Monthly Archives: August 2023

Today’s Dimwitted Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Juanita Spinelli’s entire life was a lie, but she had the talent to influence the young and dumb to do her bidding. We know that Ethel Leta Juanita Spinelli was born on October 17, 1889, in Kentucky, but after that the rest of her pathetic life is speculation. Spinelli made so many claims about her past that only the truly gullible would believe a word that she said. Whether she gave herself the nickname “The Duchess” or whether it was coined by her alleged Purple Gang connections, nobody will ever know, nor probably care.

“They call me The Duchess.”

What is known about her is that she materialized in San Francisco sometime in the late 1930s, with three kids and a hood named Michael Simone in tow. Spinelli was a haggard, toothless woman who looked twenty years older than the fifty years that she claimed to be. She asserted that she was an informer for Detroit’s ultra-violent Purple Gang and had to leave the Motor City in a hurry. The Purple Gang was a Jewish organized-crime outfit that was basically wiped out by internal disputes by 1935, so Spinelli’s story is questionable. She was supposedly married to bank robber Anthony Spinelli, who had been killed while smuggling contraband across the Mexican border. Information on Anthony Spinelli and his crimes are as non-existent as were the Duchess’ parenting skills.

The Duchess rounded up a handful of malcontents with serious mental deficiencies: eighteen-year-old Robert Sherrod, twenty-one-year-old car thief and jailbird Gordon Hawkins, and Albert Ives, a twenty-four-year-old, one-eyed half-wit. Together with the thirty-two-year-old Simone, who acted as a caseman as well as the Duchess’ lover, the gang knocked off gas stations and rolled drunks.

Spinelli’s teenage daughter Lorraine was used as a sex lure by her criminally demented mother. Lorraine, whose street name was Gypsy, would approach drunken men with the promise of easy sex. Once they were alone, Spinelli’s thugs would rob the man, sometimes taking off his clothes.

Juanita thought of herself as the brains of the outfit and when she wasn’t planning small-time robberies, she was cooking and cleaning for her troupe of young crooks. Acting as the teacher, Spinelli instructed the boys in the fine arts of robbery, assault, and car theft. She taught them that it was smarter to commit a steady stream of small crimes than one big one like robbing a bank. She explained that the police would go all out to find a bank robber, but they would more than likely shrug at a man who woke up on the sidewalk with his wallet missing. Providing them with the mother figure that they may never have had, Spinelli delegated jobs for the gang and doled out their cut of the money as if it were an allowance.

On a foggy night on April 8, 1940, Ives shot barbecue stand owner Leland S. Cash while attempting to rob him of the day’s receipts. The fifty-five-year-old Cash was deaf and didn’t hear Ives when he demanded the money. Cash reached into his pocket to turn up his hearing aid, but the dim-witted Ives plastered the restaurateur before he had a chance to comply, leaving him to die in the parking lot of his diner at Lincoln Way and La Playa in San Francisco’s Sunset District.

The Duchess panicked, packed up her gang and headed for Sacramento in a stolen car, stopping only to rob a gas station on the way out of San Francisco. Settling at a cheap hotel on the seedy side of town, the gang drank whiskey and planned to make quick money by rolling drunks in Sacramento.

Much to the gang’s dismay, the dim-witted Sherrod kept reliving the murder of Cash, asking the Duchess and others if they thought that Cash had died right away or if he had suffered a lingering death. The hooligans sent Sherrod out on an errand to discuss the situation.

They decided that Sherrod must die before he talked too much. Ives suggested that they shoot him in the head and make it look like an accident, but the Duchess vetoed Ives’ idea. She didn’t want the boy to suffer. Knowing that Sherrod was a weak swimmer, they decided to have a picnic along the Sacramento River. After the cookout, they would go swimming in the river, where they would push Sherrod into the middle of the swift spring current and to his death.

The next day, the inept gangsters piled into their stolen car and drove to an area about ten miles south of Sacramento near the Freeport Bridge with the intent to drown the hapless teenager, but Sherrod was afraid of the fast-moving current and refused to get in the water. The gang drove ack to Sacramento with Sherrod blabbing on about Cash’s murder.

