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THE FATTY ARBUCKLE SCANDAL,
When the world first read about the events of Sept. 3, 1920 in the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco, the plotline appeared to be tabloid-headline loud and clear: during a wild party, an obese Hollywood comedy star takes advantage of a naive young actress, puncturing her bladder during forced sex (with a beer bottle!); she dies a painful death of peritonitis.Arbuckle nevertheless went through three trials, acquitted of all crimes. -
THE BLACK DAHLIA
Set in the post-war Los Angeles boom, the unsolved murder of Elizabeth Short is a cautionary tale about big cities, America's peripatetic population and the dangers of the new vast urban landscapes of the nation.a severely mutilated, naked body, sliced in half at the waist and a grotesque grimace carved into her face, was found not far from Hollywood. The corpse was that of 22-year-old Short, who had moved to California to from the East Coast to pursue an acting career but ended up servingtables -
The Brinks Job
A gang of 11 men set out on a meticulous 18-month quest to rob the Brinks headquarters in Boston, the home-base of the legendary private security firm. The planning and practice had a military intensity to them; the attention to detail -- including the close approximation of the uniform of the Brinks' guards -- was near genius. It all came off without a hitch: the perfect crime of the century. And the haul was astonishing: more than $1.2 million in cash and $1.5 million in checks and securities, -
THE LANA TURNER AFFAIR
Lana Turner reigned as one of Hollywood's box-office queens for more than two decades. Real life was much trampier. Her father, a miner in Idaho, was murdered after winning a craps game. She loved to hang out with men of ill repute and would eventually marry seven times. One marriage, to the actor Lex Barker, would end in 1957 after she accused him of molesting her daughter by a previous marriage, Cheryl Crane.Turner engaged in a ferocious argument at her Beverly stapping his wife. -
THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY
netted 120 bags packed with the equivalent of $7 million and were were treated like folk heroes by the press and public. Although the operation took all of 15 minutes, the caper was not as smooth as people remember it. It wasn't non-violent, for one thing (the driver of the train was conked in the head and never fully recovered from the trauma); nor was it as carefully executed (the thieves left fingerprints everywhere). -
RICHARD SPECK
It sounds like a recurring nightmare: an armed male intruder breaks into a women's dorm and with a gun and a butcher's knife, binds and gags all the residents. Then one by one, he kills them cruelly and with great brutality. All of that happened in Chicago -
THE TATE-LABIANCA MURDERS
two sets of grisly murders took place in Los Angeles. On the 9th, a gang of four people brutally killed the actress Sharon Tate, who was married to director Roman Polanski and eight and a half months pregnant, four of Tate's friends and the son of her gardener. Tate begged for the life of her unborn child but was told by one of the female assailants -
THE PATTY HEARST KIDNAPPING
the 19-year-old heiress was kidnapped by a ratty band of Bay Area urban revolutionaries, the Symbionese National Liberation Army, who demanded as ransom that her father feed all the hungry in California. But then, just over two months later, she was seen on camera assisting them in a bank robbery. Soon enough, the kidnap victim had an arrest warrant of her own. It would be nearly a year and a half before she was captured. brainwashing, her two-month trial in 197 -
THE SON OF SAM
And the Son of Sam killer was still out there after more than a year, waiting to kill again, sending his perverse missives to the police and to New York Daily News columnist Jimmy Breslin. The killer had called himself the Son of Sam in his letters, which spoke of Papa Sam as a drinker of blood and master of Satanic mayhem. -
JOHN WAYNE GACY
The warning signs were there: the arrest for sodomy with a minor; another sexual offense with a child; the strange smell, like dead things, in his house. But John Wayne Gacy was also an upstanding citizen: he helped out the neighbors, he was the chaplain of the Jaycees, he dressed up as roly-poly Pogo the Clown to entertain children.
