Category Archives: Crime
Al Capone never shut up
Jonathan Eig, author of Get Capone: The Secret Plot That Captured America’s Most Wanted Gangster
, is a former writer and editor for the Chicago bureau of The Wall Street Journal and the former executive editor of Chicago magazine. He is the author of two highly acclaimed New York Times best sellers: Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig and Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson’s First Season. Luckiest Man won the Casey Award for best baseball book of 2005 and Opening Day was selected as one of the best books of 2007 by the Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, and Sports Illustrated. Eig lives in Chicago with his wife and children.
Where is Sister Janina?
By Mardi Link
A Felician nun has gone missing for the second time, more than a century after her violent death.
On a warm afternoon in August of 1907, Sister Mary Janina disappeared from her remote convent in Northern Michigan. The only clues were these: a rosary swinging on the convent’s doorknob and a prayerbook left on a windowsill, its pages fluttering in the breeze. She had been a teaching nun, responsible for educating the children of Holy Rosary Catholic Church, assigned to the flyspeck town of Isadore by her superiors at the Felician Motherhouse in Detroit.
For the next decade, parishioners, the law, her priest, Pinkerton detectives, and a local dog handler with a bloodhound for hire searched for her, to no avail. Ambition and progress did finally find her that first time, though; a new priest decided to tear down the old wooden church and replace it with a Gothic-styled brick one, her bones were found buried in the dirt-floored basement, surrounded by the rotting fabric of her nun’s habit. Stella, the convent’s housekeeper, was arrested for the crime and the case caused a sensation in the Catholic Church and in the courts.
“Charged with the slaying at Isadore, the housekeeper was alleged to have made a confession, giving jealousy as the motive for the crime,” The New York Times reported on October 26, 1919. Though Stella protested her innocence in court, the prosecution set up a table in front of the jury and laid the nun’s bones, one by one, upon it. With each knock of bone on wood, Stella’s guilt echoed louder in the minds of the jury.
And it was there that Sister Janina disappeared for the second time. There is no record of where her remains were taken after the trial. She had no funeral, there is no marked grave, the current parishioners of Holy Rosary call it simply “the tragedy” and today shoo away outsiders, and even the Felician Motherhouse has lost track of one of their own. Rumors from elders say she is buried in Holy Rosary’s cemetery, pictured above, but a map of the grounds does not list her as an eternal resident. A Centennial History published by the church does not even list her.
Still, someone must know where Sister Janina is buried. Do you?
Mardi Link is a freelance journalist and the author of Isadore’s Secret: Sin, Murder, and Confession in a Northern Michigan
, a 2010 Michigan Notable Book and GLIBA “Great Lakes, Great Read.” Her work has appeared in The Detroit Free Press, Michigan History Magazine, The Bookseller (UK), and Publishers Weekly. She lives on a small farm in Northern Michigan. For more on the book, please view this video
IMAGE: Holy Rosary Catholic Church Cemetery in Cedar, Mich.
Congratulations to the following winners of this book:
Arwen, librarypat and Tom
We’ll be in touch soon!
And you are…who again?
By Roger Ekirch
Birthright sets out to recount, for the first time, the real-life saga of James Annesley that not only captivated eighteenth-century Britain but inspired five novels, most famously Robert Louis Stevenson’s classic adventure tale, Kidnapped.
In 1728, at twelve years of age, “Jemmy” was kidnapped from Dublin and shipped by his uncle to America as an indentured servant. Uncle Richard, his blood rival, usurped the boy’s inheritance of five aristocratic titles belonging to the mighty house of Annesley, together with sprawling estates in Ireland, England, and Wales.
Only after twelve more years, in the backwoods of northern Delaware, did James successfully escape to Jamaica, then to England and Ireland where he set about reclaiming his birthright, all the while defying accusations of being a “pretender,” the bastard son of a maidservant, in addition to repeated attempts on his life.
How, after such a long absence, in an age without DNA laboratories, fingerprint records, or photographs could an impoverished prodigal prove his identity, let alone his legitimacy? At stake during the epic trial held in Dublin in 1743 – the longest in memory – was the greatest family estate ever put before a jury. But rather than resolve Annesley’s claim, the trial was just the beginning of a tortuous quest on the road to redemption.
Bursting with an improbable cast of characters, from a brave Dublin butcher and a wily Scot to the king of England, Birthright evokes the volatile world of Georgian Ireland—complete with its violence, debauchery, ancient rituals, and tenacious loyalties.
Roger Ekirch is an award-winning author and a professor of history at Virginia Tech. A graduate of Dartmouth College, he obtained his doctorate from Johns Hopkins University and later became a fellow commoner of Peterhouse, Cambridge as well as a Guggenheim fellow. His writing has been translated into eight foreign languages. His new book, Birthright
, has just been released by Norton.
Who were the Guise?
