heinoushistory

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Serial killer Israel Keyes bantering with an FBI agent about falling asleep in the interview room prior to their interrogation. Here he is making light of his attempted escape from police custody that resulted in him being tasered by officers the previous day. Note how calm Keyes is and how he is comfortable laughing, making jokes and slouching in a relaxed posture in his chair.

Keyes was described as being incredibly intelligent and manipulative by interviewers and was easily able to take control of the situation. High charisma is common trait in organised offenders such as Keyes and allows them to lead successful lives while they kill without anybody knowing or suspecting them.

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Examples of a mirage known as Fata Morgana. It’s believed that this optical illusion is what give birth to the myth of the Flying Dutchman 

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Catalina de los Ríos y Lísperguer (1604-1665) was an aristocratic Chilean landowner and murderer of the Colonial Era. Nicknamed La Quintrala because of her flaming red hair, she was famous for her beauty and, according to legend, her cruel treatment of servants.

Most accounts of La Quintrala are debatable. It is said she beat and stabbed a former lover, Enrique Enríquez de Guzmán of the Order of Malta, on the grounds that he had played with her feelings (since he had refused to give her a cross, a symbol of his nobility, in exchange for a kiss). Enríquez even dared to brag about his love affairs to the friar Pedro de Figueroa, Catalina's platonic love, and publicly boasted about taking advantage of a "loose" woman, referring to Catalina.

La Quintrala inherited a lot of land from her father in the coastal valley of Longotoma. It was here that horrible events began to occur, both during her husband's lifespan and after his death around 1650. A black slave named Ñatucón-Jetón was killed without any known motive for the homicide (La Quintrala then kept him unburied for two weeks). In 1633, she tried to kill Luis Vásquez, a cleric from La Ligua, who reproached Catalina for her frivolous life and cruel actions.

Her cruelty reached such an extreme that in that same year, her tenants rebelled and fled towards the mountains and neighboring districts. Catalina had them brought back by force by the provisions of the Royal Audience. In spite of continuous complaints of abuses and cruelties, she did not receive any punishment because she shared her wealth with judges and lawyers, on top of having numerous relatives in important positions.

A secret investigation was conducted on Catalina, and she was eventually arrested at her estate and taken to Santiago for a criminal trial. She was charged with 40 murders, but due to her various connections and influence, the trial was stalled and Catalina was released. She died a free woman on January 15, 1665.

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“I thought I would cut myself to see if I would bleed.”

Lizzie Halliday (c. 1859-1918) was an Irish-American serial killer and the first woman to be sentenced to death by the electric chair.

  Halliday was responsible for the deaths of at least 4 people in upstate New York during the 1890s. It was suspected that she killed her first two husbands as well, although that has never been proven.

  Convicted of the murders of Margaret and Sarah McQuillan, Halliday was held for trial at the Sullivan County jail  in Monticello, New York. During her first few months there she refused to eat, attacked the sheriff’s wife, set fire to her own bed, tried to hang herself, and cut her own throat with broken glass about which she said: “I thought I would cut myself to see if I would bleed.”

In 1894, Halliday was sentenced to death by electrocution, which was later commuted to life in a mental institution after a medical commission declared her insane. In 1906, Halliday stabbed and killed a nurse at the institution by stabbing her 200 times with a pair of scissors. Halliday died of Bright’s disease on June 28, 1918, after spending half her life in the asylum.

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Ana di Pištonja (c. 1838 - 1938), better known as Baba Anujka, was a convicted killer from the village of Vladimirovac, Yugoslavia.

An amateur chemist, Baba Anujka was known for her “magic water” - a love potion she concocted for women with abusive husbands. Anujka’s “love potions” contained small quantities of arsenic, as well as plant toxins that were difficult to detect. These potions killed between 50 and 150 people.

 Anujka was first tried in June 1914, but was acquitted. She was arrested again over a decade later in 1928 at the age of 90.  She was convicted as an accomplice to two murders and was sentenced to 15 years in prison. Anujka served 8 of the 15 years and was released due to old age. She died two years later at her home in Vladomirovac.