Fearful that Sherrod would go to the police, Simone and Spinelli decided on a better half-baked plan. They put the plan into action the very next evening, April 13, 1940.

After the two younger children were put to bed, the Duchess had a get-together in her hotel room. Sherrod was anxious for a drink and downed his first glass of whiskey in one gulp. When he asked for another drink, Spinelli poured him one laced with chloral hydrate, popularly called knockout drops, or a Mickey Finn.  Sherrod gulped down the drink and was soon groggy. After he became unconscious, the gang beat the teenager, before Hawkins and Ives loaded him into the car and drove him back to the Freeport Bridge.

As Hawkins drove, Ives undressed Sherrod and put him into swimming trunks. At the bridge, Ives dragged Sherrod out of the car and tossed him over the rail into the ice-cold water. Ives placed Sherrod’s clothing nearby, so it would like as if he had gone swimming. Little did Ives, Hawkins, Simone and Spinelli know, but Sherrod was already dead by overdose from the chloral hydrate.

The next day, the Duchess decided that the gang should drive to Reno. They needed to be in a fresh town full of money and drunks. They planned to rob hitchhikers and motorists along the way. The real plan was to kill the simple-minded, yet violent, Ives before he, too, started running off at the mouth. Ives was getting full of himself, bragging about the two murders that he had committed. The plan was to kill him in the High Sierras and dump his body off a tall cliff where he would never be found or even looked for.

Sometime during the ride, Ives saw Simone give Hawkins a knowing glance. At a gas station near Grass Valley, he overheard the gang talking about a 700-foot-cliff. Ives wasn’t as stupid as everyone thought, and he ran into a nearby diner, through the kitchen, out the backdoor and into the brush behind the diner. He waited until the gang drove away, and then he ran to a nearby California Highway Patrol post, where he told the stunned officer his story about the crime gang.

The Duchess and her crew were pulled over by highway patrol officers in Truckee. Spinelli tried to pull her innocent-mother routine, but after the police found their cache of weapons, the jig was up.

Where did it all go wrong?

After being taken to Sacramento to face charges of Robert Sherrod’s murder, the gang quickly turned on each other. Ives turned state’s evidence first and told the authorities about every robbery and car theft and the two murders that the gang had committed.

Gypsy, who was pregnant, claimed that she had been busy attending Continuation High School in San Francisco and was too busy with school to know about the criminal deeds that her mother was involved in. She was released from custody. Eight-year-old Vincent and fifteen-year-old Joseph Spinelli were placed in foster care.

The city of San Francisco waived its right to the prisoners, and the gang was tried for the Sacramento County murder of Robert Sherrod. Gordon Hawkins, Michael Simone, and Juanita Spinelli were sentenced to death in San Quentin’s gas chamber.

After the usual appeals and stunts, Ethel Leta Juanita Spinelli was led into the gas chamber on November 21, 1941. Spinelli didn’t mind when the warden realized that the witnesses weren’t all assembled and made her wait a few minutes while the spectators found their seats. Spinelli was the first female put to death in California’s gas chamber.

One week later, on November 28, Simone and Hawkins were gassed simultaneously in San Quentin’s double-seat gas chamber. Ives was found not guilty by reason of insanity and was sent to live out his life at the Napa State Asylum for the Insane.

From the San Quentin Correctional Records:

 

Culled from: Death In California by my friend, David Kulczyk

Death Scene Du Jour!

The famous coroner shot of “Bugsy” Sigel after his demise by the Mob.

Culled from: Faces of Death Trading Cards

Today’s Lime-Sprinkled Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Every detective worth his salt has a case that haunts him for the rest of his life. For NYPD Detective Ernest Van Wagner, that case began on Friday, June 18, 1909. While at the West Forty-Seventh Street stationhouse checking precinct records, he observed an elderly Chinese man in traditional black garb shuffle into the stationhouse seeking help. The man called himself Sun Leung and told the desk lieutenant in broken English, “Me tink my cousin him dead in room. Wanta cop to get him out.”

In itself, the request was not unusual. In the early 1900s most New Yorkers died at home, but very few Chinese resided so far north of Chinatown. The lieutenant, however, did not ask any questions. Instead he roused a patrolman off reserve and told him, “Go with this Chink. He’s got a dead one in his joint.”

