Anthrax to Zodiac

After Lizzie Borden was acquitted for the murders, no other suspect was ever brought to trial, and the murders remain unsolved. In Chapter 36, we see how, immediately following the trial, Lizzie and her sister fulfilled their life-long dream and moved to Fall River's most prestigious neighborhood where they lived together until they parted ways after a mysterious schism and never spoke again. The...

After her disastrous testimony at the inquest into their deaths, Andrew Borden's eldest daughter, Lizzie, was indicted for the murders. She was represented at trial by a dream team of defense attorneys that included a former Massachusetts governor and a former Suffolk County district attorney. The defense strategy depicted Lizzie as a law-abiding Sunday school teacher who could not have possibly c...

On August 4, 1892 in Fall River, Massachusetts, Andrew Borden and his wife, Abby Gray Borden, were found dead of multiple wounds inflicted by a sharp-edged hacking instrument. Abby Borden was found upstairs lying facedown on the floor of a guest bedroom of the family home, the victim of nineteen blows to the head. Downstairs, Andrew Borden was discovered in the sitting room, slumped on a divan, th...

Despite overwhelming evidence against him, Bruno Hauptmann maintained his innocence until the end and never implicated anyone else in the crime. Yet, many aspects of the case point to an accomplice. But could his co-conspirator have been Charles Lindbergh himself? In Chapter 30, we delve into the darker side of Lucky Lindy. We learn that, in addition to his strong antisemitic views and belief in e...

Even after Bruno Hauptmann was executed, the question still lingered...Did he act alone?  In Chapter 28, we'll learn about the evidence against Hauptmann and how an eagle-eyed gas station attendant wrote Hauptmann's license plate on a gold certificate from the ransom money that Hauptmann used to pay for gas, and see how investigators tracked that certificate through the banking system all the way...

After the kidnapper's directions for finding the baby proved to be a cruel deception, the search for the child launched into overdrive. Despite the massive law enforcement effort, the baby's corpse was discovered accidentally on May 12, 1932 on the grounds of the St. Michael's Orphanage in Hopewell. After a multi-jurisdictional manhunt that lasted two and a half years, police ultimately arrested i...

On the night of March 1, 1932, twenty-month-old Charles Lindbergh Jr. was kidnapped from his nursery on the second story of his family's home in Hopewell, New Jersey.  When the baby's nurse discovered the child was missing, Charles Lindbergh summoned the police, launching the investigation into the crime of the century. After a month-long negotiation, the ransom was paid, but the location the kidn...

While the Black Dahlia investigation officially remains open, the LAPD has "misplaced" all of the physical evidence in the case, eliminating, at least for now, the opportunity to apply modern forensic techniques to her personal effects and the few items gathered at the crime scene. In spite of thousands of leads and multiple confessions, the murder of Elizabeth Short has never been solved. Or has...

So who killed the Black Dahlia? In Chapter 23 of Anthrax to Zodiac , we take a look at the main suspects in the murder.  Could it have been Mark Hansen, a nightclub owner with connections deep in the underbelly of Hollywood who was said to have been obsessed with Short? Or was it Hansen's associate, Artie Loy aka Jeff Connors, who admitted to police that he knew Short, was in LA at the time of her...

In Chapter 22 of Anthrax to Zodiac , we take a deep dive into the massive investigation that followed the discovery of Elizabeth Short's bisected corpse. Read how the case was investigated in a quagmire of graft and public corruption by a police department and prosecutor's office reeling from scandals and revelations that had been plaguing the city for a decade. Learn how Short's belongings were m...

On January 15, 1947, a body was discovered in a vacant lot in the Leimert Park neighborhood of Los Angeles. The corpse had been cut in two at the waist, eviscerated, and drained of blood. The woman's face had been mutilated, and her neck and wrists were marred by ligature marks.  After the FBI identified the victim as Elizabeth Short, the LAPD launched one of the most extensive homicide investigat...

In the last part of Chapter 18, we'll explore some of the Zodiac's most intriguing communications, and learn about the amazing amateur cryptographers who finally decoded the enigmatic 340 cipher over 50 years after the Zodiac sent it to the media. In Chapter 19, we'll examine the main suspects. Was the Zodiac a bizarre man living in a trailer full of dead animals swimming in jars of formaldehyde?...

In the final part of Chapter 17, we'll examine the murder of the Zodiac's final victim, taxi driver Paul Stine. Stine was a doctoral candidate at San Francisco State driving a hack to make ends meet until his graduation, scheduled for the following January. And learn about how police came within a hair's breadth of catching the Zodiac just minutes after the Stine murder. In Chapter 18, learn about...

