Great Crimes and Trials

In December 1971 the world was amazed when it was announced that author Clifford Irving would be collaborating with millionaire recluse Howard Hughes on his official biography. It was even more astonishing when this was swiftly followed by an announcement from Hughes that the whole thing was a hoax. Irving insisted that this was a misunderstanding, but when Hughes finally broke cover to speak to journalists the ingenious fraud was revealed.

The Escapes from Alcatraz. Documenting some of the attempted escapes from the notorious US island prison in San Francisco Bay.

On 10th March 1980, Jean Harris, headmistress of an exclusive East Coast girls school, drove to the house of her lover, Dr Herman Tarnower, author of the best selling ‘Scarsdale Diet’, and shot him dead. She had been aware that he wanted to end their relationship, and claimed that his shooting had been an accident while she was trying to persuade him to kill her. The jury was unconvinced and she was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment.

On 4th February 1974 Patricia Hearst the 19-year-old heiress to one of America’s largest media fortunes was kidnapped by an obscure terrorist group, the Symbionese Liberation Army. Within three months she had apparently joined them when she was filmed wielding a gun during a bank raid. Recaptured and tried, Patty was sentenced to seven years imprisonment, but released in January 1979 as an act of Executive Clemency by President Jimmy Carter.

One of North America’s largest security companies, Brinks, has always been a target for robbers. One of the most spectacular attempts was made on 17th January 1950 when a gang broke into the company’s Boston headquarters and escaped with $2,775,395. It was more than 5 years before one of them turned state’s evidence and caused the arrest of his companions.

To this day, the exact fate of Jimmy Hoffa, one of the most corrupt and forceful US union leaders, remains a mystery. Hoffa had built up the Teamsters Union into a massive and rich organisation with close links to organised crime. Brought to trial in 1962 and finally imprisoned in 1967, he was pardoned by Richard Nixon in 1971. Four years later he was lured to a fictitious union meeting and disappeared.

On 4th April 1962 James Hanratty was hanged for an apparently motiveless shooting of two lovers on the A6 main road near London. But much of the evidence had been circumstantial, and pointed equally well towards another name, Peter Alphon. When he confessed during an interview that he had carried out the murder many people were amazed that no charges were ever brought and controversy still rages as to whether Hanratty was wrongly executed.

On 19th June 1951 Julius and Ethel Rosenberg walked to the electric chair in Sing Sing prison to become the first married couple in the United States to be executed together. They had been found guilty at the height of the McCarthy anti-Communist witch hunts of spying for the Soviet Union during the Second World War and passing vital secrets of the Manhattan Project, America’s atomic bomb programme, to the Russians. To the end they protested their innocence and controversy continues as to whether they were condemned simply to calm the American public’s fear of growing Communist power.

Originating as a resistance movement against Arab invaders in 9th Century Sicily, this secret society was brought to the United States during the great waves of emigration from Italy in the late 19th Century. It was soon organising crime and racketeering in many American cities, and under bosses like ‘Lucky’ Luciano, Carlo Gambino and Santo Trafficante, became a nationwide ‘business’ which boasted of being bigger than US Steel.

The film ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ made a romantic myth of these two young Texans. In reality they were illiterate, unfeeling killers who for a two year period, 1932 - 1934, spread terror across Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Missouri. Their gang carried out more than 20 small robberies and needless killings before being gunned down on 23rd May 1934.