While Detective Van Wagner returned to his records search, Mr. Leung led the police officer to a four-story building at 782 Eight Avenue, off West Forty-Eighth Street. The old Chinese man ran a pricey chop suey restaurant on the second floor, one of the city’s first Asian eateries to open outside of Chinatown. The upper two floors were occupied by restaurant workers and itinerant Chinese men. The telltale stench of decaying flesh emanated from within the flat that Mr. Leung said belonged to his cousin, but six sturdy padlocks on the door effectively prevented the patrolman from gaining access.

782 Eight Avenue, New York City

He notified the lieutenant. Van Wagner overheard their conversation and offered to go to investigate. He had no luck getting in, either, until he borrowed an ax from a nearby firehouse and battered down the door. The smell was so bad that several Chinese men, who had been anxiously watching the two policemen tackle the sturdy door, fled the hallway in search of fresh air.

Van Wagner opened the apartment windows and waited for the odor to dissipate before proceeding. A cursory search of the rooms failed to immediately locate the source of the stink, but Van Wagner took note of the expensive Asian furnishings and the luxurious silk garments in the dresser. Upon closer examination he realized that some of the clothing items belonged to women. His curiosity was further aroused when he noticed dozens of photographs of Caucasian females on display throughout the apartment in the company of a handsome but unknown, Chinese man.

Although the entire apartment reeked, the odor was strongest in the bedroom. He separated the heavy bed curtains, expecting to come across a body, but instead all he saw was sheets in disarray and three articles of ladies’ lingerie and a pair of black stockings partially concealed under a pillow. When he looked under the bed, he found an old battered trunk secured with rope. The motion of pulling the chest out from underneath disturbed the remains. Van Wagner severed the rope and broke the lock. The lid flew up, revealing a naked, trussed, severely decomposed corpse of indeterminate sex, partially covered by a thick wool Army blanket, sprinkled with lime.

The law required Van Wagner to wait until the coroner examined the corpse before he could proceed with his end of the investigation. The coroner determined that the victim was a woman and the cause of death appeared to be strangulation. After the coroner left, Van Wagner conducted his own search of the body and recovered a small, gold, heart-shaped locket that had become deeply embedded in the woman’s rotting bosom. It was etched with the initials “EJS,” and it provided him with the first clue as to the victim’s identity.

Other detectives began to question the restaurant staff, but none of them spoke English. The police brought in a Chinese translator from Columbia University. As Van Wagner listened to the interrogations, he got the distinct impression that the Chinese men knew more than they were telling. He telephoned Police Headquarters, hoping that someone might have reported the dead girl missing. As luck would have it, the detective on duty informed him that a man named Paul Sigel, son of famed Civil War general Franz Sigel, had contacted him earlier that evening seeking advice on how to handle a delicate family matter.

According to the detective, Sigel and his wife worked as Christian missionaries in Chinatown and had always encouraged their daughter Elsie to take part in their crusade. Mr. Sigel now feared that Elsie had eloped with a Chinese man and headed south. Shortly after she disappeared, he received a telegram from her that she was in Washington, D.C., and would return on June 12. A week had passed since that date, but Mr. Sigel did not want to officially report Elsie missing, because of the scandal that the mixed marriage would cause to his family’s reputation. He only wanted to know whom he could contact in the nations’ capital for help in locating his daughter.

The mission where Elsie Sigel volunteered.

This new information combined with initials on the locket that matched the name Elsie Sigel, gave Van Wagner a pretty good idea who the victim was. He rushed to the Sigel home. After some cajoling on his part, the husband and wife reluctantly added to what he already know. They said that Elsie had fallen in love against their wishes with William L. Ling, a young Chinese-American whom they were trying to convert to Christianity. While they refused to believe their daughter was the murder victim Van Wagner found, they confirmed that Ling lived at the address with another Chinese man they knew as Chang Sing. The next morning, the embarrassing scandal the Sigels had hoped to avoid became front-page news.

