Category Archives: Trinkets

Today’s Accidental Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

By early 1993, Bruce Lee’s son Brandon’s life was in high gear both professionally and romantically.  He was sharing a Beverly Hills home with year-older Eliza (Lisa) Hutton, a Hollywood casting assistant. The couple planned to be married in Ensanada, Mexico, on April 7. First, however, he was scheduled to star in The Crow, a movie based on a high-tech action comic book. Lee was cast as a rock star who is murdered by a gang and returns to Earth in the persona of a bird to avenge his and his girlfriend’s deaths. Producer Ed Pressman hoped this entry would be the first in a series of movies starring Lee as The Crow.

Brandon and his fiancée Lisa

The movie was shot at the Carolco Studio in Wilmington, North Carolina. The shoot was jinxed with problems from the beginning. On the first day of filming – February 1, 1993 – a carpenter on the crew received a severe electric shock and extensive burns when the crane he was riding struck high voltage power lines. On March 13, a storm smashed some of the movie sets. Another time, a cast member went to check his prop gun before the cameras began rolling, only to find a live bullet in the firearm. Adding to the production confusion, a disgruntled set sculptor drove his car through the studio’s plaster shop.

BPF1JJ BRANDON LEE THE CROW (1994)

On March 31, The Crow was eight days away from the end of the shoot. Everyone was working extremely long hours to complete the movie on time. Shortly after midnight on the morning of the 31st, Brandon reported to soundstage #4 to do a flashback scene depicting how his screen character had died. In the story line, a drug dealer fires a .44 Magnum revolver at Brandon’s character as the latter enters his apartment. The filming procedure called for Lee to open the door, carrying a grocery bag in his arms. The bag hid a trigger mechanism he was to pull that would set off a small dummy explosive charge just as the on-camera villain fired the blank shot.

At 12:30 A.M., the on-camera performer playing the drug dealer was standing approximately 15 feet away from the star. He aimed his firearm at Lee and pulled the trigger. Brandon set off the charge as planned, but then he collapsed on the set, bleeding profusely. It was quickly discerned that he had a hole the size of a quarter in his lower right abdomen. While crew members phoned for help, the emergency medical technician assigned to the set began CPR on the badly injured star.

Lee was rushed by ambulance to the New Hanover Regional Medical Center in Wilmington. Upon arrival, he still had detectable vital signs. After the staff stabilized him, he was taken into emergency surgery. During the five-hour procedure, 60 units of blood were used on the patient. Shortly after 7:00 A.M. he was placed in the hospital’s Trauma Neuro-Intensive Care Unit. His condition deteriorated progressively until finally his heart stopped, and he could not be resuscitated. Brandon was pronounced dead at 1:04 P.M. At the time of his passing, his fiancée was with him, and his mother, Linda, had flown in from Boise, Idaho, where she lived with her businessman husband, Bruce Cadwell.

The media had a field day with this freak accident, pointing up the parallels between Brandon’s death and that of his celebrated father. Soon after the mystifying tragedy, Detective Rodney Simmons of the Wilmington Police Department (the first officer at the scene of the accident) examined the final footage. To explain the tragic mishap, he suggested that “One of the lead slugs could have come off its casing and lodged in the gun.” (According to this theory, when the gun was reloaded after the close-up shot, the metal tip had remained behind the gun’s cylinder. When the blank went off, it was speculated, the explosive force propelled the dummy tip through the gun barrel and lodged it in Brandon’s body near his spine.)

An autopsy performed on the actor’s body on Thursday, April 1, in Jacksonville, North Carolina, discredited Detective Simmons’ theory and confirmed its alternative: that Lee had been shot accidentally with a “live” .44-caliber bullet. How such a thing could have happened remained unexplained, as did the fact that protocol had been broken by having the on-set villain point (and fire) the gun directly at Lee, rather than “faking” the shot (which was industry tradition).

Culled from: The Hollywood Book of Death

Morbid Trinket Du Jour!

