TODAY IN CRIME: October 12

 

1692 Massachusetts Bay Governor William Phips halted the Salem witch trials. His letter to the Privy Council of King William and Queen Mary cited “what danger some of their innocent subjects might be exposed to…if the evidence of the afflicted persons only did prevaile." Phips disallowed such "spectral evidence"—descriptions of abuses committed by the accused's spirit in witnesses' visions and dreams—in the new court he established.

1871 The British in India enacted the Criminal Tribes Act, naming many local communities "Criminal Tribes." The legislation was ostensibly enacted to combat thugees but declared everyone belonging to certain castes to be born with criminal tendencies and required adult males of the named tribes to report weekly to local police.

1915 In WWI, a German firing squad executed British nurse Edith Cavell for helping 200 Allied soldiers escape from German-occupied Belgium.

1933 The Pierpont Bunch broke John Dillinger out of the Lima, Ohio, city jail to pay him back for his help in planning their jailbreak a few weeks before. Disguised as Indiana State Police officers, the three men claimed they had come to extradite Dillinger to Indiana. When Sheriff Jesse Sarber requested their credentials, Pierpont shot him dead, then released Dillinger from his cell.

1960 Seventeen-year-old Japanese ultranationalist Otoya Yamaguchi stabbed to death Japan Socialist Party leader Inejiro Asanuma during a televised political debate. Photographer Yasushi Nagao won a Pulitzer Prize for his picture of the assassin attempting to thrust the sword a second time. Police captured Yamaguchi at the scene and he hanged himself in his cell at a juvenile detention center less than three weeks later.

1963 The Soviet Union released Jesuit priest Reverend Walter Ciszek after imprisoning him for nearly 23 years. Ciszek had conducted clandestine missionary work in the Soviet Union for more than twenty years before he was arrested by the Soviet secret police.

1972 During the Vietnam War, a brawl between Black and white sailors broke out aboard the U.S. aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk off the coast of North Vietnam. Nearly 50 sailors were injured. The Navy charged 26 Black sailors with assault and rioting and ordered a court-martial in San Diego, where four were convicted of rioting, fourteen of assault, and four found not guilty of all charges; the rest had the charges dropped. Most were demoted in rank. In the aftermath, the Navy instituted reforms to address racial inequality in the ranks.

1978 Police arrested rocker Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols for the murder of his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen, the same day Spungen bled to death on the bathroom floor of their room in the Chelsea Hotel in New York. The twenty-year-old died from a single fatal stab wound to the abdomen. Vicious died of a heroin overdose before his murder trial began.

1983 Japanese former Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka was found guilty of taking a $2 million bribe from the Lockheed Corporation, sentenced to four years in jail, and fined 400m yen. His sentence remained under appellate review until he died ten years later.

1984 British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her cabinet escaped an assassination attempt by the Provisional Irish Republican Army. A bomb planted by the group at a hotel in Brighton, England, exploded, killing five people and wounding 31.

1988 Members of the Melbourne underworld gunned down two officers of the Victoria Police execution-style in Melbourne, Australia. The perpetrators were responding to local police fatally shooting an armed robbery suspect the day before.

1995 New York state released rapper Tupac Shakur from prison on $1.4 million bail pending an appeal of his conviction for sexual assault. Suge Knight of Death Row Records posted the bail in exchange for Shakur releasing three albums under the Death Row label.

1998 Matthew Shepard, a gay student at the University of Wyoming, died five days after he was beaten, robbed, and left tied to a wooden fence post outside of Laramie. His two attackers were found guilty of murder.

1999 General Pervez Musharraf overthrew the democratically elected government of Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in a bloodless coup.

2000 Two al-Qaeda suicide bombers exploded a small craft next to the US Navy destroyer Cole in Yemen, killing 17 sailors and wounding at least 39.

2002 A bomb exploded in the Sari Club, a nightclub on the Indonesian island of Bali, killing 202 people and wounding more than 300. Authorities blamed Islamic militants linked to al-Qaida.

2011 Nigerian al-Qaida operative Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab pleaded guilty to trying to bring down a jetliner with a bomb in his underwear minutes before the plane landed in Detroit, Michigan, on Christmas Day, 2009. Charges against him included the attempted use of a weapon of mass destruction and the attempted murder of the 289 people on the plane. A federal court judge sentenced him to four consecutive life sentences plus 50 years.

2019 The partially constructed Hard Rock Hotel, a luxury complex on Canal Street in New Orleans, collapsed, killing three and injuring 20. Local news media uncovered evidence of improper structural work and negligent city inspectors as factors leading to the tragedy; OSHA is still investigating the incident.