The police caught a break several days later when Ling’s roommate turned up working as a cook in upstate New York. According to Sing, Elsie Sigel was a frequent visitor to their apartment and was friendly with other Chinese men as well. On June 9, he was awakened by a commotion in Ling’s bedroom and peeked through the keyhole. He saw his roommate choking Elsie with a stocking, but instead of stopping him, he panicked and fled the apartment. Later Ling asked him to help get rid of Elsie’s body. Van Wagner was able to confirm that the body had made it as far as Newark, New Jersey, before the two men returned it to their flat. He also verified that Ling had bought the six padlocks and that Ling had been the man who sent the telegram from Washington, D.C., but he could not discover Ling’s whereabouts. He became convinced that the Chinese tong had helped Ling escape.

In January 1910, a new administration took charge of the Police Department. It wanted to distance itself from the embarrassing episode and let the matter quietly fade away without ever making William Ling answer for his crime. As for Detective Van Wagner, he eventually got promoted to captain, but he was forever haunted by the case.

Culled from: Undisclosed Files of the Police 

The building in which Elsie was murdered no longer exists.  The block is completely boring now – all the interesting buildings were demolished long ago.

The mission at 10 Mott Street still exists though.  Less charming, of course, but intact.

Weegee Du Jour!

Weegee was the pseudonym of Arthur Fellig (June 12, 1899 – December 26, 1968), a photographer and photojournalist, known for his stark black and white street photography. Weegee worked in Manhattan, New York City’s Lower East Side as a press photographer during the 1930s and ’40s, and he developed his signature style by following the city’s emergency services and documenting their activity. Much of his work depicted unflinchingly realistic scenes of urban life, crime, injury and death.

Here’s a photo from the book Weegee’s New York: Photographs, 1935-1960:

Identification squad, 1943

Today’s Relatively Shallow Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

The earthquake of May 1202 that shook a very large area around the eastern Mediterranean is very well recorded. It must have become, rapidly for the time, a very notable event, for among those who wrote of it was the English historian Ralph of Coggeshall (d.1228), who says that the cities of Acre and Tyre were “overthrown”.

These cities, on the Mediterranean coast of what is now Lebanon, were among the places worst affected by the earthquake, but it was reported from Armenia to Libya, and from Sicily to Iran. In Syria, Lebanon, Cyprus, Libya and Egypt there was very severe damage. Acre and Tyre were virtually destroyed, as was the town of Safad, inland from them, and Bedegene, where “everything was swallowed up” according to Arabic accounts of the disaster.

Nablus, thought to have been near the epicenter of the quake, also suffered very badly, and strong tremors were felt in Damascus where, as in many other places, mosques collapsed, causing great terror amongst the population. There was heavy loss of life in Tripoli, where the old castle of Arqa was ruined.

The earthquake was felt through Egypt from Qua to Alexandria, and there was a long tremor reported from Cairo, where “sleeping people jumped from their beds in fear.” The quake was of unusual severity for Egypt. Cyprus also suffered badly, with many buildings destroyed and considerable loss of life. Although the quake clearly destroyed many buildings , in some reports of the disaster this may have become confused with damage already caused by Saladin’s attacking hordes only 12 years earlier.

Modern seismologists studying the quake believe it to have been relatively shallow but spread over an unusually wide area, and with a Richter scale reading of probably about 7.6, not one of the largest earthquakes by any means. Despite this, the cumulative effect was clearly catastrophic. There were strong aftershocks for several days following the major tremor.

Arabic reports speak of a million people having died. There is, of course, no way this figure can be checked. Abd al-Latif, one of the principle historians of the period, records 111,000 deaths in Cairo alone, and says that the main aftershock—which may have been almost as powerful as the principle tremor—caused the deaths of 50,000 in Nablus. However, it is known that in many places the earthquake was followed by famine and epidemics of disease, and the death toll would have been greatly increased in this way. We shall never know if this was the worst disaster ever in terms of lives lost, but it was certainly among the worst.

Culled from: Catastrophes and Disasters

Crime Scene Du Jour!

On December 9, 1948, a man named John J. Hill, a longtime employee in the power plant at the Northern Pacific Railroad’s sprawling Como shops in St. Paul, got into an argument with coworkers just before quitting time. The argument was apparently over who should clean some boilers, but behind it lay a long and troubled history of conflict. Hill, age 54, had been passed over for promotion and nursed a deep grudge.

