On February 24, 1981, socialite Jean Harris is convicted of murdering Dr. Herman Tarnower, the author of the bestselling The Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet. Harris, the headmistress of an exclusive girls’ school, shot Dr. Tarnower at his Westchester County, New York home on March 10, 1980. Harris claimed that she had been trying to kill herself but that Tarnower was shot when he tried to wrestle the gun away from her.

Harris and Tarnower had been a couple since they met in 1966. However, Tarnower was a notorious womanizer who never followed through on his vague promises to marry the 56-year-old Harris. In the late 1970s, Harris discovered that Tarnower was having an affair with a younger woman. Nonetheless, she assisted him in writing and editing The Complete Scarsdale Medical Diet, which became a surprise sensation, earning Tarnower wealth and fame. However, at the first sign of success he dumped her. Harris drove from her school in Virginia to Tarnower’s home on the eveing of March 10. She used her key to get in and went up to his bedroom with a loaded .32 caliber gun. Harris later claimed that she went there with suicidal intentions. However, the fact that Tarnower was shot four times seemed to contradict her claims. Rather than maintain that she had killed in the heat of the moment, which would have dealt a manslaughter conviction, Harris insisted that the shooting was an accident. Her gamble failed when the jury convicted her of murder and gave her a life sentence. Harris was a model prisoner who used every opportunity to bring attention to the plight of women prisoners. She wrote the well-received They Always Call Us Ladies about the prison system in 1988. Her sentence was commuted by New York governor Mario Cuomo in late 1992. After her release, Harris continued her work on behalf of female prisoners. She died on December 23, 2012.

Michael Thomas Barry is a columnist for www.crimemagazine.com and is the author of numerous books that include Murder and Mayhem 52 Crimes that Shocked Early California, 1849-1949.

On February 20, 1919, Habibullah Khan, the leader of Afghanistan who struggled to keep his country neutral in World War I was assassinated. Habibullah had succeeded his father, Abd-ar-Rahman, as amir in 1901 and immediately began to bring much-needed reforms and modernization to his country. Located between British-held India and Russia, Afghanistan had in the past clashed repeatedly with its neighbors, including two Afghan Wars against Anglo-Indian forces during the 19th century. Many within Afghanistan saw these conflicts as part of the fundamental and necessary defense of Muslims against the encroachments of Christians. Though the British and Russian governments signed a convention in 1907 pledging respect for the territorial integrity of Afghanistan, many Afghans, including Habibullah felt insecure between such powerful neighbors and resented the lack of Afghan representation at the creation of the convention and the effective control Britain still exercised over the country’s foreign affairs due to its active involvement in the region.

Convinced, however, that the continued improvement and modernization of Afghanistan depended on economic assistance from powerful Western countries like Britain, Habibullah maintained his country’s neutrality after the outbreak of World War I, despite pressure from Turkish and other Islamic leaders urging Afghanistan to enter the war against the Allies. By maintaining his country’s neutrality and Afghanistan’s anti-war policy, Habibullah enraged many of his young anti-British countrymen who viewed World War I as a holy war. Many Afghans felt particularly strongly that Habibullah failed to capitalize on the weakness of Russia, which was overtaken by the Bolsheviks in November 1917, by uniting the Muslim peoples of Central Asia and liberating them from non-Muslim rule.

Barely a year after Turkey’s defeat at the hands of the Allies and the end of the war in November 1918, Habibullah’s opponents, angry at what they saw as his betrayal of Muslim interests in favor of pandering to Britain, plotted and carried out his assassination. Habibullah had not declared a successor and after his death, his brother, Nasrullah Khan, held the throne for six days before being deposed by the Afghan nobility in favor of Habibullah’s third son, Amanullah Khan. Determined to extract Afghanistan completely from Britain’s influence, Amanullah declared war on Great Britain in May 1919, beginning what became known as the Third Afghan War. The British, preoccupied by India’s burgeoning independence movement, negotiated a peace treaty with Afghanistan the following August at Rawalpindi, recognizing Afghanistan’s status as a sovereign and independent state.

Michael Thomas Barry is a columnist for www.crimemagazine.com and is the author of numerous books that include Murder and Mayhem 52 Crimes that Shocked Early California, 1849-1949.

On February 18, 2011, Green River serial killer Gary Leon Ridgway pleads guilty to the murder of his 49th victim, 20 year-old Rebecca Marrero. Marrero’s remains were found in December 2010, decades after she was murdered, and left in a ravine near Auburn, Washington. After entering his guilty plea, Ridgway received his 49th life sentence without the possibility of parole and returned to the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla, where he was already serving 48 consecutive life sentences, one for each of the other women he killed.

