TODAY IN CRIME: March 16

photo credit: english-heritage.org.uk

1190: The Crusaders began the massacre of Jews who refused to submit to baptism in York, England. Many committed suicide rather than convert.

1244: French royal forces burned more than 200 Cathars, members of a heretical Christian sect, who refused to recant after the Fall of Montségur, a Cathar stronghold.

1792: Count Jacob Johan Anckarström shot King Gustav III of Sweden in the back at a masked ball at the opera. The king died on March 29.

1861: Texas Governor Sam Houston refused to take an oath of loyalty to the Confederate States of America and was ousted from office.

1948: Alderson Federal Prison Camp in West Virginia released Billie Holiday early because of good behavior. She was there for narcotics possession.

1968: U.S. troops in Viet Nam gunned down hundreds of unarmed civilians—mostly women and children—in the village of My Lai. The U.S. Army initially covered up the massacre. Of the 12 soldiers eventually charged, 11 were acquitted or had the case against them dropped before trial. Lt. William Calley was court-martialed, found guilty on 22 counts of murdering a civilian, and sentenced to life in prison. He was paroled in 1974 after years of house arrest.

1972: The U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, under orders from the Nixon administration, served John Lennon and Yoko Ono with deportation papers. (Nixon feared the popular musician would persuade newly authorized young voters to vote against him in that year’s presidential election.) The couple eventually got green cards and could live in the U.S. permanently.

1978: The Red Brigades, a left-wing urban guerilla group, kidnapped Italian politician Aldo Moro, a popular leader of the center-left. It later murdered him.

1984: Hezbollah Shiite Muslims kidnapped William Buckley, the CIA station chief in Beirut. He died while in captivity.

1985: Islamic militants kidnapped chief Middle East Associated Press correspondent Terry Anderson in Beirut. He spent more than six years as a hostage.

1988: In the largest chemical weapons attack in history, Iraqi forces struck the Kurdish town of Halabja in Iraq with a mix of poison gas and nerve agents, killing 5,000 and injuring about 10,000 people.

1988: Two hooded gunmen shot to death auto racing legend Mickey Thompson and his wife Trudy in the driveway of their San Gabriel Valley, California home. Former business partner Michael Frank Goodwin, a suspect at the time, was finally tried and sentenced in 2007 for orchestrating the killings.

1988: A U.S. federal grand jury indicted Lieutenant Colonel Oliver L. North and Vice Admiral John M. Poindexter of the National Security Council and two others on charges of conspiracy to defraud the U.S. for their complicity in the Iran-contra affair.

1994: Tonya Harding pled guilty to “conspiracy to hinder prosecution” in the government’s investigation of the attack on fellow Olympic skater Nancy Kerrigan.

1995: Mississippi formally ratified the Thirteenth Amendment banning slavery. The state failed to send a copy of the resolution to the Office of the Federal Register, however, until 2013. The amendment had been officially ratified in 1865.

1997: On Bougainville Island in the south Pacific, Commander Jerry Singirok and soldiers of the Papua New Guinea Defense Force arrested Tim Spicer and his mercenaries of Sandline International. Singirok resented the prime minister hiring mercenaries to resolve the secessionist revolt on the island.

1998: Rwanda began mass trials for the 1994 genocide with 125,000 suspects for 500,000 murders. Ultimately the new government, unable to prosecute so many on such a large scale, adapted the country’s Gacaca system of traditional, informal community courts to work alongside the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda created by the U.N.

1999: All 20 members of the European Commission, the executive body of the European Union, announced their resignations in the wake of a damning report exposing fraud, corruption, and mismanagement at senior levels.

2001: In the biggest mass murder in China in ten years, displaced worker Jin Ruchao set off a series of bomb blasts in the city of Shijiazhuang, China, killing 108 people and injuring 38 others. He was targeting his ex-wife and her family, among others. Ruchao pled guilty and was executed. Another three men were convicted for illegally selling him explosives and related gear, sentenced to death, and executed.

2003: An Israeli Defense Forces armored bulldozer killed 23-year-old American activist Rachel Corrie while she was trying to block Israeli troops from demolishing a Palestinian home in Gaza.

2005: Alameda County, California Judge Alfred Delucchi sentenced Scott Peterson to death by lethal injection for the murder of his pregnant wife, Laci.

2016: North Korea sentenced U.S. college student Otto Warmbier to 15 years hard labor for trying to steal a political poster, in Pyongyang, North Korea.