of ships. Painted coal-black, their sails dyed blood red, others dubbed the ships "The Black Fleet." During this time, she earned her nickname, the Lioness, or Tigress, of Brittany.

Jeanne named her flagship 'My Revenge.'

 

With the support of the English King, Jeanne's fleet scoured the channel, attacking any French ship that she encountered, massacring entire crews. However, she left a few witnesses to send a warning message to the French King.

Jeanne continued pirating the English channel for another 13 years until the sinking of her flagship in 1356. Along with her two sons, she was adrift at sea for five days, during which Jeanne rowed non-stop in search of rescue. Unfortunately, despite her best efforts, her son, Guillaume, died of exposure. Jeanne and her surviving son were eventually rescued and taken to Morlaix.

It is said that Jeanne de Clisson's ghost still haunts Château de Clisson, her beloved third husband's castle, to this day.

Lady Mary Killigrew

Another fearsome pirate of the Elizabethan era, Mary Wolverston, or Lady Killigrew (before 1525 – after 1587) was known for her pirate activities along the Cornish coast. Mary was the daughter of Lord Phillip Wolverton, a former pirate. She later married Sir Henry Killigrew, a pirate who was later made a Vice-Admiral by Queen Elizabeth I. 

While Henry was employed to uphold maritime law, some ex-pirates were engaged as "privateers," sailing under the favor of the Crown to amass illicit profits for England. Mary was known to be a champion of her husband's criminal activities. She redesigned their home at Arwenak castle to hide stolen goods, cut deals with smugglers, and raid ships.

It is thought that the Queen turned a blind eye to this and even pardoned her in later life. 

Grace O'Malley

Grace O'Malley (a. 1530 - 1603) was a formidable Irish pirate and a decisive leader who successfully defended her lands against English governance and other hostile Irish clans. O'Malley was the daughter of a chieftain and was educated in seafaring by her father. After his death, she took to the seas (even giving birth to her first child while aboard a vessel). 

As the English began occupying Ireland, O'Malley fortified important coastal defenses and offered her support to Irish rebels. She even met with Queen Elizabeth I in September 1594 at Greenwich Castle where they created a treaty in Latin.

 

Mary Read

Mary Read was born in Devon County, England, in the late 17th Century. She had a harsh childhood. Her father had died before she was born, and her half-brother Mark passed away soon afterward. Nevertheless, Mary's paternal grandmother supported Mary and her mother only because she thought her grandson Mark was still alive. To keep the death of Mary's brother a secret from his grandmother, Mary was raised as a boy, pretending to be her older brother.

When Mary Read was about thirteen years old, her grandmother died. Mary still dressed as a boy and had to find a job with boyish habits. She became a footboy to a wealthy French woman who lived in London. Unsatisfied with her current position, Mary escaped and boarded a man-o-war. A few years passed, and she became bored again. This time she joined the Army, where she met her future husband. After confessing love and her true gender to him, they left the Army, married, and opened an Inn called Three Horseshoes near Castle Breda. 

Mary Read was always surrounded by death. After just a few months of marriage, her husband got sick and died. Desperate, she just wanted to escape from everything and joined the Army again. This time, she boarded a Dutch ship that sailed to the Caribbean. Mary's ship was attacked and captured by the pirate, Calico Rackham Jack, who took all English captured sailors as part of his crew. Unwillingly she became a pirate. Soon after, she started to enjoy the pirate way of life. When she could leave Rackham's ship, Mary decided to stay. 

On Rackham's ship, she met the one and only Anne Bonny. Being the only women on the boat and sharing a lot in common, they quickly became good friends. Some people believe that Mary Read was in a romantic relationship with Anne Bonny, Rackham, or even crewmembers. 

Mary's pirate career ended in October 1720. She was captured by Captain Barnet in a desperate battle. In Port Royal, they stood trial. Rackam and his crew were found guilty of piracy, but Mary and Anne were spared because they claimed to be preggers. 

Mary Read died with her unborn child in prison from fever. She was buried at St. Catherine's parish in Jamaica.

