Tag: murder

The Incredible True Story of the Collar Bomb Heist | WIRED

At 2:28 pm on August 28, 2003, a middle-aged pizza deliveryman named Brian Wells walked into a PNC Bank in Erie, Pennsylvania. He had a short cane in his right hand and a strange bulge under the collar of his T-shirt. Wells, 46 and balding, passed the teller a note. “Gather employees with access codes to vault and work fast to fill bag with $250,000,” it said. “You have only 15 minutes.” Then he lifted his shirt to reveal a heavy, boxlike device dangling from his neck. According to the note, it was a bomb. The teller, who told Wells there was no way to get into the vault at that time, filled a bag with cash—$8,702—and handed it over. Wells walked out, sucking on a Dum Dum lollipop he grabbed from the counter, hopped into his car, and drove off. He didn’t get far. Some 15 minutes later, state troopers spotted Wells standing outside his Geo Metro in a nearby parking lot, surrounded him, and tossed him to the pavement, cuffing his hands behind his back.

Wells told the troopers that while out on a delivery he had been accosted by a group of black men who chained the bomb around his neck at gunpoint and forced him to rob the bank. “It’s gonna go off!” he told them in desperation. “I’m not lying.” The officers called the bomb squad and took positions behind their cars, guns drawn. TV camera crews arrived and began filming. For 25 minutes Wells remained seated on the pavement, his legs curled beneath him.

“Did you call my boss?” Wells asked a trooper at one point, apparently concerned that his employer would think he was shirking his duties. Suddenly, the device started to emit an accelerating beeping noise. Wells fidgeted. It looked like he was trying to scoot backward, to somehow escape the bomb strapped to his neck. Beep… Beep… Beep. Boom! The device detonated, blasting him violently onto his back and ripping a 5-inch gash in his chest. The pizza deliveryman took a few last gasps and died on the pavement. It was 3:18 pm. The bomb squad arrived three minutes later.

The Incredible True Story of the Collar Bomb Heist | WIRED

She Was Convicted of Killing Her Mother. Prosecutors Withheld the Evidence That Would Have Freed Her. – The New York Times

With concern about the case mounting — ‘‘Mystery Stabbing Death Unsolved,’’ local ABC news reported that August — the case went to Amy Weirich, who at 40 was a rising star in the Memphis prosecutor’s office. A long- distance runner and the mother of four children, Weirich was a former chief of the gang- and- narcotics unit and the first woman to be named deputy district attorney in Shelby County. She was considered a highly skilled trial lawyer.

A note that Andrew Hammack, Noura’s friend, gave to the police in the early days of the murder investigation. The note, which raises questions about his credibility, was not provided to Noura’s defense team. It turned out to be a crucial piece of evidence in her appeal.

Studying the case, she developed a theory: Noura was bridling under her mother’s rules and killed her for money that she could use to keep partying with her friends. Jackson’s estate was valued at $1.5 million, including a life insurance policy. Weirich also argued that Noura and her mother were struggling over whether to sell a few cars that Noura inherited from her father, Nazmi Hassanieh, a former Lebanese Army captain. After a long separation, Noura got back in touch with her father when she was 16, and he texted and called her often. Sixteen months before her mother was killed, Hassanieh was shot to death in a Memphis convenience store he owned. His murder was never solved.

The police came to arrest Noura that September as she was finishing up a babysitting job. She had no history of violence, and the case quickly became a local sensation. Weirich asked for a life sentence. The judge, Chris Craft, eventually set a bond of $500,000. Unable to pay, Noura spent a total of three and a half years in jail awaiting trial, on a heavy regimen of anti- anxiety and antidepressant medication.

She Was Convicted of Killing Her Mother. Prosecutors Withheld the Evidence That Would Have Freed Her. – The New York Times

Making a Killing

More American civilians have died by gunfire in the past decade than all the Americans who were killed in combat in the Second World War. When an off-duty security guard named Omar Mateen, armed with a Sig Sauer semiautomatic rifle and a Glock 17 pistol, killed forty-nine people at a gay club in Orlando, on June 12th, it was historic in some respects and commonplace in others—the largest mass shooting in American history and, by one count, the hundred-and-thirtieth mass shooting so far this year. High-profile massacres can summon our attention, and galvanize demands for change, but in 2015 fatalities from mass shootings amounted to just two per cent of all gun deaths. Most of the time, when Americans shoot one another, it is impulsive, up close, and apolitical.

None of that has hurt the gun business. In recent years, in response to three kinds of events—mass shootings, terrorist attacks, and talk of additional gun control—gun sales have broken records. “You know that every time a bomb goes off somewhere, every time there’s a shooting somewhere, sales spike like crazy,” Paul Jannuzzo, a former chief of American operations for Glock, the Austrian gun company, told me.

New Yorker

Murder by Poison

In early-nineteenth-century England, a good way to get rid of your husband was arsenic. A medical examiner usually couldn’t tell whether the poison was involved, because the symptoms—diarrhea, vomiting, abdominal pain—are much like those of other disorders. Nor could he necessarily place you at the murder scene. The dying typically took hours. Also, you could administer the poison gradually, a little bit every day. In the mid-century, arsenic poisoning was commonly the resort of women. (In 1851, the House of Lords tried to pass a law forbidding women to buy arsenic.) But unpleasant husbands were not the only people you might want to eliminate. During this period of feverish social mobility, a young person might be waiting impatiently for an inheritance, and there was Uncle Ted, sitting on all that money and meanwhile bossing you around, toying with your hopes. In such cases, male poisoners presumably outnumbered females.

The New Yorker

Bad girls and gone girls: Why the media tired of ‘missing white women’

You remember their names, because the media wouldn’t let you forget them: Laci Peterson, Natalee Holloway, Elizabeth Smart, Chandra Levy, Lori Hacking — young women who disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Gone girls.

Then there were the bad girls. Young women accused of murder — Amanda Knox, Casey Anthony,Jodi Arias. The long-running investigations into their alleged crimes were the stuff of equally obsessive coverage.

But as 2015 creeps toward a close, the gone girls and bad girls have all but disappeared from the media map. The era in which the national news media regularly manufactured folk heroines and anti-heroines from the crime blotter seems to have passed.

WashingtonPost