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Showing posts with label True Crime. Show all posts
Showing posts with label True Crime. Show all posts

True Crime Dull Tool Dim Bulb. The Great Iuka Illinois Bank Robbery of 1921 Original Drawing

A rare first person account of a 1921 bank robbery in Iuka, Illinois. Obviously a notorious day for the residents…but there isn’t enough printed material to write a screenplay. The drawing provides more color than the press. Here there is enough to write a song! the one substantial article found is enough to confirm that yes, bank employee Miss Kelley did leap into her Essex automobile to give chase! Surely a local hero. The account from The Chicago Banker of February 11, 1922 reports “Ed Hall, 19 years old of Flora was found guilty here of robbery in connection with the holding up of the State Bank of Iuca, December 20, in which over 18,000 was stolen. Hall’s younger brother, Lex, 17 years old, who was indicted with him, was found not guilty. The younger Hall had twenty-one witnesses to prove his alibi that he was in Flora, Ill. at the time of the robbery. Ed hall tried to prove that he was at Kincaid, Ill. at the time of the robbery. Mildred Kelly, 22-year employee at the bank, who gave chase in an automobile after the robbery, identified Ed Hall as one of the participants in the robbery. The Hall Brothers were arrested December 26.” Unfortunately, I find nothing written about “the semi-professional ball player” or Lester. Original drawing 1921 collection Dull Tool Dim Bulb

True Crime Dull Tool Dim Bulb. Lurid Drawings by a Young Woman Underworld True Crime Stories

Two lurid drawings by a young woman in 1947. These come from an album of original art (and a few tracings?) with the initials M.R. Lets assume these two weren't drawn from life. There were dozens of true crime pulps during the era, although most confused "true" with "fiction." Dad must have had these issues around, but Mom surely read them.

The Exhibition of Celestial Planets figures created by Occult Prophet Benny Evangelista Bizarre Folk Art Sculptures


The Exhibition of Celestial Planets!  Figures created by Occult Prophet Benny Evangelista of Detroit.  Bizarre Folk Art Sculptures made in the late 1920s, and the work of a murdered bogus faith healer.  Intrigued?  Read my story  in The Chiseler HERE titled Faith Healer Left Headless : A True Crime Tale by Jim Linderman

Original Press Photograph edited and cropped for publication Collection Jim Linderman

True Crime Lost in Time ? Siple RELEASED? Hex Ridden Witchcraft Murder




True Crime Lost in Time ?  Siple RELEASED?  Hex Ridden Witchcraft Murder.

Well, I'm not quite sure how one makes a mistake about a faith healer killing his family, but sure enough, read the small notation scribed by someone down at the paper.  "Siple was released"

Released? 

"Father seized in "Hex" Death"

"Howard Siple, 33 year old faith healer and head doctor, has been jailed at Clarksburg, W. VA, charged with the "witchcraft murder," of his 12-year old daughter, Helen, and the poisoning of six others of his nine children.  Siple migrated to Clarksburg from the Hex-Ridden farmland near York, PA.  Siple is shown above left standing beside a state policeman.  7/3/34"

Now here is a real mystery for you.  Why is Siple smiling if his family was murdered?  I can only think it was a mistake, maybe involving a bad furnace and carbon monoxide?  But even so, why is Siple SMILING?  What is a "Head" doctor?  For that matter, what is a "Hex Ridden Faith Healer?"

I looked around a little and found less.  Short of calling the town historian, I'm not quite sure how to figure this one out.  As you can see, they cops "collared" him…but the touch up guy at the newspaper actually drew in the collar.

Howard Siple Original Press Photograph 1934 Collection Jim Linderman

Lurid Magnificence of the Big Little Books and the Forgotten Drawings of Henry E. Vallely














For a "Big Little Book" this tiny volume amassed a pretty big body count.  If one wants to understand gun violence today, peer back to what Gramps was reading in 1937.  Maybe the Kefauver Commission who wanted to tone down comic books in the 1950s avoided the Big Little Books because no senator wanted his picture taken of him reading one.  They were for kids, and they were as violent as the most of violent, well… fairy tales.  And then some.

