The Abduction of JonBenet Ramsey

JonBenet Ramsey, a six year old celebrity in the world of child beauty pageants, was reported missing from her home in Boulder, Colorado on the morning of December 26, 1996. A hand-written ransom note claimed that the child had been abducted by a “group” representing a “foreign faction”and demanded  $118,000– the exact size of her father’s bonus– be  delivered to the kidnappers. But at 1:05pm that day,  before the ransom money could be paid, John Ramsey found his daughter’s body covered in a white blanket in the "wine cellar" room in the basement . Her wrists had been tied above her head, her mouth covered by duct tape, and her neck had been garroted by a nylon cord.  The advanced state of rigor mortis fixed the time of death between 10:00 p.m. on December 25, when her father had carried her to her bedroom, and 6:00 a.m. on December 26. The autopsy further determined that she was killed by strangulation and skull-fracturing blow to the head.  There were also  indications that she  had been sexually assaulted.
The three sheets of paper used in the ransom note, as well as the pen with which it was written, came from a table near the kitchen in the Ramsey home. So someone had taken the time to write a lengthily letter. What could not be determined by the forensic evidence was whether the perpetrator wrote it before or after strangling JonBenet. If the latter was the case, the note was likely meant to divert and confuse the police.
In many ways, the crime was reminiscent of the 1932 Lindbergh kidnapping which, like this tragedy, provoked a media frenzy. In both case, a high-profile child disappeared from its bed while the parents were at home. And in both cases there was no unambiguous signs of a forced entry, no identifiable fingerprints, and  no creditable witnesses. The only evidence of a kidnapping in both cases was a hand-written ransom note. And in both cases the child was later found dead.  But Lindbergh was a national hero (at least in 1932), and the local police accepted at face value what he had reported.
Unlike the Lindbergh case, however, the local police in of the JonBenet case fixed their attention on the possibility that  the child's death had resulted from domestic violence that been  disguised as a kidnapping.  One reason was that they  found scant evidence of an intruder.  To be sure, there was a footprint in the dust made by a hiking boot, a palm print on the door of the wine cellar, and a pubic hair in the blanket in which JonBenet was wrapped that could not be matched to any family member. But these possible clues  also could have been left in the house and blanket at an earlier time or even resulted from the accidental contamination of  the crime scene (which was not initially sealed off).
 The investigators were also unable to find an escape route.  There was an opened  basement window but there were no footprints in the snow outside the window. So the investigation focused on the activities of the three family members who were at home– JonBenet’s father John, her mother Patsy, and her brother Burke. Despite an intensive effort, however,  the police were unable to match the handwriting samples of any family member to the ransom note, or find any other evidence implicating them.  Meanwhile, the family hired lawyers to protect their interests and sue the media that was reporting police "leaks."  So the investigation ground to a halt.
 In took nearly 12 years, for the district attorney’s office to officially exonerate the family members on the basis of “new scientific evidence.” The district attorney explained: “The match of Male DNA on two separate items of clothing worn by the victim at the time of the murder makes it clear to us that an unknown male handled these items.”   Even though the investigation officially resumed, the Boulder  police chief observed, “Some cases never get solved.”