Who wouldn’t want this incredible coin-operated automaton in their living room?  Alas, the best morbid things in life demand a king’s ransom.

Special thanks to Michael Marano for the link.

We made it out alive!
Here’s to a mirthful 2021!

Today’s Miserable Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Here’s another glimpse of 19th century tenement life to prove that the Good Old Days Were Horrible! – DeSpair

Most tenement buildings in 19th century New York were little more than two-room flats with a kitchen and a single bedroom. Few people could really have been said to live “in” their tenement. Crowded, noisy, and filled with the stench of garbage, cooking, and stopped-up drains, most residents sought refuge on their fire escapes, front steps, or the roof – the “tar beach.”  Tenements also housed various kinds of industry, with people working in their rooms sewing clothes, taking in washing, or rolling cigars, adding to the noise, crowding, smell, and generally unsanitary and dangerous conditions. Wash lines hung between the buildings, with anything white soon turned gray by the ever-present soot, ash, and dust in the air. These lines also carried messages and small bundles between buildings. With the constant noise and putrid smell of the tenements, many residents simply kept their windows closed, some even going so far as to nail them shut, depriving them of any hope of a whiff of “fresh” air.

The East River was an important source of relief and diversion to children on hot summer days. Every street on the Lower East Side ended at a pier all the way up to the East Forties. Yet as one of the busiest waterways in the United States, drowning was common, as was waterborne disease. Pathogenic microorganisms found easy prey among the poorly nourished tenement children. During summer heat waves the resultant vomiting and diarrhea could prove fatal; “summer complaint” was often listed as cause of death among children.

The river was a nuisance for most New Yorkers. It refused to stay within its banks and frequently seeped into the basements of the poorest nearby tenements. Residents told stories of floating furniture and invading armies of rats at high tide. Even those lucky enough to live on higher floors – although their risk from fires was greater – were still forced to live with the constant smell of decaying fish.

With the tenements nearly uninhabitable, especially during a heat wave, when the temperature inside their apartments rose to 120 degrees, the entire population of the tenement districts crowded into the streets outside. With tens of thousands of horses plying the streets, manure and urine filled the gutters. The few garbage cans overflowed. For those not from the tenement district, the foul stench could be overpowering. New York streets during the summers were filled with hundreds of thousands of people, some peddling their wares, some selling fruit, some selling old scraps of clothes (the “rag pickers”), some gossiping and some just hoping to catch the faintest breeze in the brick and asphalt valleys of the Lower East Side. So many people filled the streets in front of the tenements that it was hard to imagine that all of them could fit back inside at night.

Crowded Lower East Side streets.

In 1890 Jacob Riis had described life in the tenements during New York summers:

With the first hot night in June police dispatches, that record the killing of men and women by rolling off roofs and window-sills while asleep, announce that the time of greatest suffering among the poor is at hand. It is in hot weather, when life indoors is well-nigh unbearable with cooking, sleeping, and working, all crowded into the small rooms together, that the tenement expands, reckless of all restraint. Then a strange and picturesque life moves upon the flat roofs. In the day and early evening mothers air their babies there, the boys fly their kites from the house-tops, undismayed by police regulations, and the young men and girls court and pass the growler. In the stifling July nights, when the big barracks are like fiery furnaces, their very walls giving out absorbed heat, men and women lie in restless, sweltering rows, panting for air and sleep. Then every truck in the street, every crowded fire-escape, becomes a bedroom, infinitely preferable to any the house affords.

Riis took note of the horrible toll the heat took on the youngest residents of the slums. “Life in the tenements in July and August spells death to an army of little ones.” While black streamers marked the deaths of adults, white ribbons marked the deaths of children. “When the white badge of mourning flutters from every second door, sleepless mothers walk the streets in the gray of the early dawn, trying to stir a cooling breeze to fan the brow of the sick baby. There is no sadder sight than this patient devotion striving against fearfully hopeless odds.”

