William Henry Abstein (1883 - 1940)

Major League Baseball Player. Known as “Big Bill,” he played Major League baseball as first baseman for three seasons (1906, 1909 to 1910) for the Pittsburgh Pirates and St. Louis Browns. A career minor leaguer who never could permanently break into the Major League (he was considered a top first baseman when he played for […]

Charles S. “Charlie” Abbey (1866 - 1926)

Major League Baseball Player. He made his debut as an outfielder for the National League Washington Senators on August 16, 1893, and was the first person from Nebraska to play in the Major Leagues. He played his whole five year career, 1893 to 1897, with the Washington Senators, ending with a  .281 batting average, 492 […]

Dorothy Stang (1931 - 2005)

Dorothy Stang, born in Dayton, Ohio, US, but a naturalized Brazilian citizen, worked as an advocate for the rural poor beginning in the early 1970s, helping peasants make a living by farming small plots and extracting forest products without deforestation. She also sought to protect peasants from criminal gangs working on behalf of ranchers who […]

John Clay Walker (1948 - 1985)

John Clay Walker (October 5, 1948 – January 30, 1985) was an American journalist and aspiring novelist who was abducted, tortured and murdered in Mexico by members of the Guadalajara Cartel under orders of their leader Rafael Caro Quintero. Caro Quintero suspected Walker of working as an undercover U.S. Drug Enforcement Agent (DEA) while he […]

Ingrid Washinawatok (1957 - 1999)

Ingrid Washinawatok was the Chair of the NGO Committee on the United Nations International Decade of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, a delegate to the United Nations Commission on Human Rights, an NGO representative in consultative status to the UN for the International Indian Treaty Council, and a member of the UN Working Group on Indigenous […]

Richard Welch (1929 - 1975)

Richard Welch, who was born in Hartford, Connecticut, was recruited to the CIA in 1951 upon graduation from Harvard, where he studied classics. His first assignment as a case officer was in Athens working as a civilian employee of the U.S. Department of the Army (1952–59). From 1960-64, he served in Cyprus, and then in […]

Joan Winters (1909 - 1933)

Joan Winters appeared on Broadway in 1930 as Sue in the drama Bad Girl. She left for Europe on April 13, 1932 and planned to return to New York City in time to celebrate her birthday on December 8, 1933. According to a UPI wire report from November 4, 1933, Winters’s corpse was discovered together with […]

Freddie Woodruff (1947 - 1993)

Freddie Woodruff (September 14, 1947 — August 8, 1993) was a regional affairs officer at the U.S. Embassy in Tbilsi, Georgia. Earlier in his career he had been posted under diplomatic cover to Berlin, the consulate in Leningrad and in the early 1980s to Ankara followed by a stint in Ethiopia 1987. Woodruff has been widely […]

Roger Youderian (1924 - 1956)

Roger Youderian was born in Sumatra, Montana, of Armenian descent. He contracted polio at the age of nine, crippling him slightly. He overcame the effects of the disease during high school, making it possible for him to play basketball. After graduating from Fergus High School in Lewistown, Montana in 1941, he attended Montana State College […]

Jaime Zapata (1978 - 2011)

Jaime Zapata was born in Brownsville, Texas, United States, a border city directly north across Matamoros, Tamaulipas, Mexico. He was one of five brothers, all in the field of criminal justice. Zapata attended Homer Hanna High School, and later graduated from the University of Texas at Brownsville in 2005, where he attained a degree in […]

Richard Fagan (1947 - 2016)

Richard Fagan learned basic guitar skills as a young child and began to refine those skills and singing do-wop in Philadelphia as a teenager. According to Richard’s account, he encountered two other people singing in the Junior High lunch room, suggested some changes while joining along and immediately had new friends and singing companions. After […]

Alan Vega (1938 - 2016)

Alan Vega was raised in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. Until the announcement of the 70th birthday release of his recordings in 2008, Vega was widely thought to have been ten years younger; the 2005 book Suicide: No Compromise lists 1948 as his birth year and quotes a 1998 interview in which Vega talks about watching Elvis Presley on […]

Sandy Pearlman (1943 - 2016)

Sandy Pearlman was born in the Rockaway neighborhood of Queens, New York, the son of pharmacy operator Hyman Pearlman. He received his B.A. from the State University of New York at Stony Brook in 1966. In 1967, Pearlman hand-picked musicians for a rock band to perform the lyrics that he was writing, based on his Imaginos […]

Pete Fountain (1930 - 2016)

A talent scout for Lawrence Welk, who saw Pete Fountain performing at the Pier 600, invited him to join the Welk’s orchestra in Los Angeles, where he re-located for two years becoming well-known for his many solos on Welk’s ABC television show, The Lawrence Welk Show. Fountain was rumored to have quit when Welk refused […]

Dean Corll (1939 - 1973)

Between 1970 and 1973, Dean Corll is known to have killed a minimum of 28 victims. All of his victims were males aged 13 to 20, the majority of whom were in their mid-teens. Most victims were abducted from Houston Heights, which was then a low-income neighborhood northwest of downtown Houston. With most abductions, he […]