The theories of case can be found here,

The Lindbergh Kidnapping

The kidnapping of aviator Charles A. Lindbergh’s toddler namesake on March 1, 1932 swept international headlines. Lindbergh had become world famous at the age of 25 by flying solo, from New York to Paris on May 21, 1927. The feat inspired such a frenzy that when he landed, a French crowd estimated at 150,000 spectators at Le Bourget Airport hoisted him above their heads for nearly half an hour, followed by ticket-tape parades in America, presidential commendations, and almost continuous press acclaim. He then married in fairy-tale fashion Ann Morrow, a stunning fellow aviator and daughter of a powerful banker at J.P Morgan, and became a spokesman for the aviation industry. So when his only child was kidnapped from his New Jersey home, it became, as H.L. Mencken famously put it, "the biggest story since the Resurrection.”
Because of his apotheosis into a celebrity hero, Lindbergh acted as if he was above the law when local police attempted to investigate the reported kidnapping. When they arrived at his home that rainy night, he prohibiting them from interviewing the household staff. Instead, carrying a Springfield rifle, he led them to three sections of a makeshift ladder near the house, which he said was used by the kidnapper to gain entrance to the second floor nursery room in which 20-month-old Charles Lindbergh, Jr. was in his crib. In the nursery, he had found a poorly scribbled ransom note demanding “25000$ in 20$ bills 15000$ in 10$ bills and 10000$ in 5$ bills. Police fingerprint experts arrived at midnight and found no fingerprints whatsoever in the nursery or on the note, but about 400 partial prints on the ladder. That was the only evidence as to what  happened to the child.
As speculation grew in law enforcement circles that some powerful criminal organization or a foreign government had stolen “the Eaglet,” as the baby was called in the press, President Herbert Hoover, who vowed to "move Heaven and Earth" to recover the child, ordered the new Bureau of Investigation (which would become the FBI) to enter the case. Enter J. Edgar Hoover, the bureau’s publicity-savvy chief, who instantly recognized the case’s potential for expanding his bureau into a national police agency (even though Lindbergh did not cooperate with his Bureau agents).
Instead, Lindbergh, after consulting William “Wild Bill” Donovan (who would go on to head the Office of Strategic Services), decided to take matters into his own hands by seeking out intermediaries with underworld connections, and providing them with the only real secret information in the case, the precise contents of the ransom note. These intermediaries gave it to the New York Daily News, which further damaged the police and FBI investigation, since con men who were not the kidnappers now had the necessary information to write their own make bogus requests for money, especially after Lindbergh placed newspaper ads offering to pay the ransom. On April 1, a purported kidnapper answered the ad, claiming that he would return the Eaglet for $100,000. Lindbergh packaged $50,000 in gold certificates and, following instructions, went to St. Raymond's Cemetery where he gave the money to a man called “John.” “John” then handed Lindbergh a note saying his son was in good health, cared for by two women, on a boat called "The Nelly" docked at Martha’s Vineyard. Lindbergh again did not wait for the police. He overflew to the docks in his private plane but found no sign of his son– nor the boat (which, it turned out, did not exist.)
Events took an even more tragic turn the next month when the corpse of a decomposed child was found in the woods about four and a half miles from the Lindbergh home. Even though both hands and left leg were missing, Lindbergh identified the remains from the toes on the right foot. In response to the public outrage, Congress rushed through what became known as the Lindbergh Law, making kidnapping a federal offense.
