Category Archives: Ghastly!

Today’s Waterlogged Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

James Larson, an eighteen-year-old from Forest City, Iowa, spent his second summer in 1954 in charge of motor and rowboats at the Many Glacier Hotel in Glacier National Park. Perhaps he wanted the job so much that he hid from his employers that he could not swim, or maybe he truly believed that if push ever came to shove he would survive by instinct. When he slipped while closing a window on  a boat and fell into the lake, however, he realized instantly the severity of his error. He yelled for help and got it—people came running to his aid and pulled him out of the water within five minutes—but during his ordeal in the water, he hit his head on the bottom of the boat. The blow knocked him out, and even though a doctor staying at the hotel worked for nearly three hours to revive him, she could not bring him around.

Many Glacier Hotel beside the fatal lake

Culled from: Death in Glacier National Park

Vintage Crime Scene Photo Du Jour!

Tony Moreno, alias Dominick “The Rat” Russo, felt secure enough in his position as gang chief of Cicero, Illinois, to sun himself on his own turf. Moreno, described as a “pupil of Capone,” was not protected by his mentor once Capone was in prison. On August 2, 1933, gunmen fired four bullets into Moreno’s chest. The pool of blood and the gazing crowd are standard fixtures in photos of gangland slayings. The pointed shoes and dangling hand make Moreno a much more elegant corpse than most dead mobsters.

Culled from: Shots in the Dark

Today’s Filthy Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Typhus fever is entirely different from typhoid fever. The latter is a water-borne disease caused by a bacillus. Typhus fever is a disease of dirt. The causative organism, Rickettsia prowazekii, belongs to a class of organisms which lies midway between the relatively large bacteria, easily seen under a high-powered microscope and which produced diseases such as typhoid, syphilis, and tuberculosis, and the viruses, which produce such diseases as smallpox and measles and which are so minute that they can be identified only with an electronic microscope. The organism is carried by lice. Lice is often found on animals or in the cracks and crannies of old buildings, but they can also infest unwashed bodies and the seams of dirty clothing.

Rickettsia prowazekii – ain’t it cute?

This is why typhus acquired the name of gaol fever and, since fevers were supposed to be caused by bad smells, this is the reason why English judges customarily would bear small nosegays of sweet-smelling flowers. The disease originated in the filthy prisons and spread from the felon in the dock to the judge upon the bench. Three such ‘assize epidemics’ occurred in the sixteenth century. These epidemics were late incidents in the history of typhus. The origin of the disease remains obscure. One theory holds that it originated in the East as an infection of lice and rats but subsequently became an infection of lice and men. (Of Lice and Men – I think I read that in 10th grade. – DeSpair)  Cyprus and the Levant were probably the first focus of spread to Europe, the earliest known severe outbreak being in the Spanish armies of Ferdinand and Isabella during 1489-90.

Since typhus is a campaign and dirt disease, particularly liable to occur in conditions where a number of people are herded closely together, wearing the same clothes for prolonged periods, and lacking means of ensuring bodily cleanliness, it sometimes had profound effects upon the fortunes of war. A remarkable example is the relatively small and localized epidemic which destroyed a French army besieging Naples in July 1528, thus making a decisive contribution to the final submission of Pope Clement VII to Charles V of Spain. Typhus also forced the Imperial armies of Maximilian II to break off the campaign against the Turks in 1566. Soldiers carried typhus fever across Europe during the Thirty Years War of 1618-48 and it was during this period that the disease became firmly established.

Typhus remained endemic in the whole of Europe from the seventeenth to the late nineteenth century, but it was only in conditions of warfare, extreme poverty or famine that major outbreaks occurred. The United States was not infected until early in the nineteenth century; a great epidemic occurred at Philadelphia in 1837. But the history of typhus is complicated by the existence of more than one form of the disease. ‘True’ typus fever, characterized by high fever, delirium, a crisis, and a blotchy rash, is very dangerous. Other less dangerous variants are Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, Brill’s Disease—a mild type which occurred among New York Jews and was described by Nathan Edwin Brill in 1898—and the Trench Fever of the First World War. This last variant, which was very prevalent among German and Allied troops, apparently replaced ‘true’ typhus in the armies it infected, for ‘true’ typhus did not occur among them, though it wrought havoc among the Servs and Russians. After the Russian revolution and the civil war which followed, famine and disease devastated almost the whole country. Approximately 20 million cases of true typhus occurred in European Russia alone between 1917 and 1921, with from 2.5 million to 3 million deaths.