Jacob Riis photo of a toddler playing in a tenement.

Culled from: Hot Time in the Old Town

Stay tuned for the debut album from my new band, “Summer Complaint”.

Morbid Trinket Du Jour!

If your New Year’s Resolution is to ease your feverish brain with some tried-and-true stress-reduction techniques, then why not do a little coloring?  (Thanks to C. M. Adams for the suggestion.)

(Transparency Is a Virtue:  Any purchases made via this Amazon Associates link will help fund books used for MFDJ content.)

Today’s Incendiary Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

At exactly 8:15:17 a.m. on August 6, 1945, the ‘Little Boy’ atomic bomb was released from the bomb bay of the Enola Gay as it passed over Hiroshima.  Among those killed by the heat flash were several members of the crews of the B-24s that had been shot down over the city the previous week. Nevertheless, flash burns were only to account for the deaths of some 20-30% of the immediate casualties of the bomb.

For a few seconds after the heat flash passed over them, the people of Hiroshima could have been forgiven for thinking that the worst was over, but in its wake came an even more devastating effect of the cataclysmic chain reaction: the shock wave.

The TNT equivalent ‘yield’ of the Hiroshima bomb has been vaguely estimated but, in all probability, the most likely figure is around 12,500 tons.  According to the US Strategic Bombing Survey:

Within a radius of 7000 feet almost every Japanese house collapsed and others received serious structural damage.

Along with the structural damage, of course, went the effects on the human inhabitants in the city:

I saw what seemed like an incendiary bomb exploding to the rear of the plane (in the sky to the south). It was followed by a flash (1 to 2 seconds duration). Thinking it was an incendiary bomb, I started to take shelter in the station building but had only gone a few steps when I felt a tremendous concussion strike me from behind. I immediately fell to the ground and covered my face…” (Kure dockyard worker)

I felt as though I had been struck on the back with something like a big hammer, and thrown into boiling oil… I seem to have been blown a good way to the north, and I felt as though the directions were all changed around… (Schoolgirl)

The blast wave, as it flattened the city, threw up an immense cloud of dust and dirt:

When I opened my eyes after being blown at least eight yards, it was as dark as though I had come up against a black-painted fence… The first thing that my eyes lighted upon then was the flat stretch of land with only dust clouds rising from it. Everything had crumbled away in that one moment, and changed into streets of rubble, street after street of ruins. (Schoolboy)

When I opened my eyes, I couldn’t see a thing. It was as if it had suddenly become midnight in the heat of the day…” (Tsutomu Yamaguchi, ship designer)

Hiroshima aftermath.

Culled from: Eyewitness Hiroshima: First-hand Accounts of the Atomic Terror that Changed the World

Adventures in Antiquing!

Of course I had to buy this vintage game when I saw it at an antique store.  I mean, how could I not?  It’s soooooo wrong, but so of of its time.

Mine was missing the back, but I found this one online.

Today’s Pale, Tortured Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Eliza Sowers—a former paper mill worker who had recently seen her station in life improve when she was hired to be a maid and was asked for her hand in marriage—had tried everything to end her terribly timed pregnancy. She swallowed magnesia, and tansy, and pennyroyal. She was bled. She consumed cups of tea made from powdered roots. She drank down one and a half bottles of an unknown wine-colored “medicine” she got from a local doctor with the promise that it would “make her regular,” gagging on the liquid, which she said was “sharp to the taste.” When it didn’t work, she desperately did the whole routine again a few weeks later. At night, she begged her sister, with whom she shared a bed, to help her, but no matter what they did, she couldn’t, as they said at the time, “get to rights.”

When Eliza finally began to show, her new boss referred her to Henry Chauncey, a self-described “botanical physician” who assured the young woman and her boss that this situation could easily be remedied.

Chauncey secured Eliza a room in a boardinghouse far from her home and place of employment. Its main selling point was that it was known for not asking questions. Chauncey then gave Eliza a new round of tinctures and formulas to drink—a black-powder tea, ergot, savin oil—and left, assuring her that nature would take its course.