 

Anne Bonny

Most of what is known of Bonny’s life comes from the volume A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates (1724), written by a Capt. Charles Johnson (thought by some scholars to be a pseudonym of English writer Daniel Defoe, not to be confused with the green goblin, Willem Defoe) and considered highly speculative. Anne was thought to be the illegitimate daughter of Irish lawyer William Cormac and a maid working in his household. Cormac separated from his wife after discovering his cheatin’ ass ways and later assumed custody of Anne. Following his hookup with her mother, he lost most of his clientele, and the trio emigrated to Charles Towne (now Charleston, South Carolina). Anne’s mother died of typhoid fever when Anne was 13 years old.

Her father betrothed her to a local man, but Anne resisted. Instead, in 1718 she married sailor John Bonny, with whom she traveled to the island of New Providence in the Bahamas. Her husband became an informant for the governor of the Bahamas. Not happy with her marriage, she became involved with pirate John (“Calico Jack”) Rackham, which hopefully sounds familiar unless you’re drunk like Logan. He offered to pay her husband to divorce her—a common practice at the time—but John Bonny “aw, hell Nah!”

In August 1720, Anne Bonny abandoned her husband and assisted Rackham in commandeering the sloop William from Nassau Harbour on New Providence. Along with a dozen others, the pair began pirating merchant vessels along the coast of Jamaica. Rackham’s decision to have Bonny accompany him was highly unusual, as women were considered bad luck aboard ships. Her fierce disposition may have swayed him: fictional stories claimed that when she was younger, she had beaten an attempted rapist so severely that he was hospitalized. Bonny did not conceal her gender from her shipmates, though when pillaging, she disguised herself as a man and participated in armed conflict. Accounts differ on when her female compatriot Mary Read joined the crew. Some state that Read—who had served as a mercenary while disguised as a man—was among the original hijackers of the William, while others claim that she was aboard a Dutch merchant ship that Rackham’s crew captured.

On November 15, 1720, Capt. Jonathan Barnet caught up with the William at Negril Point, Jamaica. Except for Bonny and Read, who fiercely battled their pursuers, the crew was too drunk to resist, and they were captured and brought to Spanish Town, Jamaica, for trial. Rackham and the male crew members were immediately found guilty and hung. Bonny and Read were tried on November 28. Though they too were found guilty and sentenced to death, their recently discovered pregnancies won them stays of execution. Read died in prison the following year, but Bonny was released, likely because of her father’s influence. She returned to Charles Towne, where she married, had children, and lived out the remainder of her life.

Jacquotte Delahaye

Delahaye was born around 1630 in Haiti, though there is no evidence of her birth, and many of the stories seem to originate from 1940s writer Léon Treich. Legend believes that the British navy killed her father, and her mother died during childbirth. As she was destitute, she joined a pirate crew and later commanded a fleet of ships. 

With striking red hair and the legendary status of surviving many dangerous encounters, she was named "Back From The Dead Red."

 

Ching Shih

Contrary to popular belief, the most successful pirate-lord in recorded history was not Blackbeard, Henry Morgan, Sir Francis Drake, or any other human with a wiener.

Instead, it was an extraordinary Asian woman known today by Ching Shih, which translates to ‘Ching’s widow.’ Her saga is nothing less than an exhilarating rag to riches story. At the height of her power, she commanded over 800 large ships, 1000 smaller vessels, and over 70,000 pirate crew, comprised of both men and women.

In comparison, Blackbeard, at his peak, commanded only 300 ships and a few thousand pirate crew.

Ching Shih was born as Shih Yang, in 1775, in the poverty-ridden society of Guangdong province, in China. Like many of the women of this period, on attaining puberty at the age of thirteen, she was forced into prostitution to supplement her family's income. She worked in one of the floating brothels, also known as flower boats, in the Cantonese port city. These boats would sail along the nearby coast with the customer on board. Back then, the Chinese perceived that the boat's rocking added an entirely new dimension to sexual pleasures and enhanced the overall experience. If the ships a Rockin… you get it.

In a short period, young Ching Shih had become the talk of the town due to her striking beauty, poised nature, and lavish hospitality. These attributes attracted several high-profile customers, including courtiers of the royal palace, army military commanders, wealthy merchants visiting the port city, and many more. Apart from this, very little is known about her early life, given her humble origins.