True Typhus rash

The mode of transmission of typhus by the bite of the infected body louse was first described in 1911. H. da Roche Lima isolated the causative organism in 1916 and named it after an American, Howard Taylor Ricketts, and an Austrian, Stanislaus Joseph von Prowazek, both of whom died while investigating the disease. Since then improvements in hygiene and the use of DDT to kill lice have brought typhus under control, but mystery still surrounds this disease, for it seems that very special conditions are necessary before it will flourish in a virulent form, even when there is gross infestation with lice. Typhus seems to require concomitant malnutrition and sordid living conditions before it will produce a lethal epidemic.

Clipping hair of a boy infested with lice at a bathing station in Warsaw, 1917.

Culled from: Disease in History

Crime Scene Du Jour!

Scene of Dutch Schultz Shooting at the Palace Bar and Grill, Newark New Jersey, 1935

In 1935 Lucky Luciano ordered a hit on fellow gangster Arthur “Dutch Schultz” Flegenheimer and his “aides” after Schultz announced his intention to kill the anti-mob prosecutor Thomas L. Dewey. Luciano feared this murder would draw unwanted attention to the racketeers, so he put out an order to silence Schultz. Along with three other gangsters, Schultz was gunned down in a Newark, New Jersey, restaurant.

Culled from: Police Pictures

Today’s Deported Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Twenty-eight Mexican nationals got into an old, twin-engine DC-3 on the cold and clear Tuesday morning of January 28, 1948. The twenty-seven men and one woman were being deported back to their home country because they were working illegally in California as agricultural workers. The deportees had the choice of taking a bus, train, or airplane back to El Centro, California. The novelty of flying and the speed of the flight sounded much better than a long, cold, and bumpy ride.

The DC-3 was owned by Airline Transport Carriers, an  air carrier that flew only flights chartered by various government agencies. The flight on that cold January day was chartered by the Immigration and Naturalization Service to fly the deportees to the INS Deportation Center in El Centro.

For reasons that remain unknown, Captain Frank Atkinson and co-pilot Marion Ewing took the wrong airplane for the flight. They were supposed to take a DC-3 that was certified to carry thirty-two passengers, but instead took a DC-3 that had seats for only twenty-six passengers and was seven hours overdue for a routine and required safety inspection. The thirty-year-old Atkinson had more than 1,700 hours of flight time and Ewing had more than 4,000 hours. Both had been U.S. Army Air Corps pilots during World War II. Along with the flying crew, Atkinson’s wife Bobbie flew along to serve as a flight attendant. The flight to Oakland was routine, and nothing out of the ordinary happened.

Greeted in Oakland by INS guard Frank Chaffin, the crew found out that there were more passengers than seats in the plane. It is not known if Captain Atkinson realized then that he had flown the wrong airplane or if he had been aware of the fact all along. He apparently did not care, as the plane was flying light. The flight was to travel to Burbank for refueling before heading off to El Centro. Atkinson loaded the evicted Mexicans and their guard into the plane. Three of the migrant workers had to sit on luggage. The DC-3 was slightly overloaded as it bounded down the runway and over the San Francisco Bay.

At approximately 10:30 a.m., workers at the Fresno County Industrial Road Camp, located twenty-one miles northwest of the town of Coalinga, noticed the DC-3 overhead, trailing white smoke from its port engine. Many of the one hundred men at the camp were veterans of World War II and had seen many airplanes in trouble.

Suddenly, the work crew saw the left wing ripped away from the fuselage along with nine passengers, who had jumped out through the gaping hole in the fuselage. The plane caught fire and spiraled to the ground, exploding in a huge ball of fire. The workmen ran to the scene to rescue any survivors, but the only thing that they could do was put out the fires that the blazing aircraft had sprayed over the dry Los Gatos Canyon.

The fiery wreckage was spewed over a two-hundred-yard area. Bodies—some still strapped in their seats—littered the terrain, along with suitcases and shoes. The wing, together with the bodies of the nine jumpers, was found a half mile from the crash site. The majority of the dead were found in the front of the aircraft’s burnt-out hull.