Meanwhile, unable to find any credible evidence of a kidnapping gang, police began focusing on the possibility of an inside job. For one thing, Lindbergh had told them that the nursery had been searched by the nurse, his wife, and himself after the kidnapping but before the arrival of the police, yet none of their fingerprints– or any fingerprints-- had been found in the room. This absence suggested that the room had been wiped clean by someone on the inside. Investigator also had the theory–at least at this point– that the kidnapper might have escaped through the house since their tests showed it would be extremely difficult to descend the ladder, which had irregularly spaced rungs, carrying a 30 pound child . And the fact that the kidnapper not only knew the child’s whereabouts but placed his ladder under an unlocked window raise the possibility he had inside information. One employee of interest was Violet Sharp, a pretty 28 serving maid who told contradictory stories about here where she was on the night of the kidnapping. After the police announced their intentions to take her to police headquarters for questioning in June 1932, she was found dead in the Lindbergh home. The cause was cyanide poisoning and it was deemed an apparent suicide.
More than two years passed without a break in the case then in September 1934, police found about one-third of the gold certificates that Lindbergh had paid in ransom in the graveyard in the Bronx home of Bruno Richard Hauptmann, a thirty-four-year-old carpenter with a criminal record in his native Germany. Hauptmann denied any knowledge of the kidnapping, claimed that the gold certificates had been left with him by his former business partner, Isidor Fisch, who had died after returning to German. Hauptmann was arrested and charged with kidnapping and murder.
At the trial, the prosecutor, New Jersey’s powerful Attorney General David Wilentz, presented an impressive chain of evidence tying Hauptmann to the plot in which Lindbergh had been duped into paying $50,000 for bogus information. In addition, Hauptmann had no ironclad alibi for the night of the kidnapping. But there was scant evidence placing him anywhere near the scene of the crime. One witness who said he saw someone looking like Hauptmann driving in the area turned out to be legally blind. The only physical evidence was the ladder used in the kidnapping itself. The state’s expert witness rendered an opinion based on his examination of a floor board taken from Hauptmann’s former attic (and found at a late date after earlier searches had missed it) was that it was consistent with one strut of wood in the ladder. But “consistent” merely means it could have been that a piece of wood could have come from the attic. Such evidence would have been more cogent if any of the 400 prints on the ladder matched those of Hauptmann, but none did, Nor did the 4 prints on the ransom note match Hauptmann’s. Nevertheless, Hauptmann was convicted and sentenced to death. New Jersey Governor Harold Hoffman offered to commute his death sentence if Hauptmann would confessed. But instead he maintained he was innocent and he was electrocuted on April 3, 1936.
The four year media circus was over, but, as in the case of the Kennedy assassination, independent researchers and buffs continue to search for new evidence. For example, they have attempted to show the wood used to make the ladder was thicker than Hauptmann’s attic floor, and thereby controverts the crucial expert testimony, and that the original ransom note was written on table that Hauptmann could not have used (which would indicate that more than one person was involved.)
To be sure, ironclad evidence was presented in court that Hauptmann had received part of Lindbergh’s ransom money. But most of the $50,000 was never found. Aside from the $15,000 found in Hauptmann’s home, another $3,000 was later traced to a notorious forger named Jacob Novitsky. Novitsky, who was arrested for another crime, reportedly told cell mates he had been involved in the extortion plot but not the kidnapping. According to contemporary handwriting analysts, the handwriting in note in this ransom plot did not necessarily match that of the original note, it is possible that Hauptmann (and others) in the extortion plot were mere capitalizing on Lindbergh’s well-publicized misfortune. So, seven decades, the Lindbergh case remains unresolved.