Unfortunately for Eliza, nothing changed except her level of suffering, which grew and grew until the woman in charge of the boardinghouse hunted down the “doctor” to fix the situation. Witnesses later would testify that when Chauncey reentered Eliza’s room, he carried something that “shined and looked like a knitting needle” to finish what he believed his “medicine” had started. Eliza’s piercing screams rattled the closed boardinghouse door, and almost immediately after, Chauncey left the boardinghouse again.

Eliza bled alone and heavily into the night and through the next day. And the next. And the next. Finally, after a week, a nervous Chauncey moved the girl’s pale, tortured body to a different boardinghouse—this one frequented by prostitutes. Regrettably for Chauncey, the landlady at this boardinghouse knew exactly what was happening, and the severity of the situation. After a night of watching Eliza moan in pain, and constantly replacing the hot bricks at her feet to keep her warm, the landlady called in Dr. James Rush, a well-known and respected doctor in Philadelphia. He would later testify that he knew at first glance that she was going to die.

“I found her with a livid face [and] wild staring eye,” he told the court at Chauncey’s trial, “Sighing, moaning and excla[iming] of agony; her abdomen was very much swollen, and hard and tender to the touch; her extremities cold and she was pulseless.”

Rush shared his ultimate conclusion with Chauncey: There was no saving her. Chauncey agreed, and together, they fed her six or seven glasses of wine, which would serve as the only treatment she received while Rush was there. Rush convinced Chauncey to move her to his house so she wouldn’t have to die in such disreputable lodgings, and he did. But the next day, either in transit or soon after arriving at Chauncey’s house, Eliza Sowers died. She was twenty-one years of age.

The Eliza Sowers case proved to be a turning point in how America viewed abortion – or at least how the American legal system would begin to view it. When Chauncey was initially being charged and held for murder, he attempted to get bail through a loophole regarding how the law defined murder. He demanded that he be released on bail on the grounds “that it was a defendant’s right in murder cases where ‘intent to take life’ was not present. But with intent absent, how could this be considered a murder case at all?”

The release was refused. It was plainly explained: “The death of the mother following criminal abortion is murder, not because the agent accomplishing the act intended to kill the female, but because, the act being unlawful in itself, he is held responsible for all its results.”

With this statement and its resulting act, abortion was being formally criminalized.  When an autopsy was performed on Eliza, it was found that the cause of death was an infection “resulting from a laceration of the uterus caused by an instrumental abortion.” Chauncey was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison.

Culled from: Dr. Mütter’s Marvels: A True Tale of Intrigue and Innovation at the Dawn of Modern Medicine

Adventures in Antiquing: Pond’s Extract

I’ve been doing a lot of antiquing lately, and I thought I’d share some of the treasures I’ve stumbled across.  I adore this pamphlet for Pond’s Extract (circa 1904 or so)  – it’s small, but I’d like to get it framed nevertheless.  Graphics were better before!

Today’s Notorious Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Just before lunch on December 22, 1967, Dr. John Branion, forty-one, set off in his car from the Ida Mae Scott Hospital on Chicago’s south side. Several minutes later – after passing his home – he picked up his young son from nursery school, then called on Maxine Brown, who was scheduled to lunch with the Branions that day. When Mrs. Brown explained that she was unable to keep the engagement, Branion drove to his apartment at 5054 South Woodlawn Avenue. He arrived at 11:57 a.m. to find his wife, Donna, lying on the utility room floor. She had been shot repeatedly. He immediately summoned help. A neighbor, Dr. Helen Payne, examined the stricken woman and confirmed the obvious – Donna Branion was dead.

Police recovered three expended bullets and four cartridge casings. Two of the slugs were under the body and one near it. A fourth, still in the body, was found during the autopsy. Red dots on the shell casing primers were typical of German-made Geco ammunition.