Big Little Books are cool, but I am interested here in one particular artist, Henry E. Vallely.  Before I go any further, check out THIS little gem in which scholar "DSK" seemingly proves Batman comic artist Bob Kane swiped from Vallely.  Holy smokes, Batman…our inventor is a CROOK! 


I swear.  No honor among thieves or comic cook Illustrators.

There are literally hundreds of fantastic illustrations by Mr. Vellely in books for children  There are nearly that many in one book alone, and all shown here came from just one.

The problem with Big Little Books is that they are brittle with acid pulp and literally disappearing while we twiddle our thumbs on smart phones.  They can be frozen or treated in other ways to preserve them, but like capitalism, I guess, they held within them the seeds of their own destruction.  (Marxist theory from my college days!)

The other problem is that no one can SEE the work of the artist anymore, as if you even touch the spine to read one, the entire little book cracks into a puff of brown paper dust.  Wear a mask.  Those collectors might as well be wrapping dead fish in their mylar bags…they're not going to last much longer and you can't stop it.

In order to illustrate my profile here of Henry Vallely,  I have solved the problem of opening a book to scan it by shelling out four dollars for a completely beat copy of "In The Name of the Law" copyright 1937 by Stephen Slesinger published by Whitman Publishing Co. of Racine, Wisconsin.  If they feel I have violated their copyright, I will gladly remove the images here (and ask vigorously what THEY are doing to preserve the work) but my initial check reveals they never renewed it.  I'll proceed to tear and scan.  Whitman gave up on Little Big Books and concentrated on those blue folders for coin collecting.

I am RIPPING IT APART and RUINING IT Comic book guy!  Physics, chemistry and time are going to do it anyway.  Someone better scan this work before it goes, and I don't think Google is including the little buggers in their massive book scanning program, deciding instead to concentrate on things no one is interested in while running rampant over copyright laws of their own. 

Vallely's work is simple, effective and astounding.  Vallely did more with a few black shadows than most artists do with full color.  Endlessly creative, not a thing repeated.   He did clothing ads, book covers and children's books mostly, but Vallely did Bible stories too.  Why doesn't that surprise me?  Big Little Books seem to have paid most of his bills.

Now for the biography!   THERE ISN'T ONE. Not only unfamiliar and unrecognized today, the ASK ART website indicates there are NO biographical sketches to speak of.  According to The Vallely Archives blog, he passed away in 1950…but even that source stopped seven years ago.  No Wiki entry.  Nothing.  It pisses me off, and here I am doing it for free.  What the hell ARE Phd. candidates in the arts writing about for their dissertations anyway?  Effing BANKSY? 


All illustrations by Henry E. Vallely from In The Name Of The Law 1937
 
Above Text by  Jim Linderman


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Whorls DNA Fingerprints and Bernice Pepperling





Whorls DNA Fingerprints and Bernice Pepperling.


Are all fingerprints unique?  Well…if you've been following here long, you probably know the answer.  Not really.  We'll get to that later.

Fingerprint and Identification Magazine.  Fingerprint Magazine ran for some 50 years, and guess what?  The Genealogy Today website is indexing all the issues into their database as fast as they can find them! 

The magazine was sold to 16,000 police chiefs who in turn shared it with ten patrolmen.  (yes, sold…it was a subscription item your local chief had to pay for.)  See the stats on the cover?  16,000 sold, 160,000 readers.  In the publishing business that is known as the pass-along rate.  "Mac…stop screwing around.  Go study the Fingerprint magazine."


It ran profiles and the whorls of wanted desperadoes, including gunsel (and cover girl) Bernice Pepperling (AKA Marie Riley) here who tried to slip a weapon into jail to her lover.  She is presumed innocent until rounded up.  If you are doing some genealogical research on your great aunt Bernice, you are in for a surprise.

They also has curious little news items, like the one here about fingerprints being used to control quarantined Detroit citizens…You'll see they fingerprinted the resident of every rooming house to prevent the spread of smallpox.  Sorry privacy advocates.  Public Health wins out every time,  just like it did back in 1924.  Read the piece and you'll see some guys were sending in ringers to give prints for them so they could keep on spreading germs.