The theories of this case can be found here.

Madoff's Missing Money

The black hole into which Bernie Madoff pumped $7.9 billion of other people’s grew even darker with the death of Jeffry Picower and Stanley Chais, the only two available witnesses to the laundering of these mystery funds. Both men had been charged in separate fraud suits by the SEC aimed at uncovering the myriad offshore and onshore accounts into which this $7.9 had been ultimately channeled into what the bankruptcy trustee describes as “ a labyrinth of interrelated international funds, institutions, and entities of almost unparalleled complexity and breadth.” It was one of the greatest disappearance act in financial history but neither case will ever come to trial. Picower died in presumed swimming pool accident on October 25, 2009 in Florida and Chais died of a rare blood disease on September 26, 2010.

Both men had been involved with Madoff since well before he began his Ponzi scheme. And they both enjoyed special access to Madoff’s operation. According to the SEC complaint, Picower was advised in advance of Madoff’s monthly profit “targets,” or the amounts with which Madoff planned to pad Picower’s accounts, and, through this knowledge, he or his assistant could request higher or lower “profits” for various accounts. Moreover, to amplify Picower’s fictional profits to accommodate this siphoning off, Madoff extended him so much fictional credit that his accounts had , according to the bankruptcy trustee’s analysis, a “negative net cash balance of approximately $6 billion at the time of Madoff’s arrest.” Picower collaborated in his spectacular, if fictitious, profits by faxing Madoff back-dated letters to support fabricated trades. In some of the faked trades, Picower’s reported profits ran as high as 550% . As a result, the Picower was able to withdraw over $2.4 billion just between 2002 and 2008.
Like Picower, Chais had a close working relation with Madoff (so close that his name came up first on Madoff’s office speed dial.) According to the SEC complaint, Chais withdrew $1.15 billion from 60 accounts for himself, family members,  corporations in which he held interests, funds into which he consolidated his clients, and other entities. Madoff enabled him to make such massive withdrawals by giving him inexplicably high phantom profits, with rates of returns in some accounts in excess of 300% a year.
According to the reckoning of the bankruptcy trustee, Picower and Chais together withdrew a total of $7.9 billion between 1995 and 2008 from the phantom profits that Madoff allocated to them. Why were such staggering notional profits systematically credited to the Picower and Chais accounts and then systematically and purposefully siphoned out of these accounts?  Were Picower and Chais following instructions in re-depositing the billions that they withdrew? All Ponzi schemes need an exit strategy. Unfortunately, with the death of Picower and Chais, we may never unravel the secret of where that money ended up.
The theories of the crime can be found here.