The bullets that killed Donna Branion were .38 caliber, quite common, but microscopic examination revealed distinctive rifling patterns – six lands and a right twist. The casings also had marks on the base, signifying that the weapon used to fire them had a loading indicator. Firearms expert Burt Nielsen knew of only one pistol that fulfilled all these criteria – a Walther PPK. When asked if he owned any weapons capable of firing.38 caliber ammunition, Branion, an avid gun collector, replied, “Just one,” a Hi Standard. No mention was made of a Walther. Tests conducted on the Hi Standard eliminated it as the murder weapon.

Donna Branion

Detectives were puzzled by the lack of apparent motive for the killing. There was no sign of a robbery, and Donna was not known to have any enemies. Except possibly her husband. Rumors that the Branion marriage had been less than idyllic were commonplace. In a move that seemed to confirm the rumors, just forty-eight hours after the tragedy, Branion flew to Colorado for a Christmas ski vacation. In his absence, detectives learned that Branion was a notorious womanizer whose affairs had provoked numerous violent arguments with Donna. Compounding their suspicion was his behavior at the murder scene, where he had not bothered to examine his wife’s body.

Dr. John Branion

On January 22, 1968, Detective Michael Boyle returned to Branion’s apartment with a search warrant. In a cabinet that had been locked on the day of the murder, he found a brochure for a Walther PPK, an extra clip, and a manufacturer’s target, all bearing the serial number 188274. He also found two boxes of Geco brand .38 caliber ammunition. One box was full, the other had four shells missing, the same number of shots that had killed Donna Branion.

The New York Importers of the Walther revealed that model number 188274 was shipped to a Chicago store, where records showed that it had been purchased by James Hooks, a friend of Branion’s. Hooks admitted giving the gun to Branion as a belated birthday gift almost a year before the killing.

On May 28, 1968, Branion was convicted of murder and sentenced to a twenty to thirty year jail term. Released on a cash bond of just five hundred dollars, Branion began an appeal process that lasted until 1971. With his legal options fast expiring and sensing that imprisonment was nigh, he fled the country. After an amazing jaunt across two continents, he found asylum in Uganda, occasionally acting as personal physician to Idi Amin, that country’s dictator. Upon Amin’s ouster, Branion was arrested and extradited to the United States in October 1983.

In August 1990, Branion was release from prison on health grounds. One month later, at age sixty-four, he died of a brain tumor and heart ailment.

Culled from: The Casebook of Forensic Detection

Today’s Illuminating Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

When New York City Medical Examiner Charles Norris started his job, he’d decided to track every accidental illuminating gas death that occurred on his watch. During his first month in office – January 1918 – there were sixty-five such fatalities, an average of two a day.

The details of those deaths made it obvious that carbon monoxide does not discriminate in its victims. In the right circumstances, it will kill anyone. A newly married couple in an elegant brownstone just off Fifth Avenue on the Upper East Side were killed by gas escaping from a defective rubber hose; a woman living in midtown Manhattan was killed by gas escaping from tubing leading to a stove; a man on the Lower East Side was poisoned by gas escaping from a radiator; a man on the Upper West Side fell into bed drunk and failed to notice that the flame had blown out on two gas jets that fed the lamps in his room; a city inspector was killed by illuminating gas while inspecting the water meter in a basement; a man on Morningside Avenue, on the Upper West Side, was killed by gas escaping from a small gas heater in the bathroom.

In 1925 the details were of the same order, but the number of fatalities had gone up. That January fifteen people were killed by gas in one terrible day. Among them – a man in Yonkers, killed by gas escaping from an unlighted burner on a stove; a baby, dead when his mother placed him by a poorly fitted stove for warmth; a Long Island man, killed by a leaky furnace; a Bronx man, his wife, and a guest staying in their apartment, dead due to another unlighted stove burner; a young mother and her baby, killed in Brooklyn by a faulty gas heater.

