What True Crime Story Fascinates You Most?

Cafe Society
141

I just learned about the case of Oury Jalloh, which is fascinatingly bizarre and horrifying.

On January 7th, 2005, police in Dessau, (East) Germany arrested an African immigrant who was drunk and had allegedly been harassing a group of cleaning ladies. For inexplicable reasons, he was shackled to a mattress in a holding cell and left alone for several hours, during which time a fire broke out in his cell and he burned to death. Police would find a lighter in his cell and assumed he had started the fire to try to get them to unshackle him.

Except that over the years, more and more evidence has come out that he was beaten to death in his cell by the police in a sort of hazing ritual carried out on local drunks that had originated in the Communist era, who then burned his corpse to destroy the evidence, and that almost the entire staff of the precinct were complicit in killing him and then covering it up. Only one of the officers involved has ever been found guilty of a crime (and only involuntary manslaughter at that) because lots of critical evidence went missing or was deliberately destroyed, and it apparently wasn’t the first time someone had been killed under similar circumstances in the exact same cell.

For as much unwarranted violence against blacks takes place among American law enforcement, I can’t even think of anything within my lifetime in this country that even comes close to this level of barbarousness.

142

This story led NBC News just now. The shooter is still at large.

Comments on stories are…interesting. While UHC was always the worst insurer I ever had to deal with (thank heavens Kaiser Permanente doesn’t operate in my area) this is still unwarranted.

And this was right below it on Google. It’s a pay site but the title speaks volumes.

143

From the Rolling Stone article:

Thompson’s violent death outside a hotel where UnitedHealthcare was hosting an investor conference didn’t just prompt scathing jokes but heated criticism of the insurer he had helmed since 2021. One image that made the rounds online was a chart from the personal finance website ValuePenguin, which found that UnitedHealthcare denies 32 percent of all in-network claims relating to individual health insurance plans — twice the industry average.
…
Another ongoing lawsuit against UnitedHealthcare’s parent company, UnitedHealth Group, named Thompson along with two other top executives. A pension for firefighters in the city of Hollywood, Florida, filed the securities fraud class action earlier this year, accusing Thompson and his colleagues of selling $120 million of their UnitedHealth shares after learning of a U.S. Justice Department antitrust investigation of the company — but before the probe became public.

144

These stories make me all the more grateful that my own cancer treatment claims were paid without any hiccups. In 2017 and 2018, my insurance was billed for about $60,000, which included two outpatient surgeries and 20 radiation treatments, and paid about half that, on top of my copays which I could thankfully afford.

145

Today’s shooting reminded me again of the Ken McElroy case.

My current theory is that several people got together and each was given a loaded gun, but only one of them had a live round. So, when asked, they could all honestly say they didn’t know who shot him!

146

As of now (8:43PM Central time, 12/4) the suspect(s) have not been caught, but I did hear in the meantime that other insurance companies’ executives and CEOs are being doxxed. That’s not right either, especially if it potentially puts children in danger.

147

In the McElroy case there were rounds from different weapons, so more than one shooter.

148

Here’s one that popped up on CNN today. In 2021, a 21-year-old in Michigan took a home DNA test for fun. Several months later the cops contact her because it turns out she’s the niece of an infant who was found dead in a campground toilet in 1997, and her grandmother gets busted for homicide.

149

That is fun.

150

Jeffrey Epstein is fascinating.

How did he get all his money? There is speculation he funneled money from people he was managing money for.

What intelligence agencies was he working for? The prosecutor in charge of his case was told to let it go since Epstein was an intelligence asset. I’ve heard both the US and Israel were using him as an intelligence asset. Having blackmail material on large numbers of rich and powerful people would make you extremely useful to intelligence agencies.

As an example, when Putin was head of the FSB he had hotels bugged with hidden cameras. When a prosecutor went after Yeltsin, Putin had videotapes of the prosecutor having sex with prostitutes in a hotel room leaked to end the investigation. The prosecutor targeting Yeltsin was dismissed and Yeltsin rewarded Putin for doing this by making him prime minister.

On that subject, part of me wonders if Elliot Spitzers prostitution crimes was leaked because he was going after wall street bankers since he was the governor and former AG of NY state, where a lot of financial crimes happened that caused the Great Recession.

How did Epstein actually die? Was it suicide or homicide?

Will the list of people who participated in his crimes ever be released, or do the people who engaged in those crimes have enough wealth and power that they can ensure the list of people who engaged in those crimes never comes to light?

151

Long Island, NY in the 80’s had a few weird crimes. Of course there was Amy Fisher / Joey Buttafucuo yet Fisher didn’t actually kill anyone, just shot and maimed.

The senseless crime I remember was this guy killing someone he barely knew Ricky Kasso - Wikipedia perhaps along with some friends. His booking photo has him in an AC/DC shirt and they liked Ozzy, Black Sabbath and Judas Priest. And Satan. And LSD. Iron Maiden was thusly spared.

It was really just that I was about their age, yet I didn’t live in the rather more affluent Northport.

Another was the Valley Stream murder of a teenaged girl: Murder of Kelly Ann Tinyes - Wikipedia

The guy they convicted is serving 25 to life. He was 21 at the time and probably will not get any probation. There are strong suspicions the his 13 year old brother was an accomplice. It was the first case in New York won mainly with DNA evidence.

One real oddity is both families, last I heard anything, still lived on the somewhat-affluent street - about two doors down - in Valley Stream.

152

I moved to Northport about 9 years after that murder and heard mentions of the dark recent history, but never the details (locals seemed to want to suppress it), so thanks for the link.