By Stuart Carroll
Who were the Guise? Why write a book about them? The answer to the first question is simple. Everyone who has heard of Mary Queen of Scots knows them. Mary’s star certainly burned brightly for a brief while: she was queen of France for eighteen months, and claimed the thrones of England and Ireland, before setting sail for Scotland in 1561. But her star was not the sun around which her kinsfolk orbited. In the annals of the Guise family her existence values a few brief pages.
Today, Mary’s uncles and cousins are remembered, if at all, as bit players in the dramatic events of her life. I wanted to set the record straight and bring their remarkable story to wider public attention. But there was another reason for writing the book. In their day the Guise were held in awe throughout Europe. Admiring or appalled, none could ignore them. The story of their enmity with the great dynasties of Tudor, Habsburg, Valois and Bourbon is the story sixteenth-century Europe. The Guise shaped the course of European history: rising to prominence around mid century as one of Europe’s most powerful families before plunging France into bloody chaos, they refashioned the Catholic Church at the Council of Trent; plotted to invade England and remove Elizabeth I; and made and unmade the kings of France before ending the century as martyrs for the Catholic cause.
There was a further reason for writing the book. To understand the Guise is to understand the profound transformations that shook sixteenth-century Europe. Today’s religious fundamentalism and the conflict it entails make it imperative that we revisit the roots of Europe’s own religious violence. The word ‘massacre’ was first used in its modern context in sixteenth-century France and, as readers will discover, Europe’s Wars of Religion continue to reverberate across the centuries.
Stuart Carroll, author of Martyrs and Murderers: The Guise Family and the Making of Europe
, has taught at the Universities of London and York, where he is currently Professor of History. He is twice-winner of the Nancy Roelker prize for the best essay written on early modern French History.
IMAGE: The Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, which the Guise Family is widely believed to be partly responsible for, by Francios Dubois, c 1572-84
Blaming the Burke and Hare Victim
By Lisa Rosner
Why, when a beautiful girl is murdered, are people so quick to assume that it must somehow have been her own fault?
That has been the unfortunate fate of Mary Paterson, killed by Burke and Hare in April 1828, her body sold to anatomy lecturer Dr. Robert Knox. As if it were not bad enough to be burked at the age of 18, preserved in alcohol for three months and then dissected, she has also been saddled with a reputation as a notorious prostitute.
First claimed as “a person of disorderly life…cut short in her sinful career,” by an oft-quoted, though unreliable contemporary source, she was recently, and as unreliably, characterized in the Scotsman as “a voluptuous beauty whose body was for sale…” who “would hitch up her skirt in the shadows of Edinburgh’s Canongate.” Artists’ renditions of at least two different naked women circulated, each purporting to be the “true” Mary Paterson stretched out on the dissecting slab; and the rumor spread by word of mouth, and later through fiction and film, that she was recognized by her medical student lover as he stood, scalpel in hand, ready for the morning’s work.
But the very fact that Mary Paterson’s cadaver was beautiful makes it highly unlikely that she was the kind of homeless streetwalker implied by the Scotsman, and one of her friends spoke out against the contemporary rumors; “she may have been ‘irregular’ in her habits,” but “not so low as she has been represented.” The excellent Edinburgh archives confirm this, as they document the admission of Mary Paterson into the Magdalene Asylum, a kind of reform school for penitent prostitutes, at the age of 16.
This was a sign of “irregular” habits indeed, but not of notorious prostitution, because the archives also document that she left the Asylum less than week before her murder. She had no time in her brief life to embark on a “sinful career,” or to form a liaison with Burke or medical students. She was not “asking” for death: it came to her simply because, one April morning, she encountered a murderer on the Canongate.
Lisa Rosner is Professor of History at Stockton College, Pomona, NJ, where she is also Interim Director of the South Jersey Center for Digital Humanities. Anatomy Murders
, the third book in her Edinburgh Trilogy, has allowed her to delve ever-deeper into the seamy side of early modern medicine. For more on Burke and Hare, including animated walking tours through 1820s Edinburgh and a re-creation of an anatomical dissection, visit http://burkeandhare.com.
IMAGE: Canongate Edinburgh Looking West, Thomas Hosmer Shepherd (c.1810 to c.1842)
Burke and Hare Anatomy Murders
By Lisa Rosner
On Halloween, 1828, sometime before 11 pm, Hugh Alston, a grocer in the West Port district of Edinburgh, heard two men quarrelling from the floor below, and a woman’s strong voice calling “Murder.” The tenant downstairs was William Burke, a shoemaker; Alston may have guessed that the other man was Burke’s associate William Hare, who lived a few streets away. Alston went downstairs and stood in the passageway. He heard more quarreling, then strangling sounds, and the woman’s voice, still strong, called for the police to come, there was “murder here.” With that Alston went for the police, but found none: Halloween was a traditionally raucous night, and they were either making their rounds or enjoying the fun. When Alston returned, all was quiet.