The U.S. Bureau of Mines, which had been investigating carbon monoxide risks in coal mines, released a report in the summer of 1926 stating that “the public generally does not appreciate the danger from gas leaks.” The government was also weary of people reporting that a trained killer had set off a bomb when in actuality someone had merely left a gas jet open and then lit a cigarette. The bureau wanted to reassure the country’s citizens that not every residential explosion was the work of the Black Hand Society (an extortion syndicate which believed in theatrical demonstrations such as blowing up cars or apartment to get the message across).

It was usually the result of common carelessness.

Culled from: The Poisoner’s Handbook

Morbid Trinket Du Jour!

Ken sent me a link to a very attractive little trinket.

“Hey for under $7 and free shipping, you can’t go wrong.”  [Well, the shipping shows as .21 for me now, but that’s practically free!]

Man Behind the Glass Pendant

I’m finally reunited with my library after a prolonged renovation so the facts should start flowing regularly again.  I apologize profusely for the delay.  Thank you for staying morbid!

Today’s Sharply Pitched Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

China Airlines Flight 140 was a regularly scheduled passenger flight from Chiang Kai-shek International Airport (Now Taiwan Taoyuan International Airport) serving Taipei, Taiwan, to Nagoya Airport in Nagoya, Japan. On April 26, 1994, the Airbus A300B4-622R was completing a routine flight and approach, when, just before landing at Nagoya Airport, the First Officer inadvertently pressed the Takeoff/Go-around button (also known as a TO/GA) which raises the throttle position to the same as take offs and go-arounds.

Pilot Wang Lo-chi and copilot Chuang Meng-jung attempted to correct the situation by manually reducing the throttles and pushing the yoke downwards. The autopilot then acted against these inputs (as it is programmed to do when the TO/GA button is activated), causing the nose to pitch up sharply. This nose-high attitude, combined with decreasing airspeed due to insufficient thrust, resulted in an aerodynamic stall of the aircraft. With insufficient altitude to recover from this condition, the subsequent crash killed 264 (15 crew and 249 passengers) of the 271 (15 crew and 256 passengers) people aboard. All passengers who survived the accident were seated in rows 7 through 15.

Searching the wreckage.

The flight took off from Chiang Kai-shek International Airport at 16:53 Taiwan Standard Time bound for Nagoya Airport. The en-route flight was uneventful and the descent started at 19:47, and the airplane passed the outer marker at 20:12. Just 3 nautical miles (5.6 km) from the runway threshold at 1,000 feet (300 m) AGL, the airplane leveled off for about 15 seconds and continued descending until about 500 feet (150 m) where there were two bursts of thrust applied in quick succession and the airplane was nose up in a steep climb. Airspeed dropped quickly, the airplane stalled, and struck the ground at 20:15:45. 31-year-old Noriyasu Shirai, a survivor, said that a flight attendant announced that the plane would crash after the aircraft stalled. Sylvanie Detonio, who had survived by April 27, said that passengers received no warning prior to the crash.

The crash, which destroyed the aircraft (delivered less than 3 years earlier in 1991), was attributed to crew error for their failure to correct the controls as well as the airspeed.

Culled from: Wikipedia

Vintage Halloween Trinket Du Jour!

Of course, it’s not just around Halloween that I peruse Ebay for vintage Halloween trinkets, but I thought I’d share a notable one I just found from the 1930s.  Isn’t this a lovely ghost?

Today’s Grateful Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Among the earliest known accounts of a photographer taking a corpse photograph is James F. Ryder’s 1873 recollection of his days as a daguerreotypist in central New York State in the 1850s. In recounting the attitudes of the townsfolk to his practice, Ryder states:

I was regarded with respect and supposed to be a prosperous young fellow. All were friendly and genial – save one. The blacksmith, a heavy, burly man, the muscular terror of the village disapproved of me. Said I was a lazy dog, too lazy to do honest work and was humbuggin [sic] and swindling the people of their hard earnings. He, for one, was ready to drive me out of the village.