The investigation by the Civil Aeronautics Authority found that a fuel leak in the port engine fuel pump ignited a fire and, due to the extremely fast-moving in-flight air, acted like a cutting torch, burning through the wing span, causing the wing to be torn away.

The people of Fresno turned out for the mass funeral of the twenty-eight Mexican nationals at Holy Cross Cemetery. Catholic mass was said by Monsignor John Galvin of Saint John’s Cathedral and Father Jose de Gaiarrgia of Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Twenty-eight identical gray caskets were laid to rest into an eight-four-foot-long mass grave, flanked by officials from Mexico and the United Sates and their respective flags. Twelve of the victims were never identified.

Legendary songwriter Woody Guthrie read about the disaster at his home in New York City and became infuriated that the newspapers had omitted the names of the deportees. He wrote a poem called “Deportee (Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)” that lamented that fact. If Woody had read the Fresno Bee, he would have seen that everyone who was identified was named in the Fresno paper, the closest city to the accident.

Mass Burial

Culled from: Death In California by my friend David Kulczyk

Ghastly!

Yosuke Yamahata photographed the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki on August 10, 1945.  Here’s one of his haunting images from the book Nagasaki Journey: The Photographs of Yosuke Yamahata, August 10, 1945.

Today’s Noticeable Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Matthew Lovat was a mentally unstable eighteenth-century Italian shoemaker.  His mental condition first showed itself when he castrated himself as a young man. The ridicule that this aroused in his native village of Casale forced him to move to Venice. A year later he tried to crucify himself in the street but was stopped when he attempted to nail his left foot to a wooden cross. He returned to Casale and began work making ;a second cross, which he attached to a rope suspended from the ceiling of his third-floor room.

With the cross laid flat on the floor, Lovat stripped off save for a handkerchief girding his loins. He donned a crown of thorns. Slipping his feet into a specially made bracket, he proceeded to hammer a nail through his feet into the wood of the cross. He tied his body securely to the shaft of the cross to prevent him slipping off and imitated Christ’s spear wound by cutting himself with a knife. Next, using his free hands, he edged the cross towards the window ledge, until it overbalanced and fell vertically out into the street. Thus suspended, Lovat used his left hand to nail his right into the cross; predictably he found it impossible to nail his left, despite the fact that he had previously pierced the palm with a nail. Equally predictably,  his actions did not go unnoticed by passers-by, who rushed to his rescue.

Lovat’s third attempt at suicide was successful but more orthodox. He starved himself to death in a lunatic asylum.

Culled from: Death: A History of Man’s Obsessions and Fears

Mütter Museum Specimen Du Jour!

Untitled from the Mütter Series ©2000 Candace diCarlo

Foetus, approximately twelve-weeks, cleared and stained with alizarin, preserved in glycerin.

Culled from: Mütter Museum

Today’s Unpleasant Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

German submarine U-20 was the U-boat that sank the Lusitania.  Here is an excerpt about life about the submarine, from Erik Larson’s typically brilliant book, Dead Wake:

Under commander Walther Schwieger, U-20 had at least one dog aboard. At one time, it had six, four of them puppies, all dachshunds, the unexpected product of an attack off the coast of Ireland.

On that occasion, following cruiser rules, Schwieger chased and stopped a Portuguese ship, the Maria de Molenos. After waiting until its crew got away, he ordered his gun crew to sink the vessel. This was his favored mode of attack. He saved his few torpedoes for the best and biggest targets.

His gun crew was fast and accurate, and fired a series of shells into the freighter’s waterline. Soon the ship disappeared from view, or, as Zentner put it, “settled down for her bit of vertical navigation.”

Amid the usual debris left adrift on the surface, the men spotted a cow, swimming, and something else. The bearded accordion player saw it first and shouted, “Ach Himmel, der kleine Hund!”

He pointed to a box. A tiny head and two paws protruded over its edge. A black dachshund.

U-20 approached; the crew lifted the dog aboard. They named it Maria, after the sunken freighter. They could do nothing for the cow, however.

U-20 already had a dog aboard, a male, and in short order Maria became pregnant. She bore four puppies. The accordion player became the dogs’ caretaker. Deeming six dogs too many for a U-boat, the crew gave three puppies away to other boats but kept one. Zentner slept with one on his bunk, next to a torpedo. “So every night,” he said, “I slept with a torpedo and a puppy.”