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“I’m not scared to die. I’m scared of the electric chair. I’m scared of having my head shaved bald and being strapped in this huge chair and being shocked to death. Because if you think about it, y'know, you can touch someone else and get shocked and that hurts and that’s barely being shocked and I cannot imagine… just… all that electricity. That scares me.”

- 22 year old Christa Gail Pike in 1998 discussing her death penalty conviction for the brutal murder of 19 year old Colleen Slemmer in 1995. In an attack which lasted 30 minutes to 1 hour, Pike and two accomplices beat and slashed Slemmer with a boxcutter, carved a pentagram into her chest and eventually bludgeoned her head with a heavy piece of asphalt. Christa kept a piece of Colleen’s skull as a token of the killing.

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August 30, 1945 - photograph of Harry K. Daghlian’s burnt and blistered hand, a result of touching the “demon core” of a plutonium-gallium alloy bomb. While conducting an experiment on August 21, 1945, a criticality accident occurred while Daghlian was attempting to build a neutron reflector manually. 

It was estimated that Daghlian received a dose of 510 rem of neutron radiation. Despite intensive medical care, he developed symptoms of severe radiation poisoning and slipped into a coma. Daghlian died 16 days after the above photo was taken.

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April 1, 1946 - A lone man (on the far left, just below the midline) about to be swept away by tsunami waves in Hilo, Hawaii. Triggered by an 8.6 magnitude earthquake off the Aleutian Islands, the waves ranged between 45-130 feet in height. 173 were killed, 163 were injured, 488 buildings were demolished and 936 more were damaged. 

The large scale destruction prompted the creation of the Seismic Sea Wave Warning System, which became the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center in 1949.

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Photograph of scalping survivor Robert McGee, taken in 1890. McGee was scalped at age 13 by Sioux Chief Little Turtle in 1864.

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The top map exhibits mysterious disappearances of people while the bottom marks the largest cave systems in the United States. 

The overlap is eerie, to say the least.  

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The Murder of Fanny Adams

At least twenty years before Jack the Ripper became a household name, another English murder case would horrify and grip the country; the brutal murder of eight-year-old Fanny Adams in 1867 by a seemingly normal solicitors clerk named Frederick Baker.

Described as being a lovely, cheerful little girl, Fanny Adams was well known in the village of Alton for her beautiful cornflower blue eyes. On August 24th, 1867, Fanny was playing in the woods with two friends when they encountered Frederick Baker (24) taking a shortcut home from work; he watched the girls run races and pick blackberries before giving them money to buy sweets. As Fanny went to go with her friends, Baker snatched her in his arms and ran with her to the nearby river.

An artist's depiction of the abduction and murder of Fanny Adams

When the little girl failed to return home for dinner, a search party was formed to look for her. Naturally they went to the meadow where she was last seen, and upon arriving at a hop garden near the river the searchers came across a horrible scene - Fanny's decapitated head stuck on a wooden stake. Her eyes had been ripped out, and a large cut mutilated her lower face in an awful imitation of a smile.

Her butchered torso lay nearby, with body parts scattered throughout the garden; one entire arm lay several feet from a single foot, while both legs had been cut from her lower torso. A forearm was found on a path leading to the garden. Further examination revealed Fanny's chest had been sliced open and her heart - which was never recovered - was scooped out, alongside most of her organs.

The gruesome nature of the crime lead to it being reported nationwide, and Frederick Baker was arrested within days after Fanny's playmates identified him as the man who snatched and ran with her. His diary entry for August 24 was short but chilling:

"Killed a young girl today. It was fine and hot"

Baker remained unfazed throughout the investigation and trial, and offered no words of remorse or explanation as to why he murdered the little girl. He was found guilty of murder and hanged on Christmas Eve; a record 5000 spectators turned up to watch the execution.

The murder of Fanny Adams started to be referenced in a macabre joke within the newly enlisted Army recruits starting in 1870 - because true cuts of meat were strictly rationed, the soldiers began to refer to their tiny, inedible lumps of dinner meat as the missing body parts of "Sweet Fanny Adams". In modern times, the term has evolved into "sweet f*ck all" or "sweet F.A", used to mean something small or insignificant. Within the Army today, pots used to store or cook meat are called Fannys.