By that time, Madgy Docherty, the last of the 16 victims of Burke and Hare, was already dead. Drunk and dizzy from whiskey, she had lain down, or been pushed, onto the bed during the quarrel. Burke positioned himself on top of her to compress her lungs, and Hare covered her mouth and nose with his hands. Her face became livid, and blood-flecked saliva came from her mouth. There was no real struggle – Burke, though small, was solidly built, and he and Hare had done this sort of thing before. Once she was dead, they stripped her body and put it under a pile of straw near the bed. Its final destination: the dissecting rooms of Dr. Robert Knox, anatomical lecturer in Surgeon’s Square.
Lisa Rosner is Professor of History at Stockton College, Pomona, NJ, where she is also Interim Director of the South Jersey Center for Digital Humanities. Anatomy Murders, the third book in her Edinburgh Trilogy, has allowed her to delve ever-deeper into the seamy side of early modern medicine. For more on Burke and Hare, including animated walking tours through 1820s Edinburgh and a re-creation of an anatomical dissection, visit http://burkeandhare.com.
IMAGE: Madgy Docherty; Used by permission of the Library of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh
GRACE HAMMER by Sara Stockbridge – A Reader Review
Reviewed by Audrey L. Vest
The Victorian Era in England at the height of the British Empire was a time of tremendous expansion. Public morals were strict, yet many Londoners lived in the grip of poverty and crime, especially prostitution. Charles Dickens depicted the harsh lot of the poor in his novels, populated with unforgettable characters. Sara Stockbridge obviously admires Dickens, and in many ways her GRACE HAMMER, A Novel of the Victorian Underworld is a tribute to him. Grace, a single mother who lives with her four children in London’s East End, is an avid reader, a good mother, and keeps a tidy home. She also happens to be a thief, notably a pickpocket, and is initiating her children into the family business.
Much of the novel’s plot revolves around Grace’s involvement with the handsome and charming but fickle Jack Trallis. But Grace has a secret that presents a grave danger to her and her children. She has stolen a precious necklace from another thief, Horatio Blunt, and he has vowed to chase her down and make her pay. Tipped off to Grace’s whereabouts, Horatio searches the East End for her, leading her to flee to the countryside with her children where they become embroiled in a nail-biting adventure.
Stockbridge manages to convey the tone of Victorian prose in an economical way that engages the contemporary reader. In place of long descriptive passages, she is able to capture the mood of a scene in a single sentence. Yet her writing is quite sensual, conveying the sights, sounds, and smells of Whitechapel, as Grace frequents public houses and worries about her friends, the ladies of the night, who are being brutally murdered by a vicious serial killer. (The only quibble this former English teacher has with Stockbridge’s writing is her disconcerting habit of switching tenses mid-paragraph.)
If one sign of a skillful novelist is the ability to create memorable characters, Stockbridge succeeds. Grace, Jack, and little Daisy lived on in my mind after I closed the book for the last time, while Miss Emmaline Spragg may well pop up in a few nightmares.
Audrey L. Vest is a retired book editor and English teacher who loves to read about the Victorian era.
Henry Hudson’s Lost Voyage
By Peter C. Mancall
On April 17, 1610, the English sea captain Henry Hudson maneuvered his small ship called Discovery out of St. Katherine’s dock in London toward the Northwest Passage, the water route Europeans believed connected the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. On board were twenty-two men and two boys, one of whom was Hudson’s seventeen-year old son.
In the late summer of 1610 the captain guided the Discovery into modern Hudson Bay. He decided to spend the winter in Canadian waters even though he knew the ship would become trapped in ice. At some point during the bitterly cold months, some crew members decided they had suffered enough. When June came and the bay thawed, rebels put Hudson, his son, and seven loyal or ill men on a small boat (known as a shallop) and set them adrift. According to the survivors, the mutineers soon met a just fate when a group of Inuit killed four of them. A fifth rebel died, apparently of malnutrition, as the boat sailed homeward.
Sixteen months after its initial departure the Discovery, its decks stained with blood, returned to London with seven men and one boy. The survivors blamed the mutiny on the five men who had since died, but lingering suspicions about the captain’s fate prompted the High Court of Admiralty to investigate further. The suspects could not be charged with mutiny, because there was no such crime in England yet. The sailors had not committed treason because private financiers, rather than the King, owned the ship. The court charged four of the survivors with murder for purportedly exposing those on the shallop. But the accused were exonerated, probably because the court lacked evidence to prove that they had caused Hudson’s demise.
The bodies of Hudson and his last companions have never been found. No one was ever punished for the crime.
