May 21: The "Crossbow Cannibal" strikes again
Plus: a wrongful murder conviction, serial killer claims a mother, and more.
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1924: Two rich boys try to commit the “perfect murder”
It was a crime that seemed dreamed up by a detective writer—and indeed, one of the killers only read detective novels. Around 5 p.m. on May 21, 1924, a bright young 14-year-old named Bobby Franks was walking home from a baseball game, when he met the worst plot twist imaginable.
A green car pulled up next to him with two older boys inside: Richard Loeb and Nathan Leopold, the well-educated sons of millionaires. (Leopold, at 19, was already the foremost expert in America on a particular type of endangered bird.)
These two had decided ahead of time that they wanted to commit the perfect murder: killing a rich kid, demanding ransom, and thus proving that they were better than the average, boring, non-murdering person. At least, that was Loeb’s dream; Leopold, desperately in love with Loeb, was simply going along with it.
In the green car, Loeb hit little Bobby Frank over the head with a chisel, and then suffocated him. The older boys dumped his body, burned his clothes, and wrote a ransom note, expecting that the brilliance of their plan would never be discovered.
Except that they’d made one of the most basic mistakes ever, a mistake too simple for even the pulpiest detective writer: Leopold’s glasses were found at the crime scene.
They were caught, arrested, and after a dramatic trial, given life in prison.
Explore More
Read: The Leopold And Loeb Trial: An Account, UMKC School of Law
Listen: Leopold and Loeb, True Crime All The Time
Watch: The Shocking Criminal Case of Leopold and Loeb, Montrose Gillement
1980: 48-year-old woman killed; wrong man blamed
Katherina Reitz Brow was known to keep a large chunk of cash in her home. That may have been the detail that doomed her, because one morning, someone broke into her Massachusetts home and stabbed her to death.
They took that cash, as well as her purse and jewelry. And then they vanished.
Suspicion fell quickly on her next-door neighbor, Kenneth Waters. He worked at a local diner that Brow liked to visit, and many of the employees at the restaurant knew about her penchant for cash. But Waters had what he thought was an air-tight alibi: he was at work, and then at the courthouse, and then at work again. The case stayed cold.
Two years later, the current boyfriend of Waters’ ex-girlfriend (you read that right) went to police, claiming that Waters had confessed to Brow’s murder. Police threatened the ex-girlfriend until she, too, “admitted” that Waters had been involved in something sketchy that morning. He was sentenced to life in prison, despite his alibi and the fact that his fingerprints didn’t match those at the crime scene.
But Waters’ sister knew he was innocent. She put herself through college and then law school to prove it and worked with the Innocence Project to get DNA testing that showed definitively that Waters wasn’t ever at the crime scene.
He was released in 2001, and had six blissful months of freedom before dying in a bizarre accident—falling off a wall while walking to his brother’s house. Still, his sister says those months of freedom were the best of his life.
Explore More
Read: Kenneth Waters - National Registry of Exonerations, University of Michigan Law School
Listen: Kenny Waters, Seeing Red A True Crime Podcast
Watch: Conviction, Amazon Prime
1990: A serial killer breaks into a mother’s apartment
Elissa Naomi Keller was home alone when the serial killer broke in. Normally her 17-year-old daughter was living with her, but her daughter was visiting friends for the week. So no one was there to help when Cleophus Prince Jr. broke in and stabbed her to death.
When her daughter came home several days later, the apartment was quiet, and she noticed a blanket on the floor. “The blanket was covering my mom,” she said in court later. “It covered her except for her face and feet and she looked like she had been cut across the eyes. It scared me, and I screamed and ran into the living room.”
Approximately one year later, Prince was arrested trying to break into another woman’s home. By then he had killed six times.
Among his possessions was a gold nugget ring that Keller never took off. He was obsessed with his victims’ jewelry; he wore one dead woman’s wedding ring on a chain around his neck.
Explore More
Read: The Clairemont Killer, Crime Library
Listen: Cleophus Prince Jr and Bold Jack Donohue, Bloody Murder - A True Crime Podcast
Watch: Serial Killer Documentary: Cleophus Prince (The Clairemont Serial Killer), Serial Killers Documentaries
2010: The self-styled Crossbow Cannibal kills again
Suzanne Blamires thought she would become a nurse. After all, she’d gone to school for it, and her family was convinced that that was the life she was meant to have.
But she went to raves and did ecstasy there, which eventually gave her a taste for harder drugs. She fell into a crack and heroin addiction, while her live-in boyfriend allegedly encouraged her to turn to sex work to fund the habit.
It was that sex work, in the English city of Bradford, that led her to cross paths with a man who called himself the “Crossbow Cannibal.”
Her murder was captured on CCTV, as the man chased her down and shot her twice in the back of the head with a crossbow, returning to the camera to flip it off. Parts of Blamires’ body were later found floating in the river.
This man—Stephen Shaun Griffiths—was intimately familiar with the area where Blamires and other sex workers worked. He’d studied it for more than ten years, and he knew that the women were desperate and that help was basically non-existent.
He was actually working on a PhD in criminology at the time, with a dissertation called “Homicide in an Industrial City.” But the homicide…was him.
He hunted three women with a crossbow, cut them apart in his bathtub, ate pieces of them, and then dumped the rest in the river. Upon being arrested, he told people he’d killed “loads” of others.
Explore More
Read: Crossbow Cannibal: 'He killed because it was easy', The Guardian
Listen: Stephen Griffiths, The Crossbow Cannibal, What Makes a Killer
Watch: The Crossbow Cannibal | The Case of Stephen Griffiths, Coffeehouse Crime
From the Headlines
Livestream: Jen McCabe faces questioning from Karen Read’s lawyers, Boston.com
Police return to home of suspect in 4 Gilgo Beach murders, NBC News
Gary Allen Srery: US predator tied to 4 murders and counting in Canada while running from feds, Fox News
After 11 years, mystery still surrounds disappearance of Nicholson man Josh Adams, Athens Banner-Herald
Police offer $500k reward to help solve mystery of pregnant mum's 1998 murder, 9News
Court documents say bodies of murdered Kansas women found in freezer, KFOR
Years after a Hillsborough deputy murder-suicide, a family wants reform, Tampa Bay Times
B.C. serial killer Robert Pickton savagely attacked in prison, clinging to life, Victoria Times Colonist
What to Read & Stream
Here's How Producers Choose Cases Featured on Snapped — and How It's Evolved Over the Years, Oxygen
‘Longlegs’ Trailer: Maika Monroe Investigates a Serial Killer with a Terrifying Occult Tie, IndieWire
Meet the unlikely forensic scientists breaking new ground with their true crime podcast Grave Secrets, Huddersfield Hub
BBC 5 Live’s Gangster podcast returns with the unsolved murder of North-East hardman Viv Graham, BBC
Lifetime Adds Pair of True-Crime Movies to Summer Slate (Exclusive), The Hollywood Reporter
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