I looked for the newest issue of Fingerprints at Barnes and Noble, but it must have slipped back behind one of the Brides magazines or something.

Anyway, back to the initial question.  Is every fingerprint one of a kind?  Turns out it is kinda like every snowflake being different.  Wilson Bentley found identical snowflakes, and he only had to look at 5,000.  We had that many nearly every DAY last winter on my PORCH.  Then Mr. Bentley died of pneumonia.  (True) 

That is, the uniqueness of a fingerprint is  "a working hypothesis"  which is why in court they used to pay someone to come in and say it's a science.  I guess in the trade the problem is known as "false positives" which is an oxymoron, but it works. 


I quote.  "Five examiners made false positive errors for an overall false positive rate of 0.1%. Eighty-five percent of examiners made at least one false negative error for an overall false negative rate of 7.5%."  For you sticklers, the citation is  "Accuracy and reliability of forensic latent fingerprint decisions"  by Bradford T. Ulery" National Academy of Sciences. Even better is THIS ONE.
Fingerprints are increasingly being replaced by DNA.  DNA never lies, but the problem is often getting juries to believe in science.  Some jurors zone out around 10:30 and miss the explanation…and they zone out again after those two hour lunch breaks.  I do know there has been a marked decrease in the number of perps trying to file or burn their fingerprints off…something which happened in movies during the depression and in Dick Tracy comics.  By the way, did you know John Dillinger tried to burn his fingerprints off with acid?  Yep…not long after this magazine appeared.

Fingerprint and Identification Magazine September 1924 Collection Jim Linderman

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Human Detective Art versus the Courtroom Artist Pale by Comparison to Pulp






What do they mean here?  As opposed to bloodhounds?  Now that we rely on cyberslueths more than gumshoes, it is nice to be reminded of the days when a hard working human dick brought in the perps.

Human Detective was lurid, but then so is 48 hours (and the knock-off on A&E The First 48) both which are gripping…and as long as we have criminals, we'll have headlines, even if they come in digital form.

The best Human Detective covers are painted.  Later, tricked-up photographs were used, but one could hardly tell the difference, with all the hyper-realistic color and primary color luridness added.  Still great. 

Here is a question:  How come today's courtroom artists suck by comparison to the old-timers?  Seems to me that market, if one were a commercial artist looking to dominate a field, is ripe for a lurid illustrator rather than a quick sketch artist.

Two lovely books which reproduce covers of True Crime pulps are, first, the way totally cool Cyanide and Sin: Visualizing Crime in 50s America, which was published in a limited edition of 3,000 copes (and comes with a huge fold-out cover) and True Crime Detective Magazines 1924-1969.  Both are great.

The Case of the Tasteless True Crime Talisman Lindberg and the Most Famous Ladder in History by Jim Linderman


Gosh, didn't cops back in the 1930s have great coats?  Check them out...thick, rich leather and thigh-length long, with great leather boots too!  You won't see THESE guys on a Segway at the mall.  Anyway, the photo shows two hog-riding constables checking a barn for clues in one of our greatest national mysteries, the Lindberg Kidnapping Case.

I won't go into detail on the crime, as there is certainly enough for you to find yourself...and the tousled-topped national hero turned out to sorta be a creep anyway by nearly aligning himself with THE WRONG SIDE during World War Two. How the...?  At so called America First Committee meetings, the airman apparently lambasted our impending involvement in the war by lecturing others on American Jews and their undue influence.  Well...best left forgotten.
 
This post centers on a small aspect of the crime.  The same one our tuff-dressed crime busters were centered on as well.  They may look like the guys from "American Pickers" entering a honey-hole, but they were trying to find a connection to the central piece of evidence.

The ladder.

Bruno, or whoever, had to climb up to snatch the child, a horrible thing...and he built a ladder to do it.  The ladder became what used to known as "The Macguffin" in Alfred Hitchcock movies.  A recurring element which might mean nothing, but could just mean everything.  Literally the O.J. gloves of the 1930s. 