This post contains more of Chapter 17 of  Anthrax to Zodiac  where we explore the Zodiac's second and third attacks and take a closer look at the lives of his victims. We learn about the shooting of Darlene Ferrin and Mike Mageau at Blue Rock Springs and the knife attack on Bryan Hartnell and Cecelia Shepard at Lake Berryessa. We'll consider the possibility that the Zodiac was known to Darlene Fer...

Between December 20, 1968, and October 11, 1969, the killer known as the Zodiac attacked at least seven victims, killing five of them. The Zodiac attacked three couples in remote areas of the northern California county of Napa before killing a taxi driver in the heart of San Francisco just outside the grounds of the Presidio. Despite at least two surviving victims, numerous eyewitnesses, and one o...

This post contains Chapter 14 and 15 of  Anthrax to Zodiac . In Chapter 14,  we'll do a deep dive into the notes Cooper allegedly sent to the media and explore the possibility that some of them contained coded information about his identity. Do the mysterious letters and numbers point to the felonious war hero, Robert Rackstraw? Are they a code that just hasn't been broken yet? Or are they just gi...

In Chapter 13, of  Anthrax to Zodiac , we'll look at some of the most intriguing pieces of evidence in the case including the possible link between the hijacker and a French-language comic book character.  Then, we'll take a hard look at the tiny particles of exotic metals and alloys recently discovered on the clip-on tie that Cooper left behind that could point to Cooper's place of employment. Fi...

This post contains the last part of Chapter 12 of  Anthrax to Zodiac  and concludes he examination of Richard McCoy as a suspect in the hijacking of Flight 305. Read about how, after McCoy was convicted for a copycat hijacking, he escaped from a federal prison and was killed during an effort to apprehend him.  Then we'll  look in detail at two other prominent candidates: the mysterious Robert Rack...

Who was D.B. Cooper? Over the past fifty years, the passenger in seat 18E of Flight 305 has morphed from a man into a legend. Yet, the hijacker calling himself Dan Cooper was a real, flesh and blood human being whose true identity has never been revealed. This post contains the first part of Chapter 11 of  Antrhax to Zodiac  and looks at FBI's investigation of the crime, including the question of...

On November 24, 1971, a man using the name Dan Cooper boarded Northwest Orient Flight 305. Once airborne, he passed the flight attendant a ransom note and showed her what he said was a bomb in his briefcase. He demanded $200,000 in cash and four parachutes. When the plane landed in Seattle, he collected the ransom and released the passengers and two of the crew then instructed the pilots to fly hi...

In the last part of Chapter 7, we'll examine the controversy surrounding the DNA collected from the JonBenét's body.  We'll also consider further the possibility the family played a role in the crime. In spite of four secret grand jury indictments against John and Patsy Ramsey for their alleged roles in the murder, in a 2008 letter, the Boulder County DA publicly exonerated the entire Ramsey famil...

In the last part of Chapter 6, we'll take a look at questions surrounding semi-digested pineapple found in JonBenét's small intestine, and we'll explore the relationship between JonBenét and her older brother, Burke. We'll also discuss the rift between the police and the Boulder DA regarding whether the killer was a member of the household or an intruder—a rift that quickly widened into a chasm an...

Six hours after Patsy Ramsey called the Boulder police, JonBenét's father, John, cried out from the basement of their home and emerged from the stairs carrying the corpse of his six-year-old daughter, launching one of the most notorious murder investigations of modern time. This post contains the last half of Chapter 5 and the beginning of Chapter 6 of  Anthrax to Zodiac . We'll take an in-depth l...

John and Patsy Ramsey enjoyed a traditional Christmas morning at home with their children, six-year-old JonBenét and nine-year-old Burke, before attending Christmas dinner at the home of friends. According to Patsy Ramsey, she got up early the next morning and discovered a ransom note on the stairs. When she and John couldn't find JonBenét, at 5:52 a.m. on December 26, 1996, she called 911 and fra...

This post concludes Chapter 3 of Anthrax to Zodiac with more detail on the government's case against Dr. Bruce Ivins. Ultimately, after Dr. Ivins's death, the FBI declared that they had gotten their man and promptly closed the case despite the fact that Dr. Ivins died an innocent man, having never been charged, let alone convicted, of anything. Over twenty years later, we are still left asking, "W...