GOODBYE BILLY!

7/14/1881 - One of the most famous deaths in Wild West history takes place when William Henry McCarty, Jr., also known as William Antrim, receives a fatal slug in Fort Sumner, New Mexico.  Huh?  Never heard of him you might be saying in confusion ... well, 21-year-old dead William is better known by his outlaw moniker ... the one and only, Billy the Kid.

 Billy

In hiding after his escape from a Lincoln, New Mexico jail (in which he killed his two guards, Deputies James Bell and Robert Ollinger, on April 9th of 1881), Billy the Kid makes the fatal mistake of seeking a late night steak dinner after having sex with his longtime sweetheart, Celsa Gutierrez (instead of doing the wise thing and fleeing to the safety of Mexico).

 Ollinger gets blasted

Entering the Fort Sumner home of Peter Maxwell at around midnight to obtain the key to his friend's meathouse, hatless, wearing socks, and carrying a butcher kife with his six-gun in his waistband, the Kid has the misfortune to enter a dark room in which Sheriff Pat Garrett is in the very process of questioning Maxwell about Mr. Bonney's whereabouts.  

 Sheriff Pat Garrett

Alert to possible danger of a shadowy figure in the room, Billy calls out "Quien es?" twice, his last words, for Garrett, recognizing the voice of his former drinking buddy, and knowing the lethal speed of the Kid's draw, lets loose immediately with two shots from his weapon before running out of the room.  One slug all that is necessary, a hot round from Garrett's .45 finds its target in the center of Billy's chest, just above his heart, and the outlaw dies instantly ... and a legend is born.

 Tombstone at Fort Sumner

Mission accomplished, Garrett allows Billy's body to be taken by friends to a nearby carpenter's shop ... where a box for the Kid is prepared and a wake is given celebrating the popular outlaw's life ... all twenty-one years of it.  

 Dime Novel Billy

Glad to be rid of a menace to the region he patrols, 31-year-old Garrett finds the notoriety that comes from questions about the manner of the bandit's death extremely unpleasant ...  over the years he will lose numerous elections for a variety of law enforcement positions, eventually becoming a rancher.  And it is while ranching in 1908 that the law man gets gunned down himself under mysterious circumstances involving debts, goats grazing on his property, and the presence of western hitman Jim "The Killer" Miller in the neighborhood.  No one knows for sure who gets Garrett, but whoever takes him out, they make sure that the shooting is final ... pumping fatal doses of lead into his stomach and head.  He outlives Billy by 26 years.

Vigilante justice for Miller and associates (Miller is far left in black hat)

Rest in Peace, Billy!

A MONSTER NAMED SPECK

7/13/1966 - No father since six, a step-father with a 25-year criminal history, drinking by the age of twelve, a daily drunk by fifteen, a drop-out from the 9th grade by sixteen, twenty-four-year-old Richard Benjamin Speck is a total loser with 41 arrests on his resume by the time he leaves Texas for Chicago (where his sister lives) in 1966 (fleeing a 42nd arrest warrant for stealing 70 cartons of cigarettes from a grocery store).  In Chicago, moving up from petty crimes like public drunkenness and vagrancy, Speck will molt into the monster he is ... raping and murdering 32-year-old barmaid Mary Kay Pierce on 4/19, before his crime-of-the-century moment of wanton slaughter comes on this day at a dormitory for student nurses located at 2319 East 100th Street of the Windy City.

Speck

Drunk and flying high on speed, after an unsuccessful day and evening trying to get transport work at the National Maritime Union hiring hall (an occupation that doesn't suit him, on his first assignment he will be sent back to shore after suffering an appendicitis attack, on his second he is fired for fighting with one of the ship's officers ... there never is a third sea mission), dressed in a black jacket, t-shirt, pants, socks, and shoes, and armed with a cheap stolen .22 caliber Rohm pistol and switchblade knife, at 11:00 Speck makes his way over to a townhouse he has seen pretty young women entering and leaving, knocks on the door (the two-story townhouse holding the dormitory is only 150 feet away from the hiring hall) ... and sadly, the door opens.