In 1801, Zheng Yi, a notorious pirate commander of the infamous Red Flag Fleet, encountered Ching Shih in the Cantonese port and was smitten by her beauty. Of course, he visited the floating brothel and met Ching Shih, expressed his feelings, and asked her to marry him. Ching Shih told him that she would marry him if “she was granted fifty percent share over his monetary gains and a partial control over his pirate fleet.” This demand showed that she did not want to end up as eye candy for her husband for the rest of her life. Drowned in his boner-filled love for her, Zheng Yi invariably agreed to her conditions, and they got hitched. The truth of this chain of events is often debated today. Historians claim that Zheng Yi had ordered his men to abduct Ching Shih from the brothel, forcibly marrying her.

Regardless, it was Ching Shih who benefited the most from their union, and her encounter with Zheng Yi is often considered to be her stepping stone to greater glory, which in turn got her etched into history as one of the most successful pirates in recorded human history.

Under the joint command of Zheng Yi and Ching Shih, the Red Flag Fleet began to grow and prosper like never before. The fleet grew from 200 ships, at the time of their wedding, to 1800 ships, in the next few months.

Immediately after joining her husband, Ching Shih implemented some crucial changes and constituted the code of laws to be followed to the T by all the crew. Here are a few:

1) Pirates who gave unauthorized orders or those who refused to follow orders were executed on the spot without a chance to justify themselves.

2) All seized goods had to be presented for inspection. If any pirate was found hiding or under-reporting goods, a part of their body was chopped off depending on the scale of the crime.

3) Loyalty and honesty were greatly appreciated, and worthy pirates were rewarded generously, setting an example for the others.

4) Female captives needed to be treated respectfully. They were segregated based on their looks. The weak, pregnant, and ugly ones were freed as soon as possible.

5) The beautiful women captives were held back for ransom. The pirates were given the freedom to marry these attractive women under mutual consent.

6) Infidelity and rape were treated as serious offenses. These offenders were immediately hanged. In the case of consensual pre-marital sex, both the offenders were executed. In some instances, the man was castrated, and the woman was banished from the fleet.

 

Apart from these, several economic reforms were implemented, considering the crew's happiness as an expression of gratitude towards them. This addition resulted in many of the pirate groups of the region merging themselves unconditionally under the banner of the Red Flag Fleet, which resulted in it becoming the largest pirate fleet on the face of the planet.

Meanwhile, unable to conceive a future heir, the pirate couple decided to adopt a young angler in his mid-twenties named Cheung Po from a nearby coastal village, which means that Cheung Po became the second in command to Zheng Yi and the most respected crew after him and Ching Shih. This move puzzled many crew members as to why the pirate couple chose to adopt a fully grown man. Let’s find out!

Just six years into their marriage, in 1807, Ching Shih’s life took a sudden tragic turn; Zheng Yi passed away during a devastating storm off the coast of Vietnam. Their adopted son Chang Pao was instated as the leading commander of the Red Flag Fleet and the pirate queen Ching Shih’s confidant.

Amidst this tragedy, there was an internal rift for dominance amongst the power-hungry captains of partnering ships. The future of the Red Flag Fleet was in danger. Ching Shih managed to secure command of the fleet and win the support of factions loyal to Zheng Yi, including his nephew and cousins, by utilizing a few cunning business tactics. Soon after, the power-hungry traitors were captured and executed in public to set an example and deter any future possibilities of a coup.

 

Following this situation, stricter disciplinary measures and codes of laws were implemented, and the lawbreakers were hacked to death instantly regardless of their rank.

 

Less than two weeks after the tragic death of her husband, the pirate queen announced that she was getting married to her adopted son, the commander of the Red Flag Fleet. AH HA!!

She had shared a relationship with him for a long time, which is why she was not conceiving from her first marriage. It was under her influence that her sucker husband, Zheng Yi, had adopted the young fisherman and declared him as his willful heir.

Under the leadership of Ching Shih, the Red Flag Fleet set off to capture new coastal villages and flaunted total control and domination over the South China Sea. This onslaught added to the trouble British and French colonizers faced as the pirates regularly plundered their ships.