U-20, second from left

That Schwieger was able to conjure so humane an environment was a testament to his skill at managing men, because conditions in a U-boat were harsh. The boats were cramped, especially when first setting out on patrol, with food stored in every possible location, including the latrine. Vegetables and meats were kept in the coolest places, among the boat’s munitions. Water was rationed. If you wanted to shave, you did so using the remains of the morning’s tea. No one bathed. Fresh food quickly spoiled. Whenever possible crews scavenged. One U-boat dispatched a hunting party to a Scottish island and killed a goat. Crews routinely pillaged ships for jam, eggs, bacon, and fruit. An attack by a British aircraft gave one U-boat’s crew an unexpected treat when the bomb it dropped missed and exploded in the sea. The concussion brought to the surface a school of stunned fish.

The crew of U-20 once scavenged an entire barrel of butter, but by that point in the patrol the boat’s cook had nothing suitable on hand to fry. Schwieger went shopping. Through his periscope he spotted a fleet of fishing boats and surfaced U-20 right in their midst. The fishermen, surprised and terrified, were certain their boats would now be sunk. But all Schwieger wanted was fish. The fishermen, relieved, gave his crew all the fish they could carry.

Schwieger ordered the submarine to the bottom so his crew could dine in peace. “And now,” said Zentner, “there was fresh fish, fried in butter, grilled in butter, sautéed in butter, all that we could eat.”

Commander Schweiger

These fish and their residual odors, however, could only have worsened the single most unpleasant aspect of U-boat life: the air within the boat. First there was the basal reek of three dozen men who never bathed, wore leather clothes that did not breathe, and shared one small lavatory. The toilet from time to time imparted to the boat the scent of a cholera hospital and could be flushed only when the U-boat was on the surface or at shallow depths, lest the undersea pressure blow material back into the vessel. This tended to happen to novice officers and crew, and was called a “U-boat baptism.” The odor of diesel fuel infiltrated all corners of the boat, ensuring that every cup of cocoa and piece of bread tasted of oil. Then came the fragrances that emanated from the kitchen long after meals were cooked, most notably that close cousin to male body odor, day-old fried onions.

All this was made worse by a phenomenon unique to submarines that occurred while they were submerged. U-boats carried only limited amounts of oxygen, in cylinders, which injected air into the boat in a ratio that depended on the number of men aboard. Expended air was circulated over a potassium compound to cleanse it of carbonic acid, then reinjected into the boat’s atmosphere. Off-duty crew were encouraged to sleep because sleeping men consumed less oxygen. When deep underwater, the boat developed an interior atmosphere akin to that of a tropical swamp. The air became humid and dense to an unpleasant degree, this caused by the fact that heat generated by the men and by the still-hot diesel engines and the boat’s electrical apparatus warmed the hull. As the boat descended though ever colder waters, the contrast between the warm interior and cold exterior caused condensation, which soaked clothing and bred colonies of mold. Submarine crews called it “U-boat sweat.” It drew oil from the atmosphere and deposited it in coffee and soup, leaving a miniature oil slick. The longer the boat stayed submerged, the worse conditions became. Temperatures within could rise to over 100 degrees Fahrenheit. “You can have no conception of the atmosphere that is evolved by degrees under these circumstances,” wrote one commander, Paul Koenig, “nor of the hellish temperature which brews within the shell of steel.”

The men lived for the moment the boat ascended to the surface and the hatch in the conning tower was opened. “The first breath of fresh air, the open conning-tower hatch and the springing into life of the Diesel’s, after fifteen hours on the bottom, is an experience to be lived through,” said another commander, Martin Niemoller. “Everything comes to life and not a soul thinks of sleep. All hands seek a breath of air and a cigarette under shelter of the bridge screen.”

All these discomforts were borne, moreover, against a backdrop of always present danger, with everyone aware they faced the worst kind of death imaginable: slow suffocation in a darkened steel tube at the bottom of the sea.

Culled from: Dead Wake

Vintage Crime Scene Du Jour!

“Homicide, John Flood – July 3, 1917″
6.25″ x 8.25” glass-plate negative

PATROLMAN SLAIN WHILE WIFE WAITS

Patrolman About to Buy Funeral Wreath. He Is Called to Flat to Quell Row.

