Researchers tested blood and semen found on a shawl near the body of the killer’s fourth victim, a woman whose mutilated body was found in September 1888.
The identity of Jack the Ripper, the notorious serial killer from the late 1800s in England, may finally be known.
A DNA forensic investigation published this month by two British researchers in the Journal of Forensic Science identifies Aaron Kosminski, a 23-year-old Polish barber and prime suspect at the time, as the likely killer.
The “semen stains match the sequences of one of the main police suspects, Aaron Kosminski,” said the study authored by Jari Louhelainen of Liverpool John Moores University and David Miller of the University of Leeds.
Murderabilia is an online market where collectors buy and sell items related to serial killers. William Harder is the owner of murderauction.com, where murderabilia items are for sale. Here & Now‘s Robin Young talks with Harder and Andy Kahan, a long-time victims advocate for the city of Houston, Texas.
The rate of lethal violence is 7 times higher than the average for all mammals
A new study of 1,024 mammal species has determined which animals are the most vicious killers of their own kind. Killer whales perhaps? Pit bulls maybe? For the answer, just look in the mirror.
The strange tale of Valerie Solanas reads as both tragedy and farce. In 1967, the radical feminist wrote one of the most vitriolic, misandrist treatises in American history, entitled “The SCUM (Society for Cutting Up Men) Manifesto.” So absurd that it reads like parody, the work nevertheless offers a striking (if deranged) record of 1960s tensions, many of which persist today. The manifesto might have remained a historical oddity if Solanas hadn’t turned her rage into actual violence: In 1968, she shot
“Apocalypse Now,” Francis Ford Coppola‘s 1979 Vietnam war, has attracted to it maybe the largest corpus of legends and anecdotes of any film ever made. Sort-of an adaptation of Joseph Conrad‘s “Heart of Darkness,” the production became a slog through natural disasters, directorial megalomania, and latter-day Marlon Brando‘s sprawling eccentricity. If you are a film student with an idea for a movie set in a jungle, take a quick look at the legends surrounding “Apocalypse Now,” and similar films like those of Werner Herzog, and write a new script, for God’s sake.
But if you just enjoy stories of hubris and chaos, then by all means dive in. We have here, courtesy of No Film School, a new window on the production, in the fascinating form of the director, Coppola, interviewing the writer, John Milius. Milius is a fascinating figure all to himself, a buddy of Coppola, Lucas, Spielberg and the rest of the “brat pack” from way back in the day who also wrote “Dirty Harry,” directed the original “Red Dawn” and created the HBO series “Rome” (check out our list of essential Milius films right here). Here he and Coppola delve back to the days before they shipped out to the jungle, when the only complexity facing them was Milius’ ten-draft, thousand-page monster-script. “What could possibly go wrong?” they must have been asking themselves…
Germany’s states have voted to introduce federal legislation that would criminalize the act of providing technical infrastructure for so-called dark-web marketplaces where illegal activities take place.
Before entering a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, the site of one of the deadliest mass murders in the country’s history, the accused gunman paused to endorse a YouTube star in a video that appeared to capture the shooting.
“Remember, lads, subscribe to PewDiePie,” he said.
To an untrained eye, this would have seemed like a bizarre detour.
But the people watching the video stream recognized it as something entirely different: a meme.
In 1982, a group of offenders began striking the Brussels area of Belgium. It began with a series of small robberies, but – by the end of the year – had progressed to full-blown murder. Though their criminal career was still in its apparent infancy, the Brabant Killers – also known as the Brabant Gang and the Gang Of Nivelles – would go on to become Belgium’s most violent and mysterious criminals. Over thirty years later, their identities and motives are still unknown.
In October 2017, a SWAT team descended on Jameson Lopp’s house in North Carolina. Someone — it still isn’t clear who — had called the police and falsely claimed that a shooter at the home had killed someone and taken a hostage. After the police left, Mr. Lopp received a call threatening more mayhem if he did not make a large ransom payment in Bitcoin.
To scare off future attackers, Mr. Lopp quickly posted a video on Twitter of himself firing off his AR-15 rifle. He also decided he was going to make it much harder for his enemies — and anyone else — to find him ever again.
Mr. Lopp, a self-described libertarian who works for a Bitcoin security company, had long been obsessed with the value of privacy, and he set out to learn how thoroughly a person can escape the all-seeing eyes of corporate America and the government. But he wanted to do it without giving up internet access and moving to a shack in the woods.
