Route 91 is a country music festival which has been held ever since 2014. The festival has attracted dozens of thousands of music fans every year – but on October 1st, 2017, nobody expected the show to be interrupted by 11 minutes of pure massacre. It was 10:08 p.m. when the crowd was starting to… Read More »
“I have not killed anyone” THE CRIME: Dorothea Puente was born in San Bernardino County, California on 9 January 1929 as Dorothea Helen Gray and raised in an orphanage because both parents were alcohlics who died when she was young. In 1945 she married Fred McFaul and gave birth to two daughters but gave them… Read More »
“Remorse, what for? I didn’t even know them” THE CRIME: The last person publicly guillotined in France, Eugene Weidmann was born at Frankfurt-am-Main in Germany on 5 February 1908. A career criminal, he led a gang of teenage thieves before moving to Paris and progressing to more serious crimes, including six murders. He stole cars… Read More »
“I killed those guys” THE CRIME: Kristen Gilbert was born on 13 November 1967 in Fall River, Massachusetts as Kristen Strickland. At school she was a typical teenage girl but as she got older she began to develop dishonest habits in her relationships, which were also tinged with violence. After school she went to Greenfield… Read More »
Dr Death THE CRIME: On 1 October 1977 Dr Harold “Fred” Shipman began work at the Donneybrook Medical Practice, Hyde, Cheshire. The 31-year-old had begun practising as a family doctor three years earlier in Todmorden, West Yorkshire but after just a year of practice he was forced to enter rehab, after being caught forging prescriptions… Read More »
“I looked for my boy for nine months…all we got was a handful of bones” THE CRIME: It would be wrong to assume that hard-line Islamic countries like Iran are not too troubled by serial killers. The press nicknamed Mohammed Bijeh the Tehran Desert Vampire. Born on 7 February 1975, he worked at a brick… Read More »
Nils Gustafsson went on trial more than 45 years after the murders THE CRIME: In June 1960 four Finnish teenagers — Maila Irmeli Bjorklund, 15, Anja Tuulikki Maki, 15, Seppo Antero Boisman, 18, and Nils Wilhelm Gustafsson, 18 — went camping on the shores of Lake Bodom, a small lake by the city of Espoo… Read More »
“Vallejo/12-20-68/7-4-69/Sept 27-69-6:30/by knife” THE CRIME: The Zodiac Killer — the way the killer signed himself in letters to San Francisco newspapers from 7 August 1969 —struck for the first time at 11pm on 20 December 1968. David Arthur Faraday, 17, and Betty Lou Jensen, 16, were shot on Lake Herman Road in Vallejo, California as… Read More »
“I have a bomb in my briefcase. You are being hijacked.” THE CRIME: On the day before Thanksgiving in 1971 a man calling himself Dan Cooper boarded a Boeing 727-100, Northwest Orient (now Northwest Airlines) Flight 305, at Portland International Airport in Oregon, bound for Seattle, Washington. He was in his mid 40s, about 1.82… Read More »
“If I was to say Helen Smith’s death was an accident, I would be a liar” THE CRIME: Helen Linda Smith was born on 3 January 1956, the daughter of a former policeman. Having failed the exams needed to become a police officer, Helen chose nursing and landed a job at St George’s Hospital in… Read More »