First Box At Left

Claiming he won't hurt anyone and is just going to tie up the women while robbing them of enough money to go to New Orleans, Speck brandishes his pistol and switchblade about, cowing the six women in the house into allowing themselves to lie on the floor and be bound around the hands and feet with strips of bed sheets the killer tears apart (tied with nautical knots he has learned during his brief time as a sailor).  Speck's captives are 23-year-old Corazon Amurao from the Philippines, 23-year-old Valentina Pasion and 22-year-old Merlita Gargullo, both also from the Philippines, 20-year-old Pamela Wilkening (only 19 days away from her 21st birthday), 20-year-old Patricia Matusek (a swimming champion), and 24-year-old Nina Schmale (a Sunday School teacher for four years).  At 11:30, when 22-year-old Gloria Davy returns to the townhouse after a date (she is president of the Illinois Student Nurses Association), she joins the others upstairs in bondage, as do 21-year-old Suzanne Farris (one of three children born to a Transit Authority worker) and 20-year-old Mary Ann Jordan (one of six children born to a local civil engineer), when they enter the residence shortly after midnight.  Nine powerless young women and one piece of human garbage, a formula for an epic tragedy.

Eight of the Nine Nurses

Power, madness, hate, and lust ... Speck unties Wilkening, takes her into another room, stabs her in the left breast, then strangles her to death with a torn bit of bed sheet ... a killing that stimulates the monster, but sadly doesn't satiate him ... and so it is on to victim #2. Following a horrible pattern, one by one, Speck will take the women to another area of the home where he spends about 20 to 25 fatal minutes with each (a scumbag through and through, Speck will blame his victims for their deaths, claiming none of the killings would have happened if Wilkening had not spit in the maniac's face when he started pawing her breasts), then he washes up and repeats the process ... Mary Ann Jordan is stabbed in the neck, breast, and eye, Farris fights back and is stabbed eighteen times before being strangled to death, Schmale is stabbed in the neck and strangled, Pasion is stabbed in the neck, Gargullo is stabbed and strangled, Matusek is kicked in the stomach and strangled to death, and Davy is raped, then taken downstairs naked, raped again in a manner that mutilates her anus with a foreign object and strangled to death. Done, Speck lets himself out the front door and makes his way over to the skid row on Madison Street, where he starts a new drinking binge.  He has made a mistake though and allowed a potential victim to survive ... a witness that will send the killer behind bars for life ... Corazon Amurao!

Amurao

Terrified, but keeping her wits about her, during Speck's evening of slaughter, Amurao manages to squeeze under a bed when the killer is out of the room ... where she listens to the final words of her friends, has the rape of Davy take place on the bed she is beneath, hears eight murders take place and is saved from becoming number nine when Speck loses track of how many victims he'd taken hostage.  Remaining motionless and silent beneath the bed until 6:00 in the morning, Amurao steps over bodies (trying to avoid looking at the carnage all around the townhouse), breaks out a screen window, and climbs outside on to a ledge where she begins screaming for help.  "Help me!  Help Me!  Everybody is dead!  I am the only one still alive on the sampan!  My friends are all dead, all dead, all dead!  I'm the only one alive, oh God, the only one! My friends are all dead!"  A neighbor, Mrs. Betty Windmiller, and a man out walking his dog, Mr. Robert Hall, are the first to hear the news.  Minutes later the police arrive and begin their murder investigation ... an easy "gotcha" considering Speck has left a witness (who will accurately describe the killer to a police sketch artist at the hospital she is taken to), 30 fingerprints about the house, many bloody, and a t-shirt wrapped in Davy's panties. Fingerprints a match to Speck, the police arrest the killer on the 16th of the month, after the drunken monster makes a feeble attempt to commit suicide by slashing his right wrist and left arm and is taken to the emergency room of Cook County Hospital, where he gives his real name as he is checked in.

A Victim Removed

Crime Scene

The Knife

Brought to trial the following year, with a confession in hand, a witness that identifies the killer in court, and a fingerprint expert providing testimony that Speck produced the prints, the jury deciding Speck's case finds him guilty of all eight murders after only 49 minutes of deliberations.  Guilty, Speck is sentenced to die on 11/22/1968 in the state's electric chair ... but escapes execution when the United States Supreme Court rules his death penalty is unconstitutional because 250 potential jurors were kept out of the Speck jury pool over being opposed to the death penalty because of religious issues.  No death, but no out either ... upon re-sentencing, Speck is given 8 consecutive sentences of between 50 to 150 years ... a maximum sentence of 1,200 years.  After a massive heart attack, one day before his 50th birthday, at the age of 49, on December 5, 1991, wearing his "Born To Raise Hell" tattoo, maggot Speck departs forever for Satan's infernal regions of Hell.