TWO WOMEN ARE HELD

Missing Pugilist Sought—Policeman Was Beaten to Death

Ten minutes after he left his wife waiting at Avenue A and Seventy-eighth street yesterday afternoon while he answered a summons of an apartment house disturbance. Patrolman John P. Flood of the East Sixty-seventh street station lay dead in the kitchen at 602 East Seventy-seventh street with a double fracture of the skull. When the policeman was found his assailant had fled. The police have sent out a general alarm for Milton Blier, a pugilist.

It was only half an hour before Flood’s duty ended, and his wife was waiting with him so they might purchase some flowers for the funeral of a little girl friend, when a hysterical woman rushed up and cried to the patrolman, whose three years in the neighborhood had made him well known:

“Come to my apartment quick, John. There is trouble.”

Patrolman goes to Death

Flood rushed away with the woman, whom beknown as Miss Kitty Mannix of the John Jay apartment house, at 502 East Seventy-seventh street. She explained to the patrolman, so she told the police afterwards, that she believed a prizes fighter, known as Milton Blier (alis Blaha), was waiting for her, and that she was afraid to enter her apartment. After she warned Flood that the man would probably cause trouble, the woman unlocked the door and the patrolman entered.

Miss Mannix said she went down the stairs to wait with her sister. The patrolman did not return, and believing she heard groans, she hurried to the office of Miss Emma Kelcourse, agent for the apartment house, at 510 East Seventy-seventh street who in turn reported to Julius Schneider, superintendent of the row of buildings. He went to the apartment and found Patrolman Flood lying unconscious on the floor, with blood splattered about the room, two or three broken plates, but no furniture upset. A physician of Flower Hospital found the policeman dead when he arrived a few minutes later.

Census Card is Clue

A State military census registration card led to the discovery of Miss Mannix, who disappeared immediately after she had reported to the house agent. On the card her name was Mrs. James O’Connor, and it was learned later that she was the wife of James O’Connor, with whom she has not been living for three years. The police found her in her mother’s laundry on the East Side. With Margaret Haskegen, her sister, of 419 East Sixty-fourth street, with whom she spent the night while in fear of going home, Kitty Mannix (Mrs. O’Connor) is being held by the police as a material witness.

After questioning the two women last night the police sent out a general alarm for Blier, a prizefighter, who is described as 23 years old, weighing 130 pounds, medium height and fair complexion. His home was in the neighborhood of Eightieth street and Second avenue.

The assailant is believed to have taken the weapon with which he killed the policeman with him. Coroner Healy said the wounds looked as if Flood had been struck on the forehead with a hammer and on the back of the head with a small axe.

Patrolman Flood lived at 426 West Fifty-First street with his wife and three children. He also supported the children of his brother-in-law. He joined the force in July 1902. He was known among the fellow patrolmen of the Sixty-seventh Street for his mild manner and good nature.

Patrolman John Flood

Culled from: Murder in the City

Incidentally, last year a street was named in honor of Flood, and in 2019 his unmarked grave was given a proper headstone:
https://patch.com/new-york/upper-east-side-nyc/officer-killed-1917-gets-honored-yorkville-street-naming

Today’s Frostbitten Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Civic disaster requires a hero. Minnesotans found or created one in a young storm survivor they christened “Minnesota’s Frozen Son.” Michael J. Dowling was fifteen when he came within an inch of freezing to death in one of the blizzards of the winter of 1880-81 (known as the “Snow Winter” because of the immense and frequent snowstorms). Dowling’s frostbite was so advanced that he lost both legs below the knees, his left arm below the elbow, and all the fingers and most of the thumb on his right hand. But Dowling was a fighter. He lived on to become a teacher, newspaper editor, and eventually speaker of the house of the Minnesota State Legislature. “It is what one has above the shoulders that counts, ” he always told his fellow amputees.

Culled from: The Children’s Blizzard

Vintage Medical Photo Du Jour!

“A Morning’s Work,” 1865
Reed Brockway Bontecou, M.D., Washington D.C.
Albumen print, 6 x 4 1/2 in.

This photograph graphically documents the devastation of the Civil War. More than 625,000 men died (one of every four who fought), and more than 400,000 were wounded. Chronic diarrhea and infections such as dysentery killed tens of thousands of people in the years following, as a ravaged generation and a young nation continued to pay the costs of the war.