The Red Flag Fleet was operating its businesses at an enormous scale. Not a single ship moved in the South China Sea without the knowledge of Ching Shih’s army. Entire coastal towns worked for them, supplying them with food, goods, and other provisions. The pirates taxed ships that wanted to cross the South China Sea. If they refused, they were attacked and plundered immediately.

 

Nevertheless, the Chinese dynasty desperately wanted to end all this. So, the novice Mandarin navy vessels were sent out to confront the Red Flag Fleet in the South China Sea and destroy them. A few hours into the battle, the Mandarin navy began a humiliating defeat. Ching Shih used this opportunity and announced that the Mandarin crew would not be punished if they joined hands with the Red Flag Fleet. So, just like that, the Mandarin navy was absorbed by the pirates, and the Qing dynasty lost a considerable part of their navy.

 

The Emperor of China was enraged to think that a woman controlled such an enormous amount of the land, sea, resources, and people that belonged to him. So, in an attempt to ink a peace deal with the pirates, the emperor offered an amnesty to all pirates of the Red Flag Fleet, hoping to terminate Ching Shih’s reign over the sea.



Meanwhile, the Red Flag Fleet came under attack from the Portuguese navy. That navy had already been defeated twice before. However, this time things were different because they came prepared with bigger ships and weapons. This superiority gave the Portuguese an upper hand, and the Red Flag Fleet could not return with an attack of the same size. The Europeans were slaughtering them in their own backyard.

Ching Shih recognized no point in fighting; the Portuguese navy ruthlessly destroyed her fleet. So she readily accepted the treaty offered by the Chinese emperor. The entire crew of the Red Flag Fleet was forced to surrender. The emperor allowed pirates to take home all the loot they had accumulated over the years without facing any significant repercussions. Plus, several pirates were granted jobs within the Chinese bureaucracy. Ching Shih’s adopted son and later husband Chang Pao became the captain of Qing’s Guangdong navy. In 1813, she welcomed her first child, Cheung Yu Lin, followed by a daughter whose whereabouts have been long lost in history.

 

In 1822, her second husband lost his life at sea, after which she relocated to Macau along with her children and opened a gambling house with all the loot she had grabbed at sea. She was also involved in trading salt. Towards the end of her life, she opened a brothel in Macau, bringing her life full circle.

 

Ironically, after kicking so much ass, she died peacefully in her sleep at the age of, yep, “sixty-nine.”

 

Sadie the Goat –

In 1869, Sadie the Goat joined the Charlton Street Gang, headquartered at a gin mill at the end of Charlton Street on the West Side of New York. Her real name was Sadie Farrell, but she became known as Sadie the Goat because of her favorite form of fighting: headbutting men in the stomach and having a male sidekick knock the victim out so they could steal his money and valuables.

Before joining the gang, she prowled the streets of the Fourth Ward and was known as a brutal mugger. However, after a terrible fight with another female gangster, Gallus Mag, Sadie the Goat lost her ear fled. Gallus Mag had bitten the ear off entirely and stored it in a jar in a saloon she owned. 

After Sadie lost the fight and her ear, she left the Fourth Ward and found a new home on the West Side with the Charlton Street Gang. Before her arrival, the gang had decided to become pirates and cause problems along the shores of the Hudson River, but they weren’t very good at it. However, with Sadie stepping in, things began to turn around.

With Sadie commanding the gang, they stole a ship and made her captain of their pirate crew. These pirates patrolled the Hudson River stealing and terrorizing, becoming rich in the process. It is said that Sadie the Goat was known for her cruelty and made several of her own men walk the plank throughout the pillaging. True to form, her ship carried the Jolly Roger flag.

After a few months of pirate life, local farmers along the river banded together and engaged the pirates in gun battles. As a result, the Charlton Street Gang decided to call it quits and Sadie the Goat returned to the Fourth Ward. There, she surrendered to Gallus Mag, the gangster who ripped off her ear in their last fight. Honored by the gesture, Mag returned Goat’s ear to her, and it’s said Sadie the Goat wore it in a necklace, in a locket, for the rest of her life.

Maria Lindsey – Maria Lindsey met notorious pirate captain Eric Cobham, and it was love at first sight. Cobham revealed his profession to Maria, but she was not put off – in fact, they were married the next day! The two left Maria's hometown of Plymouth and spent around 20 years sailing the seven seas as swashbucklers.