Life Behind Bars

As for Amurao, trying to make as much of the rest of her life as normal as is possible, in the years that follow, she will spend time in the nursing departments of Far Eastern Hospital in Manila and Georgetown University Hospital in Washington D.C., marry businessman Alberto Atienza, have two children, and beyond the $5,000 reward she is given for providing the information that gets Speck arrested, refuses to sell the story of her horrific evening for profit!  With a huge assist from her guardian angel, she is currently 72 years young! 

One Tough Cookie!


  

DEATH AT THE GERMAN VILLAGE TAVERN

7/8/1936 - One of the deadliest, but least known public enemies of the 1930s, Lawrence DeVol, has his criminal career finally ended in Enid, Oklahoma, by quick shooting members of that town's police force!

DeVol

Born in Belpre, Ohio on 11/17/1903, DeVol shows his psychopathic tendencies early, being designated an incorrigible youth and sent to the Oklahoma State Training School for White Boys at the age of 10! Released after serving a short sentence, DeVol is not fixed whatsoever by his stay at the institution, and soon becomes an integral part of a group of local Tulsa, Oklahoma toughs called the Central Park Gang that includes a group of future outlaws and killers that includes the Barker Brothers, Lloyd, Arthur (Dock), and Fred, Russell Gibson, and Harry Campbell.  At 13, DeVol cops his first arrest for larceny, and at 19 robs his first bank (following the lead of the man known as "The Dean of American Bank Robbers," Harvey Bailey, the Vinton, Iowa job nets the Bailey crew $70,000!). Operating with the outlaw elite of the Midwest, his criminal resume by 1936 includes felonies in Oklahoma, Missouri, Kansas, Colorado, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, and Wisconsin, robberies totaling more than $3 million in cash and securities, stints behind bars totaling 10 years (caught unarmed in his early days, DeVol starts going everywhere armed at a minimum with a .45 caliber semi-automatic pistol tucked in his waistband, and a .380 caliber semi-automatic pistol worn in a shoulder holster under his left arm) and successful escapes from the Ottawa County Jail in Miami, Oklahoma, the Tulsa County Jail in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the Muskogee County Jail in Muskogee, Oklahoma, the Hutchinson Reformatory in Hutchinson (where his best friend is future Public Enemy #1, Alvin Karpis), Kansas, and the St. Peter Hospital for the Criminally Insane in St. Peter, Minnesota. 

Bailey

Karpis

And operating as a hit man, an enforcer for the mob running Omaha, Nebraska, and as the muscle on various robberies (his acuity with the use of a Thompson sub-machine gun earns him the nickname of "Chopper"), Devol is into double digits for killings cops, gangsters. and innocent bystanders.

Missouri Officer John Rose - DeVol Victim

The beginning of the end for DeVol starts with his bloody participation in the 1932 Barker-Karpis gang bank robbery of the Third Northwestern National Bank of Minneapolis ... a job that nets the gang $114,000 in cash and bonds, and costs three men their lives (Devol guns down police officers Ira Evans and Leo Gorski from 15 feet away with his machine gun as the men approach the bank, and Fred Barker kills 29-year-old Oscar Erickson in Como Park as the gang is changing cars, believing the man who has slowed down to see if he can assist a group of strangers appearing to have car trouble, is actually trying to get the outlaw's license plate number to give to the police).  Foolishly getting totally shitfaced and creating a scene at the Annabee Arms Apartments where he is staying in Minneapolis, after a fight in which DeVol is subdued by the butt of a police pistol being cracked over his head, the bandit is arrested, goes on trial for the dual killings of Evans and Gorski, pleads quilty to escape potential trials in other states that could result in the death penalty, and is sentenced to life at the Minnesota State Prison in Stillwater by Judge Winfield W. Bardwell. 