As the investigation progressed into trial, a spectacle unlike any before due to the nascent and emerging mass-media, slimy vendors sold miniature kidnap ladders outside the courthouse!  That's right.  Tiny souvenir wooden ladders, an early example of crime capitalism gone crazy!  The tasteless newspapers ran tasteless photographs of tasteless spectators holding tiny tasteless ladders for the camera.
I have looked for one of those wee ladders off and on for a long time.  I've owned a few miniature wooden handmade ladders, but had no way to tell if they were a legendary murder talisman representing the double horror of crime and unseemly opportunistic greed,  or simply something a father made for his kid's Farmer Brown playset.

I even consulted a Lindberg Kidnapping expert at one time to see if he knew where I could get one.  He brushed me off, clearly so as not to reveal his own pursuit of the holy grail of true crime novelties.

Guess who else was obsessed with the miniature ladder?  No less than Maurice Sendak!    He apparently traded one of his drawings for one, and used a similar image of a kidnapper's ladder leaned against a window in one of his works. 

Once in a while I do a true crime story.  You can see some of the others HERE.


Original 8 x 10 glossy press photograph March 7, 1932 with Handwritten description Collection Jim Linderman

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Fred the Chain Man and his Carved Gun A True Crime Tale #2 by Jim Linderman



The Chain Man was found guilty October 19,1922 for kidnapping and sentenced to life in prison.  He stayed there three years.

The Chain Man earned his nickname for linking a few young women together in in a hole below his shack near Omaha, Nebraska.  He had tricked them by offering a ride to a nearby amusement park.  His victims were Jean Jenkins and Kathyryn McManaman. While his prisoners were chained to a cement block in the pit, Brown dug their graves nearby.  When H. E. Boyd tried to rescue the women,  Brown simply added him to the chains.

Chain Man was shot while being captured in Medicine Bow, Wyoming after a few days on the run.  He survived to face trial.

Chain Man's trial was delayed while the court decided what to do with hoards of high school girls who came to enjoy the show.  "We will continue the trial in the morning when the children are at their desks" decided the judge.

Brown didn't stay in prison long, unless you consider three years a long time.  He carved this dummy gun and used it in an escape attempt, but he was killed while trying. So was a prison guard.

Several years later, the skeleton of his apparent partner in the crime, Gus Grimes, was found buried near the shack Brown had held his victims.

There is at least one other example of this real photo postcard surviving.  There is no way to determine how many were developed, but the businessman who made them probably hoped to sell a few to the high school. 

Fred Brown's Dummy Gun "Azo" Real Photo Postcard 1925 Collection Jim Linderman

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A True Crime Tale by Jim Linderman


I am pleased to have the following article published in THE CHISELER this week! The Chiseler is a highly regarded web magazine edited by Daniel Riccuito. It is a site much worth following. Special thanks to Jarett Kobek, who inspired the story, having transcribed "The Oldest History of the World" book and the story from which I originally found the information I used for the story. I purchased the photograph above intending it as a post on the old-time-religion blog...imagine my surprise at learning what was in my hand.



FAITH HEALER LEFT HEADLESS: A True Crime Tale by Jim Linderman


In 1932, according to an AP wire story which ran in several newspapers, including places as far afield as Sarasota, Florida and Spokane, Washington, Robert Harris, a negro and leader of a religious order with a membership of “about 100 negroes in Detroit” confessed to the brutal murder of James Smith, also a negro. Harris admitted that “he crushed Smith’s head with the rear axle of an automobile, then stabbed him through the heart.” Robert Harris apparently dragged Smith to “an improvised altar” in his home to finished him off.


Detroit in the late 1920s and early 1930s had a problem with religious cults.

Three years earlier, on a July 4th weekend, not far from where Harris killed Smith, Paul “Benny” Evangelista, known as a “Divine Prophet” was murdered along with his wife and four children. With an axe. Few axe murders are not gruesome, but this one was particularly so. The entire Evangelista family was hacked to pieces. The bodies in bedclothes. The divine prophet’s head was severed from his torso and placed on a chair in the family living room.