 

Rachel Wall

Rachel Wall's biography is riddled with myths and legends, but if tales about her are true, she was one of the first and only American women to try her hand at piracy. As the story goes, Wall was a Pennsylvania native who ran away from home as a teen and married a fisherman named George Wall. The couple settled in Boston and tried to survive, but constant money problems eventually led them to turn to a life of crime. In 1781, the couple bought a small boat, hooked up with a few low-life mariners, and began preying on ships off the coast of New England. Their strategy was as ingenious as it was brutal. Whenever a storm passed through the region, the pirates would dress their boat up to look like rough seas had ravaged it. Rachel would stand on the deck and plead for help from passing ships. When the unsuspecting rescuers came near, they were promptly boarded, robbed, and murdered.

Wall may have lured over a dozen ships to their doom, but her luck ran out in 1782 when a real storm destroyed her boat and killed her husband, George. She continued her thieving on land and was later arrested in 1789 for attacking and robbing a Boston woman. While in prison, she wrote a confession admitting to "Sabbath-breaking, stealing, lying, disobedience to parents, and almost every other sin a person could commit, except murder." Unfortunately for Wall, the admittance wasn’t enough to sway the authorities. On October 8, she became the last woman ever executed in Massachusetts when she was hanged to death in Boston

 

Anne Dieu-Le-Veut

 

She was also from Brittany, and her name translates to “Anne God-Wants.” She came to the Caribbean island of Tortuga in the late 1660s or early 1670s. From there, she suffered some rocky years that made her a widow twice, as well as a mother of two. But, her second husband was killed by the man who'd become her third. Dieu-le-Veut insisted on a duel with Laurens de Graaf to avenge her late husband. The Dutch pirate was so taken by her courage that he refused to fight her and offered her his hand. They married on July 28, 1693, and had two more children.

 

Dieu-le-Veut set sail with de Graaf, which was considered odd as many seamen thought women on ships bad luck. Yet Dieu-le-Veut and de Graaf's relationship has been compared to that of Anne Bonny and Calico Jack, inseparable partners who didn’t give a shit about superstition.

 

Dieu-le-Veut's legend took over as captain when a cannonball blast struck down de Graaf. Others suggest that the couple fled to Mississippi around 1698, where they may or may not have continued to pirate. And still, other tales claim that Dieu-le-Veut's spirit lived on in her daughter, who was said to be a badass in her own right by demanding a duel with a man while in Haiti.

Awilda, 

Aghast at the thought of marrying a snake-slayer named Alf, she took off, leaving the palace disguised as a man. She gathered a band of disgruntled women also keen to staying single, commandeered a ship and set sail for a life of piracy; Together Awilda & her female crew learned to weild axes and swords, quickly establishing a fearsome reputation across the Scandinavian seas.

When they came across another ship, full of male pirates whose captain had just died, she managed to convince them all to follow her as their new captain!

Word had spread of this growing band of pirates and the Danes sent their own ships to try and capture her. By this time Awilda commanded a large fleet, when her old flame Alf led an expedition to hunt her down, he found himself outnumbered. However, displaying the same courage & wit as he had when defeating those snakes, he managed to put ship after ship out of action until he finally made it to the lead ship where Awilda was waiting, sword in hand.

He didn’t know that it was Awilda he was hunting and the realisation only hit him when, in the midst of a swashbuckling swordfight he knocked the helmet clean off her head and recognised the girl he had risked life & limb for all those years before by killing all those snakes!

Perhaps she was impressed by his sword skills or his willingness to stand down, perhaps she just had a change of heart or realised how perfect their names would sound together, either way she decided that Alf wasn’t too bad after all and that she would take him as her husband. In true fairy tale style they lived happily ever after as Queen & King of Denmark.

Sister Ping 

Cheng Chui Ping, aka Sister Ping, was a woman who ran a successful human smuggling operation between Hong Kong and New York City from 1984 until 2000. She was arrested in Hong Kong in 2000 and extradited to the United States in 2003. She was held in U.S. Federal prison until she died in 2014 and nicknamed "The Mother of All Snakeheads," a translation of the Chinese word for "smuggler."