Reed Brockway Bontecou, M. D. (1824-1907), Surgeon in Charge at Harewood United States Army General Hospital in Washington, D.C. was an avid proponent of photography and documented his cases for inclusion in the newly established United Sates Army Medical Museum. This image, labeled “A Morning’s Work” by Dr. Bontecou himself, reflects the typical number of amputations he performed in a single morning.

Culled from: A Morning’s Work

Today’s Apologetic Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Undoubtedly, one of the most curious cases of a Jekyll and Hyde personality is that of the Jersey (an island between England and France) rapist, Edward Paisnel. Just before midnight on Saturday, July 10, 1971, two Jersey policemen were sitting in their patrol car at a traffic light when another car hurtled across the road in front of them against the amber light. They decided to give chase to the car, which was heading towards St. Helier: they suspected it might have been stolen for a joyride by local youths. The driver ignored their signals to stop, struck an oncoming car a glancing blow, and roared off at 70 miles an hour. He began weaving from side to side to prevent the police from overtaking. Finally, after a chase of many miles, he turned into a private road, ran though a fence and across a garden, and into a field of tomatoes. The occupant leapt out and ran; one of the policemen brought him down with a rugger tackle.

At the police station they discovered that the man—who was middle-aged—had rows of nails, their points outward, sewn to the lapels of his jacket. In his pockets they found a wig, a rubber face mask, and adhesive tape. The police realized suddenly that they had at last caught the man who had been committing rape on the island for many years—perhaps as many as 14.

He was Edward John Louis Paisnel. Back at his home—a farmhouse called Maison du Soleil—they discovered a secret room behind a bookcase; it contained a raffia cross, more masks, coats with nails, and black magic paraphernalia. When asked about this, Paisnel replied: “My master would laugh very long and loud about this.” His “master” was the devil, and it later turned out that Paisnel was obsessed by Gilles de Rais, burned in 1440 for the murders of more than 50 children.

The pattern of the crimes had been peculiar. In November 1957, three women had been attacked by a man with a knife, and one was sexually assaulted. In April 1958, a man threw a rope round the neck of a girl, dragged her into a field and raped her. In October 1958, a girl was dragged from a cottage and raped. The attacks ceased until 1960, and police hoped they had stopped. But then, in January 1960, they took an altogether more alarming turn. A 10-year-old girl woke up to find a man in her bedroom. He warned her that if she cried out he would shoot both her parents. He then sexually assaulted her in her own bed, and left by the window, driving off in her father’s car. When she told her brothers the next morning, they were inclined to believe that she had dreamed it all—a feature that recurred in some of the later cases.

A month later, a man entered the bedroom of a 12-year-old boy, made him go out with him to a field, and committed a sexual assault. The rapist then took the boy back to the house and back to his bedroom. This was perhaps the oddest feature of all. Why should he risk being caught? It seemed that, once he had committed his assault, the rapist became apologetic.

For the next 11 years, Jersey became an island of terror. Householders had bolts and bars put on windows. In March 1960 a 24-year-old air hostess, waiting at a bus stop, was dragged into a field and raped. On April 27, a woman whose husband was in hospital heard a noise in the middle of the night and found a man in her kitchen. The woman’s 14-year-old daughter came downstairs, and a rope was thrown around her throat. She was dragged out to a nearby field and raped, then allowed to go home.

In this, as in many succeeding attacks, it became clear that the rapist had studied the house, and knew how to achieve his object with the minimum of risk. He often wore the terrifying rubber mask. Usually the children were too frightened to scream; the man would commit a sexual assault and then courteously escort them back to their bedrooms. In some cases, penetration was minimal—he was evidently worried about hurting his victims—but at least one girl became pregnant. When 11-year-old Joy Norton was found stabbed to death in September 1965, it was feared that the rapist had at last turned to murder; but it was discovered that she had been sexually abused over a period of years, and her elder brother was charged with her murder.

And so the rape and assault continued, usually at the rate of one or two a year, until Paisnel was caught. One man who was generally suspected of the assaults had been so ostracized that he had been forced to leave the island. Altogether, Paisnel was charged with seven sexual assaults, including rape and sodomy. Found guilty, he was sentenced to 30 years’ imprisonment. But what baffled all those who knew him was that the kind Edward Paisnel, the man who genuinely loved children, and often played Father Christmas at parties, should also be the rapist who had terrorized the island.

