Two teenage gunmen kill 13 people in a shooting spree at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. At about11:20 a.m., Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris, dressed in long trench coats, began shooting students outside the school before moving inside to continue their rampage. By the time SWAT team officers finally […]
A mere three weeks after California passed a law against cyberstalking, Gary Dellapenta is charged with using the Internet to solicit the rape of a woman who had rejected his advances. Dellapenta terrorized a North Hollywood woman by placing ads in her name that claimed she had rape fantasies and […]
Eighteen-year-old Melissa Drexler gives birth to a baby boy in the bathroom stall atan Aberdeen Township banquet hall in New Jersey during her high school prom. Maintenance workers called to clean up blood found in the stall discover a bag in the garbage with her dead baby inside. An autopsy […]
Jonathan Levin, a popular 31-year-old English teacher, is stabbed and shot to death in his Upper West Side apartment in New York City. The son of Time Warner chairman Gerald Levin, Jonathan was known by many to be wealthy. When he did not show up for work, investigators searched his […]
The body of William Reese, 45, a cemetery caretaker, is found in rural Pennsville, New Jersey, on May 9, 1997. He had been shot in the head with a Golden Saber .38-caliber bullet. Police soon determined that the killer was Andrew Cunanan, a 27-year-old man already wanted for three murders. […]
Andrew Cunanan kills Jeffrey Trail by beating him to death with a claw hammer in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Trail’s murder set Cunanan off on a killing spree that ended in July when he killed himself on a houseboat in Miami Beach. Cunanan spent most of his adult life as the kept […]
Dr. Lin Russell, her two daughters, Josie and Megan, and their dog, Lucy, are all brutally attacked by a man wielding a hammer on their way home to Nonington Village, Kent, England, after a swimming gala. Forcing them to sit down in the woods, the attacker blindfolded and tied up […]
Seventy-six-year-old Richard Keech shoots his son-in-law, Nicholas Candy, to death outside his Long Beach, California, home. Candy, in the midst of a divorce and custody battle with Keech’s daughter Nancy, had arrived to pick up his son. As he staggered away down the street yelling, “Help me, help me,” Keech […]
Qubilah Shabazz, the daughter of Malcolm X, is arrested for conspiring to kill Louis Farrakhan. Shabazz believed that Farrakhan was responsible for the assassination of her father in 1965, and sought to exact revenge through a hired killer. Subsequently, Shabazz admitted her “responsibility,” but not her guilt of the charges, […]
Jesse Timmendequas is charged with the murder of seven-year-old Megan Kanka in New Jersey. Kanka’s death inspired Megan’s Law, a statute enacted in 1994 requiring that information about convicted sex felons be available to the public. Versions of Megan’s Law have been passed in many states since her murder. Megan […]
Nicole Brown Simpson, famous football player O.J. Simpson’s ex-wife, and her friend Ron Goldman are brutally stabbed to death outside Nicole’s home in Brentwood, California, in what quickly becomes one of the most highly publicized trials of the century. With overwhelming evidence against him, including a prior record of domestic […]
Rwandan armed forces kill 10 Belgian peacekeeping officers in a successful effort to discourage international intervention in their genocide that had begun only hours earlier. In less than three months, Hutu extremists who controlled Rwanda murdered an estimated 800,000 innocent civilian Tutsis in the worst episode of genocide since World […]
Modern rock icon Kurt Cobain commits suicide on this day in 1994. His body was discovered inside his home in Seattle, Washington, three days later by Gary Smith, an electrician, who was installing a security system in the suburban house. Despite indications that Cobain, the lead singer of Nirvana, killed […]
Byron de la Beckwith is convicted of the assassination of civil rights leader Medger Evers 31 years earlier, ending the lengthiest murder case in American history. Evers was gunned down in the driveway of his Jackson, Mississippi, home while his wife, Myrlie, and the couple’s small children were inside waiting […]
A search for evidence in the disappearance and probable murder of Helle Craftscontinues on the snow-covered banks of the Housatonic River in Connecticut. Investigators had finally narrowed the search to this area after Helle, a Pan Am flight attendant, had vanished on November 18, 1986. Although her body was never […]
