Historically whenever gold is discovered, it's rapidly followed by a swell of strangers all vying to strike it rich. With it comes opportunity, but also trouble, and even murder.
Cariboo, British Columbia
In 1862, Nehemia T. Smith, better known as Blackjack was involved in the discovery of gold in the Cariboo mines, and the famous strike on William Creek. He had been part of the Fraser River Gold Rush in 1858.
On a cold February evening in 1945 the body of 74-year-old Charles Walton was found in a field of the Firs farm, in which he had been working earlier that same day. He was considered a recluse, and no one who lived in the Warwickshire hamlet could understand who would want to kill him, much less mutilate him.
Charles Walton was known to be a quiet man and a loner, who shared a thatch-roofed cottage opposite the village church with his niece in the hamlet of Lower Quinton. Despite suffering from rheumatism and using two walking sticks, he worked on and off doing odd jobs and lived off his small pension. His reputation as an honest, hardworking farm laborer left the authorities puzzled as to who would want to kill him, especially in such a brutal manner.
Capone had many mistresses, but some held his interest longer than others. One of these allegedly was Mary Ann Brown, who also went by the name of Vera. She is a mysterious woman, because very little is known about her, if she ever existed at all.
Perhaps she used the surname of Brown in imitation of Capone's alias Al Brown, which he used since 1920 when he was the keeper of the Four Deuces saloon at 2222 S. Wabash Avenue. Later in life he would be known by the more notorious moniker of Scarface.
Criminals are sometimes undone by their stupidity or desperation, but there are others who are discovered by sheer bad luck. Such is the case of a gravedigger named Jean Baptiste.
Utah, 1862 Four men were arrested, and two were sought in an assault upon John W. Dawson (1820-1877) the governor of Utah who had been nominated to the post by Abraham Lincoln. One of these men was named Moroni Clawson. Ironically three weeks before they had been hired to protect the governor until he reached the eastern boundary of the Utah territory, but then something changed.
Arthur Henry "Sarsfield" Ward (1883 – 1959), better known as Sax Rohmer, was an English novelist. He is best remembered for his series of novels featuring the master criminal Fu Manchu. This story is taken from his Tales of Secret Egypt book.
Brice Watson is the host of Esoteric Atlanta, a channel dedicated to the exploration and celebration of all things weird in the state of Georgia and around the world! We discuss stories of ghost and conspiracy theories, not to mention interesting people and places.
Two officers of the bicycle police brigade of Fresnes-sur-Marne were patrolling the road to Claye, when they came in the night upon a smoldering hayrick in a field belonging to Farmer Ernet. Under the rick about 100 feet off the main road and up a cart track, they smelled the odor of burning flesh. It was the body of a slender girl, and it was obvious by the charring of her body someone had set her on fire.
On August 13, 1926, a Friday, the police in the French city of Freses-sur-Marne were trying to solve what was dubbed by the press as the "Friday the 13th" murder. The body of a young girl was found in a burning haystack near a lonely road. The girl was strangled and the fire was assumed to have been started to conceal the crime.
It was the day after Christmas, 1929 when newspapers in North Carolina carried the disturbing news of a father who had annihilated his entire family. Sixty years would pass before the motive of this heartless act would be learned.
His name was Charles Davis Lawson, and within a day of this horrific crime authorities were trying to understand what caused him to do away with his wife and six children.
It was Labor Day weekend and Steve Liethen owner of the Good 'N Loud Music in Dane County, Wisconsin was fixing a water leak after a boiler was removed. When he shone a light into the chimney the last thing he expected to see was a human skull.
Dane County, Wisconsin, September 3, 1989
A construction crew made a hole at the base of the chimney to remove the remains. They also found a shoe, pieces of clothing and a 6-inch clump of intact reddish-brown hair.
The place was Sandtown Road, once known as the Sand Town Trail, near the West End in Atlanta where a man's skeleton was found. It was a swampy area, some distance from the road in a dense area of cane growth. Most noted that it was an "admirable spot for a murder."
Atlanta, April 12, 1897
The bones were found by a policeman's young son, and soon crowds flocked to the place. All believed the person was a victim of murder, with the body not fully decomposed. He appeared to have been a man of means. Near to the remains was a piece of a gold chain, a small silver ring and a dainty gold locket, which was in the man's pocket, and not discovered by his attacker, if theft was the motive.
Bones were found on the bank of the Miami Canal on April 12, 1917. The police immediately compared the crime to the murder of Eddy Kinsey, whose body had been discovered in similar circumstances a few months before.
What was left of the man was only a skeleton, with evidence that he was the victim of foul play. The bones were taken to Undertaker W.H. Combs. From the general appearance, the remains had been left on this lonely spot for about six months. It had been scattered by buzzards, which had cleaned away the flesh and only traces of garments were left behind. There was also a pair of tan shoes hardly used, which later were proven to have been purchased at an Avenue D shop. A burned buckle showed that he wore a leather belt around his waist.
On Halloween, 1900, Sanitary Chief George Walker made a startling discovery while conducting a house to house inspection. He came upon the skeleton of a woman. It was in the rear of a vacant house at 817 Constant Street, Tampa. This neighborhood was known as the Scrub.
The bones were not white and polished such as the one ones used by physicians or medical students. They were dark and a little charred, as if the flesh had been recently burned from them. Wisps of wavy, fine reddish brown hair still clung to the skull.
What was left was just a skeleton found in a pine stand at a place called the Devil's Elbow.
October 30, 1886, Palatka, Florida
A boy hunting found him. His head lay to the roots of the pine tree, and his flesh had been completely stripped off by animals and buzzards. The condition of the clothes indicated he had been dead several months, and that he might have been the victim of the prior winter's freeze.
In 1875, Henry Keech came to St. Augustine, Florida and established a farm a few miles away at Matanzas Inlet, named for the massacre of French sailors decades before. Little did he imagine that death stalked him as well.
June 1875
Henry Keech came to St. Augustine from Wisconsin in 1873. He purchased a farm in St. John's county 14 miles from the old fort Matanzas Inlet. He was industrious and prospered. He came with a woman who all believed was his wife.
The United States had gained its independence from Britain for only a few years, when a 19-year-old named Barnett Davenport came to work for a family on their farm. Little did they know they had allowed the devil in their midst, who later claimed he was haunted by thoughts of murder.
Barnett Davenport could be called a bad seed. He was born in 1760, and thievery came easily to him. By the time he was 15 years old he had a fearsome reputation as a robber.
When Freda Lesser was murdered in 1919, there was a comparison made to the killing of Freda Ward in 1897, not only because of their name, but because they were slaughtered over love.
In July, 1919, the murder of a girl made the newspapers. Mostly because she was the victim of "morbid love" and that her name was Freda.
In the winter of 1892, a gruesome murder was committed in public by a young woman, a graduate of the Higbee School for Young Ladies, where butchery was not on their curriculum.
January 1892, Memphis, Tennessee
The city of Memphis was rocked by a scandalous murder that took place in daytime, in full view of various witnesses. There was no mystery as to who committed the crime, but the reason for the killing, caused tongues to wag for years.
There are persons who are never meant to hold positions of trust, and Hans B. Schmidt was one of them. Some are just untrustworthy, others are deadly.
Hans B. Schmidt was born in in the Bavarian town of Aschaffenburg; one of ten children. His mother Gertrude was Catholic and his father Heinrich was Protestant, but it was probably the beatings he received at the hands of his father that shaped the man he would become. He also witnessed domestic violence between his parents, brought about because Heinrich did not want her to practice her faith. Perhaps it was also a deep streak of mental illness that ran in his family.