Edward Paisnel: The Beast of Jersey

Culled from: Crimes and Punishment, the Illustrated Crime Encyclopedia, Volume 1 

Vintage Crime Scene Du Jour!

No caption. The body is that of a black man, who is lying in the front hallway of a tenement. A crowd has gathered outside, in the rain, holding umbrellas. The cigarette butt on the floor might have been thrown there by anyone, including the cops.

Culled from: Evidence

Today’s Shock-Induced Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

The New London School explosion occurred on March 18, 1937, when a natural gas leak caused an explosion and destroyed the London School in New London, Texas, United States. The disaster killed more than 300 students and teachers. As of 2021, the event is the third-deadliest disaster in the history of Texas, after the 1900 Galveston hurricane and the 1947 Texas City disaster.  The following is an account of the aftermath of the disaster.

George L. Hardy of Arp heard the explosion, and soon afterward, he saw emergency vehicles streaming east in front of his house. “The London school!” somebody shouted from a car. Hardy grabbed his hat and coat, jumped into his car, and started for the school. By the time he reached the outskirts of New London, he was sweating profusely. Hardy, sixty-three, loosened his collar and took off his coat. After he’d gotten as close to the school as possible, he parked the car in the weeds on the side of the road. Then he set out in a trot. He was too old and out of shape to make a full run.

When Hardy saw chalky white men coming out of the collapsed building carrying dead children drenched in blood, he clutched his chest and collapsed next to a fallen piece of wall. George Hardy died later that evening , felled, a doctor said, by a heart attack induced by shock.

Culled from: Gone at 3:17

Some people just aren’t cut out for morbidity!

Malady Du Jour!

The Dr. Ikkaku Ochi Collection is a fascinating cluster of medical photographs from the late 19th and early 20th century that had been collected by Dr. Ikkaku Ochi in Japan and were found in a box many years later.  There was no detailed information available for most of the photos, but the images are compelling because they show composed portraits of people suffering through intense pain caused by conditions that in most cases would be resolved through treatment today. There’s a sense of overwhelming sadness that comes through in these pictures, but also dignity and strength.

Today’s Concentrated Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

The Virgin River sculpts a dramatic and compelling corridor through the heart of Zion National Park, one that lures otherwise cautious hikers to take on a challenge entirely different from the ones they find on dry land. Here sandstone walls stretch upward for a thousand feet or more, allowing a glistening ribbon of water to find its way between them with only twenty or thirty feet of tolerance on either side. Sunlight generally forsakes this slim waterway, making this a dim or even murky journey— but when a shaft of natural light casts a momentary glow on a towering wall, the effect can be so remarkable that hikers pause to admire the play of sun and shadow against the folds of sandstone glowing in shade so vermillion, white gold, and mahogany.

Hiking the Narrows

While hiking the Narrows at its most shallow may result in an unplanned dunking into the water or at worst, a twisted ankle, there’s a greater danger from the middle of July to the end of August. Just as Zion’s shuttle buses become jammed with passengers and the trails are crowded with day-trippers and visitors from around the world, torrential thunderstorms begin to pop up regularly in the mountains north of the park. Hikers in the Narrows report looking up past the canyon walls to see bright blue sky even as rain drenches the land twenty or thirty miles away.  As the rain falls and the runoff from the desert and mountain swells the volume of the Virgin River, all that water flows into Zion Canyon.

Once inside, the volume of water becomes concentrated as it squeezes between the monolithic walls. The water level rises instantly, racing down the canyon at rates as high as four thousand cubic feet per second—and as the canyon becomes even narrower, the water level rises again. What may have begun as a few extra inches of water high in the mountains now speeds down the center of the canyon, reaching well over hiker’s heads and creating a deadly situation for people who have been lulled into a sense of security by the patches of clear blue sky they see above them. If they are caught on low ground, they may be swept away by the current’s force.

So on Monday afternoon, July 27, 1998, when 0.47 inches of rain fell at Zion National Park headquarters and the Lava Point area west of the Narrows received 0.37 inches, parties of hikers— fourteen people in all—became trapped overnight about two miles upriver from the Temple of Sinawava parking area. They managed to scramble to higher ground as the water level rose three feet in a matter of minutes, and as the flow increased from 110 cubic feet to 740 cubic feet per second, making wading in the roiling river impossible. They made makeshift camps, getting as comfortable as they could while keeping a close eye on the current for any sign that the depth might become passable once again.