Also “cruelly hacked” was Santina, the prophet’s wife and Jeanne (eight years old) Angelia (nine) Margaret (ten) and the three-year old son Mario. One account puts Mario’s age at eighteen months. In addition to the prophet’s head, one of the girl’s arms was severed. Police suspected that wound was the result of a “miscalculated blow” intended for Santina’s neck, as it too had been hacked but the head was left hanging by a thread. Leaving the house on St. Aubin avenue, in the Italian district of depression era Detroit, the fiend and pervert left a bloody trail for police which went nowhere.

Benny was downstairs in pieces when found by a neighbor, real estate broker Vincent Elias. A friend of the family, just a day earlier Elias had completed arrangements for the purchase of a farm near Marine City, MI for the Evangelistas. Elias opened the unlocked door, saw the head and without looking further ran for the police. The children and wife were found by authorities upstairs.

In an understatement, Wayne county coroner James Burgess called the murder “an unusual case.”

A week later the entire family was wheeled down rain-slicked Woodward Avenue, parade-style, each in a coffin of appropriate size. The public funeral was an opportunity for police to look for the killer in the crowd, but to no avail.

A relative of the Evangelista family living in Coraopolis told police they must have been murdered by members of a “Black Hand” organization.

Benny was Benjamino Evangelista, a Neapolitan immigrant who claimed to be an herb doctor and faith healer. In other words, a criminal and fraud using religious superstition and jargon to steal. Like all “faith healers” he bilked rubes out of savings like a carnival barker, but his tools were voodoo, false claims of health, black magic and superstition rather than sideshow swindles. He overcharged desperate people for “love potions” and promises of cures. He provided “readings” for ten dollars. For these things, it appears, he and his entire family were sent to a violent and blood-sticky end. Benny pissed off a client with an axe.

Prior to being murdered, Evangelista wrote an enormous, self-published book of religious ravings based loosely on the bible. It took him 20 years. “The Oldest History of the World: Discovered by Occult Science” It is unreadable, useless and no one bought it. In the fictional account three prophets travel to “Afra” in order to “see what the colored people were doing…” but all they were doing was eating their food uncooked.

The book has been hand-typed from one of the few existing copies and digitally reproduced by the extraordinary Jarett Kobek. http://kobek.com/

Kobek is a brilliant scholar and is most certainly, despite the extraordinary story of Divine Prophet, himself a better story than the people and events he writes about. He also provides the most complete bibliography of period articles about the crime, and details such as the characters in the book existed also as puppets in a shrine in the Evangelista basement.

The gruesome crime was still unsolved three years later when the “rear axle murderer” above, Robert Harris confessed. Briefly, The police thought the crime solved. So did the press. “Confession by King of Weird Cult clears up Detroit Murder” read one headline, but it was not to be. Harris didn’t do it.

Neither did Angelo Depoli, arrested the day of the murder with a blood covered curved knife used for chopping bananas in his barn. A year later the family dog was still being sought as a witness. Detroit police were so desperate to solve the crime they tried to pin it on a man who escaped from a lunatic asylum and was presumed killed by a freight train two years BEFORE the crime. They didn’t have much, but they did have a pair of bloody fingerprints from the door latch. They were figured prominently in the bulletin from Superintendent of Police James Sprott along with the reward of one thousand dollars which was distributed far and wide to no avail.

The case is as cold as wind from Windsor blowing across the Detroit River in December.

by Jim Linderman

Jim Linderman uses photographs and ephemera from his personal collection to tell true stories. He is author of the Grammy-nominated book / CD Take Me to the Water and the forthcoming Heroes of Vintage Sleaze. His daily blogs are DULL TOOL DIM BULB, VINTAGE SLEAZE, and old-time-religion. He has also self-published a number of books which are available from Blurb.com.




Original Press Photograph Wide World Photos 7/5/29 Collection Jim Linderman

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Crime Scene Drop Zone Tossed in Haste and a True Crime Pulp Staple







Hard-boiled visual aids here, a collaboration between photographer, graphic artist and perp. Give me twelve straights, an easel, and we've got this one sewed up.


See my published books

Jailhouse Tattoo Billy Cook John Gilmore and Hard Luck, Two Fisted Writing NOT for the Faint (or Kindle)


Every picture tells a story, but this one didn't have one for me. I found it at a flea market. It is a small original glossy press photograph dated on the reverse 1951, with a brief note that the hand belonged to one William E. Cook. I never tried to find out who Mr. Cook was, nor why his apparent jail number was written in the margin of the photo. Obviously, his jailhouse tattoo had been embellished with a pen before publication to make the letters, and the drama, more clear...I knew I could find out who he was when I needed to.