The greater my success the more bitter his spleen, and in the abundance of his candor denounced me to my face as a humbug too lazy to earn an honest living. He said he wouldn’t allow me to take his dog; that I ought to be ashamed of robbing poor people. Other uncomplimentary things, he said, which were hard to bear, but in view of his heavy muscle and my tender years, I did not attempt to resent.

Well, I left that quiet town and brawny blacksmith one day and moved to another town a few miles distant. A week later I was surprised at a visit from him. He had driven over to the new place to find me. He had a crazed manner which I did not understand and which filled me with terror.

He demanded that I put my machine in his wagon and go with him straight at once. I asked why he desired it and what was the matter. Then the powerful man, with heavy chest, burst into a passion of weeping quite uncontrollable. When he subsided sufficiently to speak he grasped my hands, and through heavy weeping, broken out afresh, told me his little boy has been drowned in the mill race and I must go and take his likeness.

A fellow feeling makes us wondrous kind. My sympathy for the poor fellow developed a tenderness for him in his wild bereavement which seemed to bring me closer to him than any friend I had made in the village. To describe his gratitude and kindness to me after is beyond my ability to do.

Culled from: Culled from Secure the Shadow: Death and Photography in America

Morbid Trinket Du Jour!

So I recently took up alcohol as a hobby (it had to happen eventually). Each payday I pick a random cocktail from an app and purchase the ingredients for the cocktail (and force myself to drink it, regardless of how repulsive it might be – last Friday I suffered through something called “Bloody Frog Cum”). Anyway, over time I’ve been building up a lovely bar and I’ve also acquired some nifty mid-century barware.  Recently I was looking into getting some fancy large ice cubes to kick my presentation up a notch (even though only my cats will ever lay eyes/paws on my drinks anyway, lonely misbegotten soul that I am). And then I stumbled upon this – and, I thought, what better presentation could there possibly be?

Giant Skull Ice Cubes!

Today’s Brutal Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

In April 1920, the seven slaughtered members of the Wolf family, as well as their stable boy, were laid to rest in Turtle Lake, North Dakota. At the time of the funeral, the identity of their killer remained a mystery. The only survivor of the gruesome attack was the youngest member of the Wolf family, eight-month-old Emma.

Then, just three weeks later, a neighbor named Henry Layer confessed to the brutal crime. Layer’s confession was as bizarre as it was ghastly. He claimed he had gone to the Wolf family farm to complain about Wolf’s dog attacking one of his cows. Patriarch Jacob Wolf, 41, told Layer to get off his property and proceeded to load his shotgun. There was a scuffle, and the shotgun discharged, shooting and killing both Mrs. Beata Wolf, 36, and the family’s stable boy, Jacob Hofer, 13, who was standing nearby. Jacob Wolf fled on foot; Layer shot and killed him.

Upon hearing gunfire, daughters Maria, 9, and Edna, 7, ran into the barn, where Layer killed them. Then Layer went into the house where he found the remaining Wolf children, Bertha, 12, Liddia, 5, and three-year-old Martha. He shot and killed both Bertha and Liddia, and bludgeoned to death young Martha with a hatchet. Layer sloppily covered the bodies in the barn with dirt and hay, pushed the bodies in the house into the cellar, then returned to work at his farm.

Two days later, a neighbor noticed that the Wolfs’ laundry was still hanging to dry, and went over to investigate. He discovered the horrid scene, as well as poor baby Emma, still alive but weak from cold and hunger, in her crib.

The Crime Scene

The crime would go down as North Dakota’s most brutal mass murder. Over 2,500 people attended the Wolf family’s funeral in little Turtle Lake, despite the population at the time only being 395. Layer raised suspicions with his odd behavior at the service, opening all eight caskets and “gazing on their faces.”

He was arrested on May 11, and soon signed a confession to the eight murders. Layer claimed the only reason he didn’t kill baby Emma was because he didn’t know she was there. He was sentenced to life in prison, and died in custody in 1925.

