This story is dedicated to ‘packerpil.’ Thank you for your continued support.   During the summer of 1942, Lafayette, Indiana, residents experienced a six-week “reign of terror” in which fifty serious and misdemeanor crimes were committed by one or more individuals. Beginning on June 2, the crime wave included: Twenty counts of breaking into automobiles, […]

In late October 1948, Hattiesburg, Mississippi house painter Walter Dorman, 42 or 44, was vacationing at a fishing camp near Tallulah, in the northeast corner of the Louisiana (near the Mississippi River, Mississippi Delta, and Lake Providence). The fishing camp was owned and operated by George Dowdy, 68, and his son, J.D. Dowdy, 23, a […]

From HCD: The biography of Native American Bobby BlueJacket, a safecracker & killer who redeemed himself inside and out of prison, will go on sale in February, 2018.  The book, Bobby BlueJacket: The Tribe, The  Joint, The Tulsa Underworld, is available for preorder from the publisher, First to Knock. Author Michael P. Daley, was kind […]

  On December 6, 1943, twenty-seven-year-old Ann Geist took her three-year-old daughter, Kathleen Ann, to a tavern near Fort Logan, Colorado, where she met up with friends. At the time, Fort Logan was a small, Army-Air Force installation west of Englewood, and eight miles southwest of Denver. Soon after she arrived, Geist and her friends […]

Woodrow Wilson “Whitey” Clark On the morning of Jan. 15, 1944, in a small shack at the back of the Dillon Sign Shop at E1806 Sprague, police inspected a gruesome murder scene. Four people hacked and mutilated by a hatchet. Two victims, T.P. Dillon and Jane Staples, were dead. Flora Dillon died a few days […]

Theodore Coneys was born November 10, 1882 in Petersburg, Illinois to T. H. Coneys, a Canadian immigrant who owned a hardware store in Petersburg, and his wife. After the elder Coneys died in 1888, Mrs. Coneys and her son moved to a farm near Beloit, Wisconsin, then to Denver, Colorado in 1907, where she worked […]

Guest post by Diarmid Mogg. Diarmid Mogg is a Scottish parliamentary reporter who runs Small Town Noir, a website of old mug shots from New Castle, Pennsylvania, and has launched a crowdfunding campaign at https://unbound.co.uk/books/small-town-noir to publish a book of the mug shots and the true-life stories behind them. Jimmy Pasta made his money running […]

Charlie Johnson was a career criminal who was arrested in Washington D.C. on January 11, 1949, for pick-pocketing. He was sentenced to one year in prison and fined $200. He was born in 1895 in Kansas City, Missouri, and his criminal record dates from 1917. His record states he was living in New York City […]

  Today’s mug shot is taken from “Famous Crimes the World Forgot.” This is Arthur Eggers. In 1946, he was a cuckold who got tired of his younger, dominant wife running around on him. He was coming home late one night when he caught sight of his wife’s lover leaving the house. When he went […]

  This story was written by NYPD detective Captain Henry Flattery, Retired, for Front Page Detective magazine, November, 1955. It was part of a collection of stories called, “Dumbells I have Known.” which poked fun at some stupid criminals. He was with the NYPD for thirty years and worked on many important cases from that […]