What happened next has a familiar ring to it. Hill got out a .30 caliber hunting rifle, either from his locker or the trunk of his car,  and started shooting. There were five other men in the building, and Hill killed four of them. It was St. Paul’s worst mass murder up until that time. A fifth worker escaped by ducking behind a steel post, which deflected the bullet intended for him. After his brief killing spree, Hill walked into another room, put the gun barrel under his chin, and fired.

This extremely graphic photograph of Hill, taken as three St. Paul police officers examined his body, appeared the next morning on the front page of the Pioneer Press. It was one of a dozen pictures from the murder scene printed in the newspaper that day.

Culled from: Strange Days, Dangerous Nights

Today’s Filthy Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

Ever since 1922, Norman Thorne had struggled to eke out an existence from a run-down poultry farm on the outskirts of Crowborough in Sussex, England. He not only raised chickens but lived among them as well, in a squalid shed barely fit for human habitation. At age twenty-four, he was perfunctorily engaged to a young typist from London, Elsie Cameron, a plain and neurotic girl with but one thought in life—to find a husband. Some idea of Elsie’s desperation can be gauged from her willingness to bed down with Thorne in his filthy shack, which she did in hopes that it would lead to something more permanent. But Thorne had other plans. Each morning after she had stayed with him, he would shunt Elsie back to London on the first available train. By letter she pressed him to announce a wedding date. In November 1924, she changed tack, writing untruthfully that she was pregnant. Thorne was unmoved, announcing that he intended to marry another girl, a local beauty named Elizabeth Coldicott. In a fury, Elsie wrote Throne that she would be arriving on the afternoon of December 5, at which time she expected him to do the decent thing. Fiercely determined, and with all her worldly possessions crammed into a single bag, she caught the train from London.

The Happy Couple

Five days later, her anxious father telegraphed Thorne to find out what had become of her. Thorne expressed bewilderment, saying that Elsie had not arrived. When Mr. Cameron contacted the Crowborough police, they interviewed Thorne and came away impressed by his concern and obvious desire to help. Soon Elsie’s disappearance attracted reporters from Fleet Street. Thorne was good copy, as he enlarged on the plans that he and Elsie had made to marry and agonized over her welfare. An accompanying photograph taken of him in the chicken run, mournfully scattering seed to his flock of leghorns, only emphasized his isolation.

Such an honest looking man!

However, two men who knew Elsie told the police they had seen her walking toward Thorne’s farm on the night of December 5. Strangely, not until a month later, when a vacationing neighbor returned and told the same story, did Scotland Yard become involved. Thorne repeated his earlier story to the Yard detectives on January 13, unaware that digging had already begun at his farm. The following day, Elsie’s bag was discovered. After some consideration, Thorne made a statement. Elsie had arrived, he said, telling him that she intended to stay until he married her. An argument broke out, and Thorne had stormed from the shed. Upon his return, he found Elsie swinging by a noose from the hut’s main beam. In a blind panic, Thorne opted to chop his lover into quarters and bury her in the chicken run, at the very spot where his photograph had been taken.

Elsie’s remains were dug up and taken to the local mortuary for examination by Sir Bernard Spilsbury. Naturally, he devoted close attention to the neck. In suicidal hanging, death is due to rupture or obstruction of blood vessels in the brain due to pressure on the vessels of the neck, obstruction of the windpipe, or both. Usually the rope or ligature used leaves a deep bruise on the flesh at the point of pressure. Spilsbury found none of these features, nothing to suggest that Elsie Cameron had hanged herself. What he did find were bruises on her head, face, elbow, legs, and feet “sufficient to account for death from shock.” In other words, she had been bludgeoned to death. On January 26, 1925, the remains were reburied and Norman Thorne found himself facing a charge of murder.

Realizing that their sole hope lay with the suicide story, Thorne’s defense team demanded a second autopsy, this time to be carried out by Dr. Robert Bronte, then pathologist at Harrow Hospital and a former Crown Analyst to the Irish government. Bronte loathed Spilsbury; so it was with some tension that in late February they met at Willesden Cemetery to preside over the second disinterment of Elsie Cameron’s body. Spilsbury studied Bronte’s autopsy with gimlet-eyed intensity.