Assassination in Beirut

On 12:56 p.m on Valentine's Day 2005, Rafik Hariri, the former Prime Minister of Lebanon, was blown up, along with most of his armored convoy, in front of the Hotel St. Georges in Beirut. The bomb had been packed into a white Mitsubishi van that had been moved into position by a suicide driver just one minute and fifty seconds before Hariri's six-car convoy arrived. The powerful explosion tore a 7 foot deep crater into the street and killed twenty-three people.
The bombing caused an international uproar that has yet to be resolved--and the aftermath of the murders and the five-year quest to discover the culprits and bring them to justice is a sobering tale of the difficulty, if not impossibility, of dealing with state-sponsored terrorism when the concerned states, in this case Syria and Iran (via the military wing of Hezbollah it sponsors) who have the means to manipulate the evidence. A un organized special tribunal on Lebanon has announced it will indictments in 2010, even though Hezbollah has warned that they could set off a civil war. So the legal process is hostage of the political realities of Lebanon.
The sophisticated technology used in the bomb and surveillance of his convoy suggested that it might involve the intelligence services of one or more states. Because Syria had extensive military and intelligence presence in Lebanon,, the Lebanese government turned to the UN for help. The UN Security Council appointed Detlev Mehlis, a German judge renowned for his pursuit of terrorist bombings, to head its investigation.
On the surface, a number of clues pointed to a Jihadist suicide bomber. Similar Mitsubishi vans had been used in a spate of other Beirut bombings blamed on Islam terrorists. Elements in the bomb traced back military explosives used by Al-Qaeda of Iraq. And a conveniently video tape sent to Al Jazeera television showed a lone suicide bomber named Abu Addas claiming that he acted on behalf of unknown Jihadist group.
But the crack UN investigative team, which included forensic experts in explosives, DNA, and telecommunications from 10 countries, found convincing evidence that the assassination was a state-sponsored operation cleverly disguised with decoys, planted evidence and false flag recruitments as the work of Islam Jihadists. The Mitsubishi van had been stolen in Japan, shipped via the port of Dubai to the Syrian- controlled Bekka Valley where it was modified to carry the bomb, and then, only days before the assassination, was driven over a military-controlled highway to Beirut.
One participant in the planning if the attack, who subsequently confessed to his role, told investigators that the putative suicidist, Abu Addas, was a mere decoy who had been induced to go to Syria, make the bogus video, and then was killed. He further alleged that the actual van driver had been recruited under a false flag in Iraq, so presumably if he defected or capture he would wrong identify his recruiters as Jihadists. He also said the "special explosives" in the TNT had been intentionally planted there to mislead investigators in the direction of Iraq.
Meanwhile, the UN team uncovered evidence that the actual conspirators had resources and capabilities, including wire-tapping Hariri's phones, that pointed to an intelligence services. Its telecommunications analysts determined that eight new telephone numbers and 10 mobile telephones had been used, as well as the wire-tapping, to follow Hariri's movements with split-second precision and move the van into place. In addition, a former Syrian intelligence agent told them that he had driven a Syrian military officer on a reconnaissance mission past the St. George Hotel on the day before the bombing and had been told that four Lebanese generals, in collaboration with General Rustam Ghazali, the head of Syrian intelligence in Lebanon, had provided "money, telephones, cars, walkie-talkies, pagers, weapons, and ID cards" for the operation. Judge Mehlis, concluded "there is probable cause to believe that the decision to assassinate former Prime Minister, Rafik Hariri, could not have been taken without the approval of top-ranked Syrian security official and could not have been further organized without the collusion of their counterparts in the Lebanese security services." And he had the four Lebanese generals arrested.
When he moved to question Syrian officials, including intelligence chief,Assef Shawkat (who is the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's brother-in law), the Syrians "stonewalled" the investigation, and protested the direction of Judge Mehlis' inquest. In January 2006, the Security Council replaced Judge Mehlis with Serge Brammertz, a 43 year old Belgian lawyer who had served as deputy prosecutor at the International Criminal Court in The Hague.
Mr. Brammertz focused the investigation on the political context of the murder but made so little progress in advancing the criminal case that when he was replaced in 2008 by Daniel Bellemare, Canada's assistant deputy attorney general, the charges against the four imprisoned Lebanese generals was dropped because of the "complete absence of reliable proof against them."
The UN investigation, under pressure from Syria and its allies, also turned in a new direction: Hezbollah, the Shiite party backed by Iran. By this time, Lebanese investigators, re-examining 2005 cell phone records, had uncovered a network of about 20 mobile phones that had been all activated just a few weeks before the attack and then silenced just after the attack. This so-called second ring of phone had been calling the same phone numbers as the eight phones that actually coordinated the attack.
According to a report in Der Spiegel, the investigators then traced the second ring of phones back to a command post of Hezbollah's military wing under the notorious Imad Mughniyeh (who had been responsible for other spectacular bombing attacks, including the US Embassy. Unfortunately, before the cell phone evidence could be further unraveled, the Lebanese chief investigator working on this complex network was killed in Beirut in 2009 and Mughniyeh, who might otherwise might have been called as a witness, was himself was assassinated. But finally, this April UN investigators summoned 12 Hezbollah members and close supporters for questioning, spurring rumors that the Special Tribunal for Lebanon (STL), which the UN set up in March 2008, was on the verge of finally issuing indictments.
In Lebanon, a country with a frozen but not ended civil war, judicial facts gave way to political interests.. Hezbollah's powerful chief Hassan Nasrallah said ominously that Hezbollah would not stand by idly if its members are accused of involvement in the assassination, denouncing what he called attempts to "politicize" the Tribunal, as if political consideration could be omitted from political crime. He then moved to discredit the UN tribunal by saying that its investigators come from “intelligence services closely linked to the Israeli Mossad,” and demanded the establishment of a Lebanese committee to investigate “false witnesses.” In September 2010, he went further, claiming that Hezbollah had “evidence” that Israel was behind the assassination. Meanwhile, Syria, which retained the military means to dominate Lebanon, also claimed to be the victim of planted evidence. Hariri's son, Saad Hariri, who became Lebanon’s premier in 2008, had accused Syria’s leaders of assassinating his father on the basis of the massive evidence uncovered in the UN investigation. But now, after a meeting Syrian President Bashar Assad, suddenly reversed his position, in September 2010, saying that he had been wrong to blame Syria for the assassination.
The  half-decade "wait" may turn out to be just the prelude, if the agents of Syria and/or Iran are named in this act of terrorism.  Since Hezbollah and Syria possess the power to destroy Lebanon,  any such Tribunal, no matter how impressive the evidence, will most likely be impeached and, as Hezbollah has already proposed,  the blame will be shifted to their convenient Bete Noire: Israel.

The theories of the case can be found here.