Peter C. Mancall is the author of Fatal Journey: The Final Expedition of Henry Hudson
Midwives and Witches
by Bronwyn Backstrom (Vanderbilt University)
The ideas of witches and witchcraft have been around for centuries and were hot topics. Witches were typically identified as older single women of lower class. Throughout history, there has been a stereotype that only women, specifically midwives and other women-healers, were witches. Women were targets because of the tradition of misogyny; women’s participation in folk-healing; and changes in the awareness of female nature, their family and economic roles, and ideas of women’s social behavior.
Female witches were accused of three main things: female sexuality (this included every sexual crime against men), organization, and having magical powers (both good and bad) that affected one’s health. Witchcraft was considered to go against the Catholic Church. It was considered a threat to God’s holy order because it was not based on scripture or religion. In addition, all witchcraft was considered based off of carnal lust, or strong sexual desires, with evil spirits.
The Malleus Maleficarum, meaning “Hammer of Witches,” was written in 1484 by two reverends: Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger. This book contains everything one needs to know about witches and witchcraft at the time, from what defines a witch and how they become one, to the sentences they would receive because of their participation in witchcraft. It also contains information on witch-midwives.
According to Malleus Maleficarum, witch-midwives were considered the most wicked and dangerous witches, who inflicted the greatest injuries. This is because they dealt with the health of others and had easy access to newborn children, who were used in offerings for the evil spirits. Witch-midwives were accused of causing miscarriages; however, if they allowed a child to be born, they would allegedly either feast on the child or offer it to the evil spirits, allowing the witches to infect the child and turn it into a witch.
The evil spirits called the witch-midwives to offer them newborn children for several reasons. One was for their pride. Another was to disguise the act of infidelity as a virtue. By associating children with the evil spirits, the witches drew in more innocent people, making it easier for them to turn into witches. Finally, they used the children to fill their ranks. When the evil spirits infected children at an early age, turning them to witches, they could set them aside to be used in the future as needed.
There was a decline in accusations against women as witches between the 17th and 18th centuries because of the increase in male midwives. Men began to replace women, resulting in fewer women in the field who could be accused of witchcraft.
Image: Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger. Malleus Maleficarum, 1669. (Courtesy of Wellcome Library, London.)
References:
Brauner, Sigrid. Fearless Wives and Frightened Shrews: The Construction of the Witch in Early Modern Germany. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995.
Ehrenreich, Barbara, and Deirdre English. Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers. Old Westbury: Feminist Press, 1973.
Kramer, Heinrich, and James Sprenger. Malleus Maleficarum. Trans. Reverend Montague Summers. Manchester: University of Manchester Press, 2007.
The Motor Bandits
By Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler
On the night of December 13, 1911, three men stole an automobile from the home of a family in the wealthy Paris suburb of Boulogne-sur-Seine. The car was a Delaunay-Belleville, France’s finest make: the czar of Russia was said to own twenty. The three men were to use it to become, for a time, the most wanted criminals in Europe.
A week later, that same car sat idling on the Rue Ordener in Montmartre. At the wheel was Jules Bonnot (police mug shot above), a former racing-car driver who had embraced anarchism and turned to crime as a protest against society. His two cohorts, Raymond Caillemin and Octave Garnier, stepped out of the car when they saw a man with a briefcase approaching.
The briefcase, they knew, was filled with cash and securities being messengered to a bank. Though the two gunmen drew pistols, the messenger surprisingly resisted, and Garnier shot the man twice through the chest before he released his hold on the case.
The gunshots attracted attention and people ran to help. As his accomplices slid into the back seat, Bonnot gunned the motor of the Delaunay-Belleville, made a hairpin turn and sped back down the street. Finding other vehicles in his way, he simply drove onto the sidewalk, scattering pedestrians in his wake. Within seconds, the car was out of sight.
In the annals of crime, this was a singular moment: for the first time, bandits had used what became known as a getaway car to escape from the scene of a crime. French newspapers gave Bonnot the nickname “the Demon Chauffeur” as the gang staged robbery after robbery in the same ruthless fashion.
Bonnot once coolly walked into a newspaper office to correct a story that had been written about him. He admitted that the police would triumph eventually, but he vowed not to be taken alive.
So it was. On April 27, Bonnot’s hideout, a two-story house in the countryside, was surrounded by sixteen members of the French Sûreté. Resisting calls for surrender, Bonnot demonstrated that he had stockpiled plenty of weapons and ammunition. The chief of the Sûreté forces called on the local militia, who brought artillery.
When word of the battle spread, more than ten thousand civilians gathered, as well as a motion-picture newsreel team. Spotlights were set up as the siege lasted into the night. When the building was destroyed by dynamite, Bonnot’s body was discovered inside, next to a final testament he had written in his own blood. His gravesite had to be kept secret to prevent admirers from turning it into a shrine.
Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler are authors of The Crimes of Paris: A True Story of Murder, Theft, and Detection (Little Brown).
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