Fred Barker

That should have been the end of the DeVol story, just another young punk growing into a sad old man behind bars ... but DeVol has another plan in mind for his future.  Slowly building to the point where the authorities must act, DeVol begins pretending (or not!) that he has lost his mind ... babbling nonsense, attacking prisoners and guards, refusing to eat for days because he thinks his food has been poisoned, and repeatedly tearing his cell apart.  In December of 1935 he is transferred to the insane asylum at St. Peter, Minnesota, where assigned to a second floor room on a ward with other cop killers and bank robbers, DeVol begins secretly working on making a knife out of a piece of wood and tin foil from a milk chocolate candy bar.  Weapon ready, confederates incorporated into his escape plan, on the Sunday night of 6/7/1936, when only five guards are covering the criminal wards, DeVol strikes.

St. Peter Hospital

With DeVol in the lead, knife and clubs made from table and chair legs result in the guards being overpowered and then locked in the hospital's pipe room, then like a scene in a Hollywood movie, a group of 15 maniacs breaks out a barred window, climb down to the ground using an unrolled fire hose, climb the outside wall (a 10-foot tall steel fence), and vanish into the night.  Separating from most of his companions in flight, DeVol chooses to set up operations again in the familiar environs of Oklahoma (using the town of Enid as a base of operations), robbing several businesses and banks with fellow escapee, 22-year-old Donald J. Reeder, who'd been serving a life sentence for murder (by July of 1936, they are the only escapees not captured or killed).  

DeVol

At 2:45 in the afternoon, Wednesday, July 8, 1936, the pair hit a small bank in Turon, Kansas (there are only two employees working during the robbery) and leave with a paper bag containing $550 in cash. Returning to Enid, Reeder decides to celebrate the successful job by spending the evening playing hide the sausage with his girlfriend, Juanita Hunsaker.  Not having any female companionship himself, DeVol goes hunting for action, gals or booze, at a nearby bar, the German Village Tavern ... and runs into big trouble.  

DeVol

Owned by a former police officer, Jim O'Neal, though dressed nicely and seemingly pleasant and polite, DeVol sticks out like a sore thumb among the tavern's regulars ... taking a booth next to the door, and continually sweeping the room and two entrances with his eyes for trouble though he has found two pretty girls to sit with him as he drinks cold beer ... his actions draw the kind of trouble he is hoping to avoid.  Thinking that DeVol might be planning to rob his establishment, O'Neal calls his buddies at the police department who agree to send some officers to the bar to check out the situation ("There's a bad man in my place and I think there's going to be a holdup!").  On patrol, closest to the tavern, shortly after 11:00, Patrolmen Cal Palmer and Ralph Knarr arrive and confront DeVol. Cool as a cucumber, the killer agrees to step outside and discuss things with the officers, telling them he thinks he knows why they are there, but asking if it would be okay if he finished his beer first. Sensing no danger, Palmer and Knarr agree to let him finish his drink ... which DeVol proceeds to do.  Done, he places his glass on the table, and rises as if to step outside, but comes up firing the automatic he has drawn from his shoulder holster. Closest to the table, Palmer takes three bullets to the chest and dies instantly (one round goes right through his heart), while Knarr is hit in the neck, right shoulder and stomach (in critical condition for several days, Knarr will survive the encounter); additionally, a stray round hits bar patron J. W. Edwards in the leg.  

Cal Palmer - 38, leaves a wife and two sons

Targets down, DeVol rushes outside just as backup for Palmer and Knarr, in the form of five more Enid officers arrive at the tavern. Running down an alley and on to the street, DeVol sees an occupied car, climbs on its running board, and claiming to be a deputy sheriff, orders its occupants out of the vehicle ... an order Dr. L.D. Huff and Fred Caldwell are happy to comply with as the police arrive and a gun battle on the street breaks out.  Over in seconds, Night Chief Lelan Coyle takes a round in his right hand that almost severs a finger, but DeVol gets the worst of the encounter, taking a killing slug to the head.

Dead DeVol

Over and out (the police will soon arrest DeVol's partner), DeVol is the last of the Barker-Karpis Gang to be brought to justice ... carrying $110 in his pockets, he is 32-years-old when he is blasted into his forever! 

BYE-BYE BRIAN!