At the subsequent trial everything hinged around one question—how did Elsie Cameron die? Spilsbury insisted she had been battered to death. Bronte, while conceding that his examination had suffered because of the advanced state of decomposition, pointed to marks on the neck as proof that death had resulted from suicide through hanging. Spilsbury dismissed these as “natural creases” in the neck. Not so, argued Bronte, they were clearly “grooves” and, furthermore, displayed signs of bruising. He had taken slides of the grooves and passed sections of the bruised areas to Spilsbury so that he might make his own slides. Spilsbury testified that neither his slides, nor those of Bronte, showed any signs of bruising.

Seriously undermining Bronte’s argument was one critical fact. Along the main beam in Thorne’s hut—the one he said that Elsie hanged herself from—there was a thick layer of undisturbed dust. Had a rope been tied around that beam and then used to suspend a body, not only would it have dislodged the dust, but the beam itself would have shown traces of grooving. There were not such markings.

The judge, in summarizing, described Spilsbury’s opinion as “undoubtedly the very best… that can be obtained,” and the jury agreed. Thorne was sentenced to death, an outcome that aroused considerable public outrage. But his appeal was unsuccessful, and on April 22, 1925, the failed farmer turned bungling murderer went to the hangman’s noose.

Culled from: The Casebook of Forensic Detection

Dissection Photo Du Jour!

Earliest Dissection Scene
Daguerreotype, circa 1844

This is an 1850s full-plate tintype of an earlier daguerreotype. It is the only surviving representation of a dissection scene from photography’s earliest era. The next earliest scene is from the late 1860s. As is typical in this time period, the school and individuals are not identified. Taking a dissection photograph in this early era was not related to the standard ‘rite of passage’ images that began in the 1880s. It is most likely related to occupational photography popular in the 1840s. Photographing a dissection in this time period in the Midwest was quite dangerous due to the public concern with grave robbing.

Culled from: Stiffs, Skulls & Skeletons

Today’s Sociopsychological Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

A Vehicular Suicide Case Study:

A thirty-seven-year-old man died on Easter Sunday of blunt trunk trauma following a single automobile crash in which he was the driver and sole occupant. Seven fresh superficial stab wounds on the lower chest and three incised wounds on the left palm were noted as well as several linear scars in the epigastrium, left antecubital fossa, and left wrist. Toxicological studies were negative for alcohol and psychotropic drugs. The above unusual injuries prompted a further investigation. The incident took place in the early evening with good driving conditions on a straight portion of an interstate throughway. The victim’s vehicle left the roadway and traveled 480 ft. (146.30 m) in a straight line before colliding into a concrete pillar of an overpass. The decedent had had a problem with alcohol, difficulty keeping a job, and disabling ankylosing spondylitis. Two weeks before the fatal crash he had been taken to a hospital by ambulance because of multiple self-inflicted superficial stab and incised wounds of the epigastrium and left arm. He admitted his suicidal intention at that time.

In this case, the stab and incised wounds and scars aroused the suspicion of suicide. Through enthusiastic police cooperation [Huh? – DeSpair], information about the victim’s sociopsychological history was obtained that helped to determine the manner of death. Apparently the decedent failed in his attempt to stab himself to death and subsequently used his vehicle to destroy himself.

Culled from: Car Crash Culture

Post-Mortem Portrait Du Jour!

INFANT IN FLORAL CROWN
DAGUERREOTYPE 1/6 PLATE, CIRCA 1855

Culled from: Sleeping Beauty III

Today’s Pathetic Yet Truly Morbid Fact!

On the morning of October 27, 1994, a heavy-set, Hispanic female burst into the Riverside County Sheriff substation in the dusty, working-class town of San Jacinto, California. Thirty-four-year-old Dora Buenrostro screamed at the police that her ex-husband was at her apartment and was going to harm their children. Police rushed to the apartment complex at 324 East Shaver Street and found a scene that made the most veteran deputy throw up. Buenrostro’s nine-year-old daughter Susana and eight-year-old son Vicente were dead, their throats slit. Susana was laid out on a loveseat and Vicente on a couch. Both children were covered with a blood-soaked blanket. Their tiny arms had multiple cuts on them from defending themselves. Four-year-old daughter Deidra was nowhere to be found.

