Becoming tired of his family and wanting to go off and live with his young girl friend, blacksmith Karl Willmann, of Hagenburg, Austria, started a domestic row that ended with him using his hammer to beat to death his wife, child and mother-in-law. He was sentenced to death in November 1948 for the triple murder
A career burglar, John Simborski also went to the gallows for killing a police officer. After his last burglary he stole a getaway car and the policeman, Walter Koella, gave chase. Simborski opened fire on him and the officer fell, mortally wounded. But Koellas patrolman partner returned the fire and wounded the fleeing bandit in
The Lebanese civil war between Christians and Moslems in the 1980s helped cover the traces of a double murder in Beirut. That was why it took four years to bring Ibrahim Tarraf to justice for the 1979 killing and decapitation of his landlady, Mrs. Mathilda Bahour and her son Marcel. At his trial the defence
It was, the newspapers announced breathlessly, the greatest mail robbery in US history, and it had been pulled off by a duo known as the Gentlemen Bandits, whose notoriety reverberated across the land. They were Gerald Chapman and George Anderson. They met in jail and developed an extraordinary taste for high living top restaurants,
High political office doesnt always bring rewards, as Ali Bhutto discovered. Pakistans president and prime minister, he was accused in 1977 of corruption and of rigging an election. The army seized power, arrested Bhutto for ordering the arrest of a political opponent, and sentenced him to death. For the next 11 months he was kept
D-Day, 1944. Tens of thousands of Allied soldiers swarmed onto the Normandy beaches in the biggest invasion ever mounted in history. Many would die, and one of them, Private Clarence Whitfield, a black man, died in a way he perhaps least anticipated. A few days after the landings Whitfield and some of his companions began
Hartford, Connecticut was the scene of another murder 15 years earlier, when Frank Grela, 41, who lived with his wife Nellie, 25, in one of the towns crowded tenements, complained to Nellie that she wasnt behaving with due modesty in front of the other male lodgers. In order to get away from the bothersome situation,
By dawn on Wednesday, August 13th, 1997, a crowd of 20,000 people had arrived to watch the execution of the man they called the Teheran Vampire 28-year-old Gholamreza Khoshrou. who, during a four-month reign of terror in the Iran capital, raped and murdered nine women and young girls. His modus operandi was to pose
For a pair of burglars, they had impeccable connections. Frederick Phillips grandfather was chief of police in a neighbouring town and Earl Lunds cousin was a policeman in Charlottetown, the town in Prince Edward Island where, on the night of January 30th, 1941, the pair were caught red-handed rifling the contents of a shop. A
An African headman, Pheelo Smith, desperately needed a human sacrifice to save his villagers crops. He chose his father-in-law as the victim, and the whole of the village of Maseru in Basutoland (now Lesotho) turned out to watch the ritual murder. Forty-two people were charged with being implicated in the crime, although 11 were finally