The Zodiac Murders

Ever since Jack The Ripper stalked London, serial killer have held almost irresistible attraction for the media. The advantage of a serial murderer for circulation is that each new victim compounds public fear that they themselves may be in danger. The more bizarre the killings the greater the fear– and interest. The relationship between the media and the serial murderer can be symbiotic: The relentless coverage of such crimes renders the killer a public persona he might not otherwise have– the name "Jack The Ripper," after all, was a coinage of the British press– while providing the media with circulation it might not other have. Consider, the case of "The Zodiac," which engendered thousands of news stories, television investigation, and two movies.
The confirmed attacks took place in Northern California between 1968 and 1969 . The first victims were two teenage high school students, Betty Lou Jensen and David Faraday on a secluded lover’s lane in the town of Benicia. At about 11pm on December 20, 1968 they were found shot to death. There was no apparent motive for the killing, no clues. About a half-year later, on July 4th 1969, two other youths, Michael Renault Mageau, 19, and Darlene Elizabeth Ferrin, 22 were attacked in the parking lot of a park in Vallejo, California. Ferrin was shot to death but Mageau was only wounded,
Both seemed to be isolated cases until August 1, 1969.. Then the killer himself linked the two attacks in letters sent to the Vallejo Times-Herald, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the San Francisco Examiner. Each letter contained one-third of a 408-symbol cryptogram, which, the writer tauntingly (and falsely) claimed, revealed his identity. He not only invited these newspapers to investigate his murders but warned that unless each paper printed his letter on their front page he would shoot "a dozen people over the weekend." The Chronicle immediately published its third of the cryptogram, and there were no murders that weekend.
The next letter received by the San Francisco Examiner provided non-public details about the two attacks. It was signed "The Zodiac," which gave the media a vivid name for their headlines.
In his next attack on September 27, 1969, the killer wore a Zodiac costume, consisting of a black hood, clip-on sunglasses, and a bib with the cross-hair Zodiac symbol in the letters. With a gun in one hand and pieces of a clothesline in the other, he attacked Bryan Hartnell and Cecelia Shepard near Lake Berryessa in Napa County. After ordering Shepard to tie up Hartnell, he stabbed them both repeatedly. Leaving them in a pool of blood, he then drew his Zodiac symbol on Hartnell's car door. Although Shepard died , Hartnell survived to tell the story,
The final confirmed murder was in San Francisco on October 11th, The victim was taxi driver Paul Lee Stine. According to three teen witnesses, the passenger shot Stine and then calmly cut off part of his victim's bloodstained shirt, and escaped .
Apparently he committed this murder to get incriminating evidence. He added bloody swatches from Stine's shirt to his next round of letters to newspapers. He then demanded that a renowned defense lawyer, either F. Lee Bailey or Melvin Belli, await his call on the Jim Dunbar television show. Belli came on the show and in front of a television audience arranged to meet the call-in claiming to be the Zodiac in Daly City. The caller did not show up but Belli received in the mail another swatch from Stine's shirt with a letter asking for his professional help. That was the last Belli heard from him.
Even after the murders stopped in 1970, the journalistic fascination with the case lingered on. Letters of unknown provenance continued to be received by newspaper. Some contained ciphers, that though they could not be deciphered, made good news stories. And since the Zodiac had taken credit for no less than 37 murders. reporters mined the police cold case files for similar killings. This search yielded many reports about other intriguing murders and disappearances that could have been done by the Zodiac, but no forensic evidence was found actually linking them. Even when DNA analysis became readily available in the 1990s, investigators were unable to match the DNA found in the saliva on the stamps of any of the letters to any crime scene or suspect. Nor was any murder weapon ever found. So the Zodiac murders remain unsolved.

Theories of the case can be found here.

Did Sam Sheppard Murder His Wife?