Emma: Cunningly Quiet Survivor

As the state’s most notorious crime, historians have oft revisited the Wolf Family murders, raising questions as to whether Layer’s confession was coerced. Indeed, Layer maintained his innocence while behind bars, claiming authorities strong-armed him during their interrogation. When asked by the prison barber, Layer said the police had beaten the confession out of him. He then broke down crying, proclaiming his innocence, and weeping, “Oh, my children. My children.”

The fate of Layer’s children —he had five with his second wife plus one from her previous marriage—is not entirely clear. Some reports have all but one being sent to live with relatives after their mother remarried. Other reports listed them as wards of the state. The eldest, Blanche, eventually married, and died in Seattle in 1981.

Little orphaned Emma Wolf was raised by her aunt and uncle, and went on to live a long life, dying in 2003 at the age of 84.

Though we may never know with any certainty whether or not Layer committed the Wolf family murderers, the photograph of those caskets, two large and six small, is a haunting image indeed. Locals still ruminate over the story of the Wolf family, whose tombstone reads in German “Die ermordete Famielie,” or “The Murdered Family,” and who now lay side by side in the Turtle Lake Cemetery.

Culled from: Huffington Post
Generously submitted by: Adoxa8

Today’s Competitive Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

In December 1937, the Japanese army swept into the ancient city of Nanking, China. Within three weeks, more than 300,000 Chinese civilians and soldiers were systematically raped, tortured, and murdered.  The following is an excerpt from the definitive chronicle of the atrocity, The Rape of Nanking.

Looking back upon millennia of history, it appears clear that no race or culture has a monopoly on wartime cruelty. The veneer of civilization seems to be exceedingly thin – one that can be easily stripped away, especially by the stresses of war.

How then do we explain the raw brutality carried out day after day after day in the city of Nanking? Unlike their Nazi counterparts, who have mostly perished in prisons and before execution squads or, if alive, are spending their remaining days as fugitives from the law, many of the Japanese war criminals are still alive, living in peace and comfort, protected by the Japanese government. They are therefore some of the few people on this planet who, without concern for retaliation in a court of international law, can give authors and journalists a glimpse of their thoughts and feelings while committing World War II atrocities.

Here is what we learn. The Japanese soldier was not simply hardened for battle in China; he was hardened for the task of murdering Chinese combatants and noncombatants alike. Indeed, various games and exercises were set up by the Japanese military to numb its men to the human instinct against killing people who are not attacking.

For example, on their way to the capital, Japanese soldiers were made to participate in killing competitions, which were avidly covered by the Japanese media like sporting events. The most notorious one appeared in the December 7 issue of the Japan Advertiser under the headline, “Sub-Lieutenants in Race to Fell 100 Chinese Running Close Contest.”

Sub-Lieutenant Mukai Toshiaki and Sub-Lieutenant Noda Takeshi, both of the Katagiri unit at Kuyung, in a friendly contest to see which of them will first fell 100 Chinese in individual sword combat before the Japanese forces completely occupying Nanking, are well in the final phase of their race, running almost neck to neck. On Sunday [December 5]… the “score,” according to the Asahi, was: Sub-Lieutenant Mukai, 89, and Sub-Lieutenant Noda, 78.

The Proud Competitors Mukai and Noda

A week later the paper reported that neither man could decide who had passed the 100 mark first, so they upped the goal to 150. “Mukai’s blade was slightly damaged in the competition,” the Japan Advertiser reported. “He explained that this was the result of cutting a Chinese in half, helmet and all. The contest was ‘fun’ he declared.”

Such atrocities were not unique to the Nanking area. Rather, they were typical of the desensitization exercises practiced by the Japanese across China during the entire war.

Beheading for fun

Culled from: The Rape of Nanking

By the way, you’ll be happy to learn that Mukai and Noda were both executed after the war.

Morbid Trinket Du Jour!

You know you want to drink some poison from this shot glass?  So what are you waiting for?

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