7/2/1969 - Murder, suicide, or just drug induced stupidity, at Cotchford Farm in East Sussex, Great Britain (a home formerly owned by Winnie-the-Pooh author A. A. Milne), the world of music loses the troubled genius (he plays guitar, harmonica, keyboards, sitar, and marimba) that formed the Rolling Stones in 1962, Lewis Brian Hopkin Jones.

Jones - 1965

Less than a month after getting kicked out of the Stones for disagreeing with their changing musical direction, missing recording sessions, temper tantrums, and numerous arrests that make his touring internationally with the group impossible (and of course, the awkwardness of Keith Richards stealing the affections of Jones' girlfriend of two years, Anita Pallenberg, while the trio is vacationing in Morocco), friends report that Jones is happier than he's been years as he starts to put a new band together featuring musical pals Alexis Korner, Ian Stewart, John Lennon, Mitch Mitchell, and Jimmy Miller (Jones is working on demos for two new songs at the time of his death, "Has Anybody Seen My Baby" and "Chow Time").  Happy until around midnight of 7/2.

Jones & Pallenberg

Richards & Pallenberg

Deciding to see why Jones hadn't yet come to bed, his girlfriend, Swedish model Anna Wohlin, discovers the answer when she finds the musician motionless at the bottom of his pool.  Help summoned (also at the house are Janet Lawson, a 26-year-old nurse that knows Jones through her musician boyfriend, Rolling Stones tour manager Tom Keylock, and 43-year-old Frank Thorogood, a contracter Jones has hired to do work on the property ... and a man already once a suspect in another death), and Jones removed from the wet, Wohlin will claim he still had a pulse, but it is gone by the time medical personnel arrive at the scene.  A notorious drinker and drug user, it seems a slam dunk when a coroner's report officially calls the passing a "death by misadventure."

The Pool

Gone but not forgotten, in the immediate aftermath of the death, the Rolling Stones will dedicate their July 5th concert at Hyde Park (in which they introduce their new guitarist for the first time, and Jones' replacement, 20-year-old Mick Taylor ... during the concert Jagger will read excerpts from the Percy Shelley poem "Adonais," stagehands will release hundreds of symbolic white butterflies over the crowd, and the band will begin the evening by performing one of Jones' favorite tunes, Johnny Winters' "I'm Yours and I'm Hers" ... and yet surprising, with excuses abounding, only Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts will attend the Jones funeral) to the memory of their former band mate, Pete Townshend of The Who will write a poem called "A Normal Day for Brian, A Man Who Died Every Day," Jimi Hendrix will dedicate a song to Jones on American TV, and Jim Morrison of The Doors will publish a poem called "Ode to L.A. While Thinking of Brian Jones, Deceased."

Hyde Park Concert

Buried 10 feet deep at Cheltenham Cemetary to discouraged ghoulish trophy hunting fans, Jones does not rest easy in his grave and rumors of murder soon are making the rounds of the world of entertainment.

Jones Tombstone

Murder confessed to and then denied, in an alternate reality of Jones' leaving (one to which Janet Lawson and Anna Wohlin subscribe, along with the 2005 movie about the musician's last days, "Stoned"), Jones fires Thorogood on the day of his death over some butchered cabinet work, but doesn't make him leave his residence, they argue into the evening, and when Lawson gets out of the pool to retrieve the musician's inhaler, the dismissed worker jumps in and easily holds Jones under until he drowns (by all accounts, Thorogood is the last person in the world to see Jones alive) ... and no surprise, when Wohlin calls for help, Thorogood doesn't react, then immediately runs to the deep end of the pool and jumps in, despite no one telling him Jones is at the bottom of the pool.

Thorogood

And there are now also stories that on the day he died, Jones gets in a huge fight with his ex-friend Richards, an argument horrid enough that Richards draws a knife on Jones before cooler heads break the argument up ... and surprise, surprise, the tale comes from Jan Bell, the daughter of Thorogood!  Murder, suicide, or just drug induced stupidity ... the death of Jones remains a mystery to this day.

Jones

Oh, and just to leave this tale with a little light instead of darkness, here is a fun factoid about Jones ... in 1963, Jones receives songwriting credits (pissing off Jagger and Richards immensely) for writing a 30 second commercial jingle for a product still enjoyed by millions ... a little breakfast cereal called "Rice Krispies!"

Snap, Crackle, Pop Indeed!