In an investigation of the murder wife, suspicion commonly falls on the husband. If he has no verifiable alibi, and there are no witnesses, it often deemed a domestic homicide. Since a husband living at home has both opportunity and a presumed motive in terminating the marriage, it is not difficult to build a convincing case against him . Consider the celebrated case of Dr. Samuel Holmes Sheppard, a husband who was both convicted and then exonerated for the murder his wife.
At 6 am on July 4th in 1965, police in the Cleveland suburb of Bayview, Ohio, were summoned to home of Dr. Sheppard, one of Cleveland most prominent orthopedic doctors. When they arrived, they Sheppard’s wife Marilyn was dead in the upstairs bedroom. Her half-naked body had been badly beaten savagely and her face slashed so many times she was barely recognizable. The entire room, including the walls, floor and closet doors had been splattered with blood. No murder weapon was found at the scene but downstairs there were signs of an apparent robbery. Dr. Shepard's medical bag had been overturned and its contents was strewn on the floor, sports trophies were smashed, and the drawers of Sheppard's desk had been pulled opened as if someone was searching them. Yet, according to Dr. Shepard, nothing was missing. The time of Marilyn’s death was established as approximately 4:30 am. Asked to account for his movements, Shepard said that after a dinner party that night he fell asleep on a day bed in the den downstairs. He was awoken by her scream, and rushing upstairs, saw some unknown person. When he got to her bedroom, he was then knocked out from behind. When he regained consciousness, still woozy, he determined Marilyn was dead by testing her pulse, then heard someone leaving by the back door. He ran after him, pursing him along the Lake Erie shore which fronted their house. . He caught up with and grappled with a "bushy-haired" person, but he was again knocked out. Police almost immediately doubted his story because there were no signs of forced entry. Instead, as was standard operating procedure, they assumed it was a domestic homicide and made little more than a perfunctory effort to recover fingerprints, blood samples, hairs, and fiber evidence. There was not need to collect such evidence if their domestic homicide theory was correct, since it would serve no purpose other than to prove that that Sam and Marilyn Sheppard shared the home. Indeed, police at the scene were so convinced that this was a domestic homicide that detectives dispatched to the hospital to question Shepard to get a full confession. One detective, playing the "bad cop," told him:"I don’t know about my partner, but I think you killed your wife." Despite such tactics, Shepard steadfastly insisted he was innocent and was himself a victim of the same assailant who murdered his wife.
Nevertheless, on July 29, 1954, he was arrested for the murder of his wife.
The trial, which began in October 1954, became a media circus. Few trials in American history, . At least up until the O.J Simpson case in 1994, generated as much lurid coverage. The prosecution spent weeks bringing out the erotic details of Sheppard’s three year sexual tryst with Susan Hayes, a nurse at his hospital, to establish him as a man who would betray his wife. His defense lawyers focused on gory crime scene evidence. They produced expert witnesses who testified that Marilyn’s broken teeth indicated that she had bitten her attacker in the struggle and that since Sheppard had no open wounds. . They produced a report by one of America’s most eminent neurosurgeons, Dr. Charles Elkin, who examined Sheppard after the murder, and found that he had suffered a cervical concussion, nerve injury, and weak nerve reflexes that were impossible for him to "fake" and that Sheppard’s injuries could not have been self-inflicted. two witnesses found by his private investigators testified that they had seen a bushy-haired man near the Sheppard home on the day of the crime. Shepard then took the stand in his own defense and described his fight with a "bushy-haired intruder."
But The jury did not believe Sheppard’s story and, on December 21, 1954, brought in a verdict of second-degree murder. and he was sentenced to life imprisonment. Then, after spending 10 years in prison, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned his conviction on the grounds he was denied due process. When he was retried in 1966, he was quickly acquitted.
After he was released from prison, he wrote a book, wrestled professionally in arenas as "The Killer," and, after becaming an alcoholic, died at the age of 46 of liver disease in 1970 .
The case was re-opened by his son with new DNA evidence. In 1998, these DNA tests showed that the there was blood on Sheppard's clothes that was neither his nor his wife’s. In addition, the same unidentified DNA was found on a crucial stain on a closet door only a few feet away from where Marilyn was murdered. If it had not been left there before the attack, it meant that some unidentified person had been in the bedroom and also left his blood on Sheppard’s clothes. The DNA testing undercut the police’s theory that it was a domestic homicide, but it did not identify the killer. The case, after more than a half century, still remains opened.
***