Earle Nelson (1897 - 1928)

Earle Nelson’s mother and father both died of syphilis before Nelson reached the age of two years. He was subsequently sent to be raised by his maternal grandmother, a devout Pentecostal. Around the age of 10, Nelson collided with a streetcar while riding his bicycle and remained unconscious for six days afterward. After he awoke, his […]

Carl Panzram (1891 - 1930)

In adulthood, Carl Panzram became a thief, stealing anything from bicycles to yachts, and was caught and imprisoned multiple times. While incarcerated, Panzram frequently got into trouble by attacking guards and refusing to follow their orders. The guards retaliated, subjecting him to beatings and other punishments. In 1907, at the age of 15, after getting […]

Gerald Stano (1951 - 1998)

Gerald Stano was born in Schenectady, New York. His given name at birth was Paul Zeininger. His natural mother neglected him to such an extent that when she finally gave him up for adoption when he was six months old, county doctors declared him unadoptable because he was functioning at what they described as “an […]

Lewis Moran (1941 - 2004)

Lewis Moran (7 July 1941 – 31 March 2004) was an Australian organized crime figure and patriarch of the infamous Moran family of Melbourne, Victoria, Australia. Notable for his involvement in the Melbourne gangland killings, Moran was shot dead in a Melbourne hotel The Brunswick Club in 2004. His murder occurred one week after the […]

Jason Moran (1967 - 2003)

Jason Moran was the son of Lewis Moran and Judy Moran. Mark Moran was his half-brother. Moran attended Penleigh and Essendon Grammar School. He met his future wife, Trisha Kane, at 15 years of age. She is the daughter of Les Kane, a Melbourne painter and docker and reputed criminal who was murdered in his […]

Sian Kingi (1974 - 1987)

Sian Kingi (16 December 1974 – 27 November 1987) was a 12-year-old New Zealand girl of Māori descent who was abducted, raped and killed in Noosa, Queensland, in 1987. Barrie Watts and Valmae Beck, a married couple, were convicted in 1988 of the much-publicised crime and were each sentenced to life imprisonment. Sian Kingi was riding […]

Ralph Stanley (1927 - 2016)

Known in the world of bluegrass music by the popular title, “Dr. Ralph Stanley” (after being awarded an honorary Doctorate of Music from Lincoln Memorial University in Harrogate, Tennessee in 1976), Ralph Stanley was inducted into the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Honor in 1992 and in 2000, and became the first person to be […]

James Still (1906 - 2001)

Lonie, James Still’s mother was sixteen when she moved to Alabama due to a tornado destroying the family home. His father, J. Alex Still, was a horse doctor with no formal training. James Still was born July 16, 1906 near Lafayette, Alabama. Still was considered a quiet child but a hard worker. He along with […]

Jesse Stuart (1906 - 1984)

Jesse Stuart was born near Riverton, Greenup County, Kentucky, to Mitchell and Martha (Hilton) Stuart on August 8, 1907. Stuart served in the US Navy during World War II but did not see combat as his mission in his life. In 1939, Stuart married Naomi Deane Norris, a school teacher. They settled in W Hollow […]

Ebony Simpson (1983 - 1992)

On 19 August 1992, Ebony Simpson disembarked from her school bus. Her mother, who usually met her at the bus stop, was busy so asked Ebony’s older brother to meet her after he got off his bus. But his bus was late and so Ebony started to walk the kilometre to her home. With the house […]

Peter Falconio (1972 - 2001)

Peter Falconio (20 September 1972 – 14 July 2001) was a British tourist from Hepworth, West Yorkshire, who disappeared in the Australian outback in July 2001, while travelling with girlfriend Joanne Lees. Falconio’s body has never been found and he is presumed dead. Peter Falconio and Lees were travelling at night along the Stuart Highway near […]

Anita Cobby (1959 - 1986)

Anita Cobby was born on 2 November 1959, to Garry Bernard Lynch, a graphic artist with the Royal Australian Air Force, and Grace “Peggy” Lynch, a nurse. As a teenager she participated in beauty pageants and had a promising career as a model, but decided instead to follow in her mother’s footsteps and become a […]

Martha Rendell (1871 - 1909)

Martha Rendell killed 7-year-old Annie first. Her method was to put something in the child’s food that would result in a sore throat. It was alleged that she killed the children by swabbing hydrochloric acid on the backs of their throats, claiming it was medicine. This would inflame the throat until the child could no […]

Dennis Ferguson (1948 - 2012)

According to court records, Dennis Ferguson’s pre-1987 criminal history contains “many convictions for false pretences, various assaults on children and indecent assaults on females”, including five convictions for child molestation. In 1987 Ferguson was imprisoned in Long Bay Jail after being convicted on multiple fraud charges. After being released from Long Bay Jail in July […]

Robert Dunn (1941 - 2009)

Robert Dunn (c. 1941 – 11 July 2009) was an Australian convicted child molester. He was a school teacher by profession, working for the Marist Brothers, a Catholic religious order. He began a 20-year jail sentence in 2001 for 24 sexual offences occurring between 1985 and 1995. In 1996, a Royal Commission chaired by Justice James […]