Imagine my surprise a few years later coming across a different picture of THE SAME HAND in a book by John Gilmore! John Gilmore is one of those guys who seems to have been everywhere. I mean, everywhere. Name me anyone with a sleazy Hollywood connection from the last 50 years and I'll bet you Gilmore either met them at a party, slept with them or knew their murderer. He met Kerouac. He met Bettie Page. He met James Dean and may have even boffed him. He knew Hank Williams, Janis Joplin, Jack Nicholson, Dennis Hopper, Brigette Bardot, Jean Seberg and Jayne Mansfield. I can't even begin to describe him to you, but if you think James Ellroy is tough, if you thought Hunter S. Thompson had a pair, if you imagine Charles Bukowski let his hang low on the pavement and scrape it a bit with each step... get a load of Gilmore. There are a half-dozen books and I have read them all. Real books though...his work is too good and graphic for Kindle.


Gilmore's Wiki entry calls him a Gonzo Journalist. True, but you might find his official website a bit more entertaining. This is some dark stuff, my friends. Be fearless...Gilmore is.

By the way, the hand gets its own page on Gilmore's site, it was indeed Billy Cook's claw and he was a no good drifter. The site has an excerpt...and leads you to Gilmore's other books. You are warned.


Anonymous Press Photograph, embellished by hand, 1951 Collection Jim Linderman



True Crime! William Edward Hickman "The Most Horrible Crime of the 1920's" and a Lurid Literary Genre


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I read true crime books to relax. Somehow being reassured there are people in the world a million times more horrible than I is comforting. Despite lurid come-ons bellowing from every back cover, they don't "grip me with fear" they just put me to sleep at night, and that is goal enough. If I told you the number of times I've stuffed a book with the phrase "INCLUDES 16 PAGES OF SHOCKING PHOTOS" or "UPDATED WITH PRISON INTERVIEW WITH THE KILLER" into the trash after reading it, you wouldn't believe me.


The worst part of reading true crime is the raised eyebrows of the checkout clerk...but I'm not alone. The recent Casey Anderson fiasco proves public interest in the genre persists, despite appropriate criticism that only Caucasian blonds and pretty women receive public scrutiny. Even my little sister reads them, and she's normal as can be. In fact, most readers are women...a fact which I don't understand.

My favorite serious true crime book of the last few years is When Evil Came to Good Hart by Michigan writer Mardi Link.
HUGE steps above the crappy instant books cluttering the checkout lane, it is a direct, straight, beautifully written and edited work of art which should earn an honored place in the Dewey decimal classification "364" in every library and on every bookshelf. A University of Michigan Press book from 2008, I've linked to it and you will thank me for the tip.


But back to those "16 pages of lurid photos."


Long ago, I posted a highly embellished press photograph of accused murderer William Edward Hickman to illustrate both the editing of newspaper photos and an early example of the "perp walk" phenom. (Now more common than the "Cake Walk" from the same era...cue the Ragtime music) I took my information from the reverse of the photo...no big deal, just another warped creep with confused and deadly hormones. But when an anonymous writer asked if I had any more photos, which I do, I took the time to look the loser up.


Hickman's crime has been called "the most horrible crime of the 1920's" and I need not describe it here. Shocking and disgusting it was, but when your sleeping pill is a book about a mob hit-man who killed over 100, including some left near the beautiful Delaware Gap as rat food, it hardly stands out. The Wiki article, which is extensive, goes on to tell the story of another major creep, Ayn Rand, who planned a book on this little weasel to be titled "The Little Street" the notes for which were later published in her journals. She isn't the only major writer to find inspiration in pathetic murderers. (Truman? Norman?)


This could be a longer essay than it is, but I am all about photos and art, not crime and punishment. To the anonymous writer who asked "if I had any more..." here ya go!


Group of Original Press Photographs of William Edward Hickman, all dated 1928 Collection Jim Linderman