Theories of the case can be found here. The Archive of Unsolved Crimes Here

Vanished: Jimmy Hoffa Is Still Missing

Can one of the most-closely watched men in America vanish without a trace? The disappearance in 1975 of James Riddle Hoffa, who had been one of the most powerful labor leaders in American history, demonstrates how difficult it is for authorities to resolve a case if they cannot find the body– or crime scene.Jimmy Hoffa, the son of a coal miner, had built the International Brotherhood of Teamsters into the largest, richest, and most politically powerful union in the United States, and had used its vast pension funds to finance the building of much of the casino economy of Las Vegas. Even before Hoffa assumed the presidency of the Teamsters in 1957, his putative connection to organized crime were relentlessly investigated by the FBI and a Congressional Committee on which Robert F. Kennedy was a lead council. When John F. Kennedy became President in 1961, Robert Kennedy, as the new Attorney General, created an unprecedented task force at the Justice Department to bring down a single man: Jimmy Hoffa. His "Get Hoffa" crusade, including no-holds-barred surveillance and wiretaps, resulted in convicting the labor leader of jury tampering and fraud. Even though he was jailed in 1967, Hoffa was re-elected l President of the Teamsters. Finally, in 1971,his sentence was commuted by President Richard M. Nixon after he agreed to officially resign his position, though, according to FBI informants, he was involved in behind=the-scenes to regain his power over the Teamsters in 1975. He was also scheduled to appear before the Congressional Committee investigation the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
On July 30th, 1975, Hoffa went to a limousine service offices in Pontiac, Michigan where he told a friend he was meeting with Tony Giacalone, who reputedly was a leader of organized crime in Detroit and Tony Provenzano, a New Jersey Teamster official. His calender had the notation "TG—2 p.m.—Red Fox", which apparently referred to his meeting with Tony Giacalone at the Red Fox restaurant in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. He arrived at the Red Fox shortly before 2pm, but no one met him, according to witnesses. At 2:15 p.m, Hoffa telephoned his wife from a call box and said "I wonder where the hell Tony is." He said he was still waiting. He never returned home.when police investigators, called by his wife, went to the restaurant, they found Hoffa's car but not Hoffa. . They found no signs of a struggle, and no witnesses to his departure. Both Tonys, when questioned, categorically denied they had any plan to meet Hoffa. They both also had airtight alibis, Giacalone spent the afternoon in a steam room at the Southfield Athletic Club on the outskirts of Detroit; Provenzano spent the afternoon at a local Teamster meeting in Hoboken, New Jersey.The FBI then launched one of the largest investigation in its history to find out what had happened to Jimmy Hoffa. It lasted over quarter of a century and is summed up in 1,879 pages of FBI files recently released on a CD-ROM. At one point, they checked out every meat packing plant in the Detroit area looking for frozen body parts, but found none connected to Hoffa. After someone on the TV show "Current Affair" claimed to be a mafia hit man who witnessed Hoffa’s killing, the FBI spent months investigating and polygraphing him before determining that his story was a fabrication. Through DNA analysis in the 1990s, they matched a match between Hoffa and a hair found in a Mercury that had been driven by Hoffa’s foster son, Charles O'Brien. O'Brien said that he used the car that day to deliver a frozen salmon to the home of a Teamster official, and a long investigation of O’Brien’s activities proved fruitless. On various tips, the FBI excavated graves, building sites, and garbage dumps without ever finding his Hoffa’s body– or proof he was dead. , his body was never found. Nor was anyone ever charged in the crime.In this unsolvable case, the government achieved its closure by blaming the Mafia. A FBI briefing memo was released noting that in 1976 the consensus in law enforcement circles was that Hoffa was murdered at the behest of the Mafia leaders out of concern he would regain control of the Teamsters and interfere with their funding from its pension funds. The problem with this consensual explanation is that law enforcement agencies, after 30 years of investigation, are unable to substantiate it– or find Jimmy Hoffa.
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Theories of the case can be found here.
Archives of Unsolved Crimes is here
Disappearance file is here