Also, I’m a bit older than the murderer and definitely remember purple microdots (as mesc),

153

He was a financial analyst, but altho there are plenty of allegations & a conviction about his sex life, none that he stole money from his clients.

The FBI-
In July 2006, the FBI began its own investigation of Epstein, nicknamed “Operation Leap Year”.[112] It resulted in a fifty-three page indictment in June 2007.[73] Alexander Acosta, then the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, agreed to a plea deal, which Alan Dershowitz helped to negotiate,[113] to grant immunity from all federal criminal charges to Epstein, along with four named co-conspirators and any unnamed “potential co-conspirators”. According to the Miami Herald , the non-prosecution agreement “essentially shut down an ongoing FBI probe into whether there were more victims and other powerful people who took part in Epstein’s sex crimes”. At the time, this halted the investigation and sealed the indictment. The Miami Herald said: “Acosta agreed, despite a federal law to the contrary, that the deal would be kept from the victims.”[77]

Ruled a suicide.

154

I lived in San Francisco the summer after the last of the Zodiac killings, and people were still freaked out. I was a little, too.

155

Speaking of Long Island, the one that always fascinated me was David Berkowitz, otherwise known as the Son of Sam, and the .44 Caliber Killer. I was a kid on Long Island in the 70s, and I remember the terror that everyone felt while the killing spree was going on, and the profound relief when he was caught.

A couple of decades later, I read a book by Maury Terry called “The Ultimate Evil” where he made the claims that Berkowitz did not act alone. At the time, I though it was a pretty compelling argument. It has since been discounted by many, but there were officers on the force that were also convinced that Berkowitz didn’t act alone.

He’s still alive (71 years old) and incarcerated at the Shawangunk Correctional Facility in upstate NY.

156

Being fairly young (I was 11 in 1984) and living in southern Indiana at the time, I didn’t know anything about this story until I heard about it in the song by hair band Faster Pussycat called “Crying Shame.”

157

Well, of course he didn’t - the dog was in on the whole thing and got off scot-free. :slight_smile:

An interesting postscript to Berkowitz’s crimes is that he became a born-again in prison, and has a website that documents his conversion and his prison ministry.

158

Dr Harold Shipman, due to him being a medical professional meant he is not listed as the highest proven victim count for a serial killer.

A Doctor for 30 years around the north of England over the 70s-90s, he murdered 218 (proven) victims and many more suspected during his work as a Doctor. He would typically administer morphine and end healthy older patients lives earlier having diagnosed them as terminal.

He was actually caught forging prescriptions for Demerol for his addiciton and the British Medical Association did not strike him off as a doctor, and he was allowed to continue practicing, and thus was allowed to hone his craft of killing people and stealing both their medications and money.

He was only caught because a family had questioned why their loving mother had left 368K to her doctor, and it appeared to be an obviously forged will.

Previous investigations into him failed due to things like inexperienced police officers being assigned to the case. There were many concerns raised about him but the British medical system and police seem incapable of accepting the idea that a Doctor could be killing people, and for many many years.

He (like another serial killer of the times, Fred West), hung himself in Prison, which is weird, because you shouldn’t be able to do this.

I remember watching a documentary on him at the time, and the shocking moment when they were interviewing the family of one of their victims (think it was the father), and then they realised that Shipman was involved with the death of their mother many years later, and he probably killed BOTH their parents.

159

And mentioned in the previous post, Fred West was a nasty one around the mid 90s, with 12 proven victims.

There was a lot of sexual abuse in his family growing up including him raping his sister and getting her pregnant, and he was tried for this but his sister refused to testify and the case collapsed.

He moved to Scotland with a woman who was pregnant with another mans child in 1960, and married her. He had a child with her too. Both children suffered abuse. He worked as an ice cream driver in Glasgow and was known to attempt to abuse children there and fled from there in 1965 (there is claims that local organised crime was after him for that, but he ran over and killed a boy in his van so the claim is that is why he left),

During his on and off relationship with his wife, he went out with another woman who he murdered when she was 8 months pregnant and went back to his wife.

Then he met Rose West at the age of 15, who was a proper piece of work. She got pregnant by Fred, and murdered his first child when he was in Prison. He helped bury the body when he was released.

His first wife was then murdered (I’m not sure if Fred or Rose were proven to have done this) and buried in a field near Gloucester. He married Rose after this.

She then became a prostitute and worked from the room in his house. They had more children which they then abused, and they killed one of them, Heather. They had lodgers and nannies and murdered and dismembered a number of them over the years, burying them in his cellar and under the Patio, as Fred was a builder.

He was only caught when his 13 year old daughter Louise was raped by him and she went to the police. His house turned up many more things and Rose was arrested too.

While Fred hung himself in Prison, Rose still lives and is in prison still with no chance of release. She was convicted of 10 murders after his death, and he maintained her innocence blaming Fred for the murders when it was clear she had performed at least one and was complicit in many more. She seems uninterested in any revelations of details of the crimes she was convicted for.

160

That case is very similar to an earlier one. John Bodkin Adams got rich elderly women to name him as beneficiary in their wills, then allegedly killed them through opiate overdoses. He was suspected of having murdered hundreds of victims in this way, but was acquitted at trial.

Adams was struck off the medical register for forging prescriptions, was reinstated a few years later and resumed work as a solo practitioner.

Fascinating details of his life include his mother being recognized as the holiest woman in Ireland and Adams being president and medical officer of the British Clay Pigeon Shooting Association.

He was quite wealthy at the time of his death. People were reportedly still leaving him money in their wills.