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October 1/2, 1916: the LZ 72, a German super-zeppelin, is struck with incendiary rounds, causing the ship to burst into flames. The commander, Heinrich Mathy, anguished over the choices: burn or jump. 

Mathy decided to jump. He wrapped a thick scarf around his head and leaped from the zeppelin gondola, falling to earth a little way from the ship, which crashed on to the “Zeppelin Oak”. No one could approach the wreckage for some time, due to the heat and explosions. When Mathy was found, his body was imbedded some inches into the ground. There were no survivors.

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Are you a witch, or are you a faerie? Or are you the wife of Michael Cleary?

Policemen had been combing the fields of Ballyvadlea, Ireland, for a week when they finally discovered the body of 26-year-old Bridget Cleary. The young woman’s body had been wedged beneath several inches of clay and a jumble of thorn bushes, but her corpse showed wounds caused by something much worse than branches: Her spine and lower limbs were so badly burned that parts of her skeleton were exposed. She was naked, except for a stocking and one gold earring, and her head was encased in a sack.

19th century Ireland was a society steeped in legends of the supernatural, especially when it came to fae. Bridget herself was known to be fascinated by the beings, and to take trips to the most fairy-ridden spots around town. On March 4, 1895, when she went to deliver eggs to her father’s cousin, Jack Dunne, near Kylenagranagh Hill. The area was home to a ringfort, an early medieval circular fortified settlement believed, in Irish folklore, to be a “fairy fort,” and thus to be avoided at all costs. Yet Bridget often visited the fort, and she likely spent time there that Monday after delivering the eggs.

It was after this visit that Michael Cleary, Bridget’s husband, became convinced that the now bed-ridden woman in their cottage was “too fine,” in his own words, to be his wife, and that she was “two inches taller” than the woman he had known. At some point, Michael had developed the belief that Bridget had been replaced by a fairy changeling as she passed near the fairy fort on Kylenagranagh Hill.

It was this belief that would drive Michael murder his wife merely 11 days later when he set Bridget on fire in their family home.

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Moments before the execution of Amon Goeth. Goeth became infamous for sniping concentration camp prisoners from his balcony. 

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Blanche Monnier was the daughter of an aristocrat family. She disappeared one day not to be seen for 25 years, until she was found by police who had been tipped off anonymously. Her mother had locked her in a dark room, telling her she would be let out when she agreed to marry the man they had set up for her, and not the poor lawyer she had intended on marrying. She was stripped naked and chained to the bed for two decades. Her mother died from a heart attack just days after her horrible actions were exposed, and Blanche spent the remainder of her days in a sanitorium due to the emotional trauma she had experienced. 

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I think finding out that Hitler was inspired by how throughly Andrew Jackson committed genocide against the Natives would shatter or at least destabilize the ethos of the Founding Fathers & America for a lot of people

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April 16, 1947: the ship is the SS Grandcamp. There is a fire in the hold, and the men on the dock are members of the Texas City Volunteer Fire Department, who are attempting to extinguish it.

SS Grandcamp’s cargo includes 2,200 tons of ammonium nitrate.

A few minutes after this photo was taken, it’s going to detonate in one of the largest non-nuclear explosions in human history, creating a mushroom cloud more than 2,000 feet tall. All but one of the firefighters in that photo are going to be instantly killed, and no identifiable fragment of most of their bodies will ever be recovered. Nearly a thousand buildings in Texas City are going to be flattened, and windows will be broken and pedestrians knocked over by the force of the blast ten miles away in Galveston. Steel shrapnel will be flung out at hypersonic speeds and fall from the sky in molten chunks, igniting secondary fires all over the surrounding area, including the various storage tanks of the local Monsanto chemical refinery and another ship in the harbor, High Flyer, whose own 1,000 tons of ammonium nitrate will detonate in turn.

At least 468 will be confirmed dead, more than 5,000 will be injured, and the disaster will cost more than $100 million in property damage (in 1947 dollars - over a billion in today’s money).