That’s how the hikers spotted the body.

It floated by them at about 5:00 p.m., battered significantly by rocks it had encountered in the swift current. No medical expertise was require to determine that the person had most likely drowned in the flash flood.

Immediately seeing the need to retrieve this person’s remains, several of the hikers worked together to reach the body, bring it to a patch of ground, and secured it there. It remained in place until early Tuesday morning, when the river had returned to a manageable level and the hikers could make their way out of the canyon. They reported their find to the first ranger they could locate.

When Zion’s search and rescue squad entered the Narrows, it located the body where the hikers had secured it. Determining who the victim was, however, became a tricky process. “There was no identification on the man, and we haven’t heard any reports about a missing person,” park spokesman Denny Davies told the Salt Lake Tribune. The recovery team ventured an educated guess that the man was in his forties, and that he weighed between 230 and 250 pounds. Washington County sheriff Glenwood Humphries noted that the body had taken a severe beating in the swiftly flowing current, making it that much harder to achieve a solid identification. Whoever this person was, he had not obtained a permit from the park to hike the canyon, and he had not made an advanced reservation for a campsite. His identity was a complete mystery.

On Tuesday evening, however, park investigators found a an unlocked vehicle parked in Zion Canyon with two wallets in it, and they matched one of the driver’s license photos with the unidentified body. They determined that the victim was twenty-seven-year-old Ramsey E. Algan of Long Beach, California. Two other hikers who had emerged from the canyon after the flash flood confirmed what seemed to be the case: Algan had been hiking with another man, and that man had not returned to his car either. Park search and rescue teams now had to face the fact that they had another hiker to find—and the chances were slim that they would find him alive.

On Wednesday, July 29, Acting Chief Ranger David Buccello coordinated the second search along the Virgin River, breaking the searchers into teams to explore five sectors of the park. He also engaged the assistance of Rocky Mountain Rescue Dogs from Salt Lake City.

On Wednesday morning, July 30, searchers discovered the body of the second man about a mile and a half upstream from where Algan’s body was first spotted. Paul Garcia, a thirty-one year-old man from Paramount, California, was located in a debris pile where his body had snagged during the flash flood.

Park officials were quick to use this tragedy to reinforce the message that those planning to hike the Narrows need to check with park rangers at a visitor center or ranger station before venturing up or down the Virgin River. “We cannot stress too strongly that visitors need to heed these flash  flood warnings and plan alternate trips that don’t include slot canyons,” acting park superintendent Eddi Lopea told the Salt Lake Tribune.  He urged hikers to get updated weather information before venturing into any narrow or slot canyon, and to delay their hike if thunderstorms are predicted.

Culled from: Death In Zion National Park

Dissection Photo Du Jour!

School unknown. The cadavers in these photographs almost always rest directly on the wooden or metal dissecting table, but in this tableau a sheet has been placed under the body. As in most scenes, none of the dissectors is wearing gloves.

Culled from: Dissection: Photographs of a Rite of Passage in American Medicine: 1880-1930

Today’s Tame Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

On March 22, 1902, Dick Rock, 49, a well-known Yellowstone-area poacher and animal keeper, was killed by one of his own bison near Henry’s Lake, just outside the park. He was attempting to show a friend how “tame” they had become. Several people had warned Dick that the bison would kill him, but he did not listen. One Saturday morning at 7:00 a.m. when Dick was feeding a bison, it became enraged and charged him, pinning him against the corral. His screams brought Mrs. Rock and several people from a nearby ranch. What they saw horrified them. Over and over the bison pitched Dick’s body up into the air and gored him with hits horns every time it hit the ground. The bison ripped all the clothes from Dick’s body and left him with twenty-nine horn holes. Mrs. May Garner remembered that when they got Dick out of there, “his eyelids twitched a time or two and he was gone.”

Dick Rock.  No wonder the bison was mad.

Culled from: Death In Yellowstone

Suicide Du Jour!

One of my favorite books is Death Scenes: A Homicide Detective’s Scrapbook.  It is exactly what it says it is: a bizarre and oft-disturbing scrapbook collected over the years by Los Angeles area police detective Jack Huddleston, whose career spanned from 1921 to the early 1950’s. Here’s a strange entry:

Pat Gorman “Suicide” Denatured, Alc.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any additional information on this incident… because it certainly needs an explanation!