Riverside County sheriffs noticed the lack of emotion Dora displayed when they discovered her children dead, as well as her lack of concern about her missing daughter. She demanded the police arrest her ex-husband, Alex Buenrostro, for the murders. Alex lived in the Los Angeles neighborhood of Silver Lake, so the Los Angeles Police were called to pick him up. The L.A.P.D. found him around two in the morning and took him for a ride to Riverside.

While Alex Buenrostro was in custody, the Riverside County Sheriffs informed him of the death of his two children and the disappearance of another. The news of his children’s deaths devastated Alex. Detectives checked with his employer and questioned his friends. They quickly realized Alex Buenrostro not only had an airtight alibi, but he was also utterly distraught over the deaths of his children. Investigators were sure he did not commit the murders. On the other hand, Dora’s story changed every time she told it, and she was evasive and non-responsive when asked if she knew where her daughter Deidra could be. A Riverside County sheriff’s deputy described Dora’s behavior: “She went from laughing and joking to being tired to being nonchalant, but never showed remorse or sadness…”

Later that evening, some children playing in an abandoned post office sorting facility at Date Street and Reservoir Avenue in Lakeview found the lifeless body of Deidra. She was strapped in a child seat, and like her siblings, her throat was slit. She appeared to have been dead for several days. The blade of the knife that killed her had broken off in her neck.

Police arrested Dora two days later and charged her with three counts of first-degree murder. In July 1998, four years after the murders, she was brought to trial. The jury listened for three weeks as Deputy District Attorney Michael Soccio described the crimes in intense detail. Soccio laid out what happened, starting with the night of October 25^th, when Dora visited her ex-husband at his Silver Lake apartment. On her way to see Alex, Dora, who had little Deidra with her, first took her anger out on the four-year-old. She stabbed the girl so violently that the knife blade broke off in her throat, and then Dora coldly left her in a massive abandoned postal facility for the rats to eat. She continued her drive to Silver Lake to see Alex. After they had sex, Dora pulled a knife on Alex and he called the police. Angered at her ex-husband for seeing other women while her own love life was stifled by her three young children, she murdered nine-year-old Susana and eight-year-old Vicente as they lounged in their living room the next day. She spent the rest of the day in her apartment with her two dead children as her audience, rehearsing what she would tell the police.

Just as the jury was on the edge of being overwhelmed by the vileness of this crime, Alex Buenrostro took the stand. He tearfully told what happened the night Deirdra was murdered. He described how he was brought in by the police and the emotional impact of learning about the horrible crimes.

Jay Grossman, Dora’s attorney, tried his best to paint the entire crime as unplanned, and that Dora’s plot was pathetic. He asked to find her guilty of second-degree murder. The jury did not buy it. On July 23, 1998, they found Dora Buenrostro guilty of three counts of first-degree murder.

The following Monday, the trial went into the penalty phase. Dora took the stand and denied killing the children. She insisted she was being framed, that Alex had murdered her family, and that the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department were in on the cover-up. She went on to berate the prosecution and her own defense attorney.

A Spanish interpreter was brought in for Dora when the jury announced that it had agreed on a penalty. As the interpret translated the verdict, Dora leaned her heard forward and cried. She was officially sentenced to death on October 2, 1998. As of this date, she is awaiting execution. Jury members told reporters that had she admitted her guilt and said that she was sorry, they would have given her life without parole.

Dora Buenrostro

Culled from: California’s Deadliest Women by my friend, David Kulczyk

Post-Mortem Portrait Du Jour!

OLDER CHILD PROPPED ON PILLOW AND TUCKED IN BED
G. M. HOWE, PORTLAND, MAINE
DAGUERREOTYPE 1/6 PLATE, CIRCA 1853

This postmortem photograph depicts a young girl [I thought it was a boy? But then again, gender is over.  – DeSpair] as if she were casually lying in bed. Her arm has been placed across her chest to make it look as if she were about to get up. The dead were often posed in sitting positions to make them appear alive in these mementos for their loving survivors. However, this child’s vacant, glassy stare at the ceiling shows us the true nature of her condition. Moreover, if she had been alive, a more natural pose would have been chosen; pictures of the living had recognizable poses which would not be confused with those in memorial images.

Culled from: Sleeping Beauty II