In the 1980s, residents of Washington State were terrorized by the so-called Green River Killer, whose first five victims’ bodies were discovered in or near the Green River in King County in the summer of 1982. The strangled bodies of more victims soon appeared around King County; all were women, most of them young and many of them prostitutes, runaways and drug users. Ridgway, became a suspect after one of the victims was spotted getting into his truck. However, when questioned by police, he denied any knowledge of the slayings and passed a 1984 polygraph test. In 2001, he was finally arrested after DNA evidence connected him to some of the killings.

In a controversial 2003 plea deal, Ridgway admitted to the murders of 48 women between 1982 and 1998, and prosecutors agreed not to seek the death penalty against him if he cooperated with police in locating the remains of dozens of his victims. Ridgway reportedly claimed to have murdered more than 60 women in King County, although authorities at the time could only find sufficient evidence to link him to the 48 slayings. Ridgway told authorities he began murdering prostitutes “because he hated them, didn’t want to pay them for sex, and because he knew he could kill as many as he wanted without getting caught.” The serial killer said he picked up women off the street, strangled them in his home or truck, and meticulously hid their bodies near natural landmarks in an attempt to keep track of them. At the time of his 49th conviction, Ridgway had been linked to more murders than any other convicted serial killer in U.S. history.

Michael Thomas Barry is a columnist for www.crimemagazine.com and is the author of numerous books that include Murder and Mayhem 52 Crimes that Shocked Early California, 1849-1949.

On February 17, 1906, union leaders Bill Hayward, Charles Moyer, and George Pettibone are taken into custody by Idaho authorities and the Pinkerton Detective Agency. They are put on a special train in Denver, Colorado, but the officials had no legal right to arrest the three union executives in Colorado. Idaho had resorted to this strategy in an attempt to bring the union leaders to justice for the assassination of former governor Frank Steunenberg. On December 30, 1905, a powerful bomb affixed to Steunenberg’s front gate exploded and killed him as he was returning to his home in Caldwell, Idaho. The former governor was a target for union miners after his role in breaking a strike in Coeur d’Alene years earlier.

In order to solve the crime, Idaho called in the Pinkerton Agency and the country’s most famous private detective, James McParland. He was the man responsible for bringing down the Molly McGuire’s, a secret Irish society from Pennsylvania’s mining district. Through a combination of trickery and intimidation, McParland got witnesses to implicate Bill Hayward, Charles Moyer, the president of the Western Federation of Miners, and others in the plot to kill Steunenberg. However, these men were in Colorado, where local authorities were friendly to the unions and would not extradite them. Government officials in Idaho, including the current governor and chief justice, sanctioned a plan to kidnap Hayward, Moyer, and Pettibone so that they could be put on trial in Caldwell. Despite the blatant illegality of their operation, the union leaders lost their appeals in federal court and were forced to stay in Idaho to be charged with conspiracy to commit murder. Clarence Darrow, who was one of the country’s foremost defender of liberal causes, was brought in to defend the case. It was the first “Trial of the Century,” drawing national media attention and celebrity attendees. Darrow made an impassioned 11-hour closing argument that mercilessly attacked the prosecution witnesses, and the jury acquitted all three men.

Michael Thomas Barry is a columnist for www.crimemagazine.com and is the author of numerous books that include Murder and Mayhem 52 Crimes that Shocked Early California, 1849-1949.

On February 14, 1929, four men dressed as police officers enter gangster Bugs Moran’s headquarters on North Clark Street in Chicago, line seven of Moran’s henchmen against a wall, and shoot them to death. The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, as it is now called, was the culmination of a gang war between arch rivals Al Capone and Bugs Moran.

George “Bugs” Moran was a career criminal who ran the North Side gang in Chicago during the bootlegging era of the 1920s. He fought bitterly with “Scarface” Al Capone for control of smuggling and trafficking operations in the Windy City. Throughout the 1920s, both survived several attempted murders. On one notorious occasion, Moran and his associates drove six cars past a hotel in Cicero, Illinois, where Capone and his associates were having lunch and showered the building with more than 1,000 bullets. A $50,000 bounty on Capone’s head was the final straw for the gangster. He ordered that Moran’s gang be destroyed. On February 14, a delivery of bootleg whiskey was expected at Moran’s headquarters. But Moran was late and happened to see police officers entering his establishment. Moran waited outside, thinking that his gunmen inside were being arrested in a raid. However, the disguised assassins were actually killing the seven men inside. The murdered men included Moran’s best killers, Frank and Pete Gusenberg. Reportedly Frank was still alive when real officers appeared on the scene. When asked who had shot him, the mortally wounded Gusenberg kept his code of silence, responding, “No one, nobody shot me.” The St. Valentine’s Day Massacre actually proved to be the last confrontation for both Capone and Moran. Capone was jailed in 1931 and Moran lost so many important men that he could no longer control his territory. On the seventh anniversary of the massacre, Jack McGurn, one of the Valentine’s Day hit men, was killed in a crowded bowling alley with a burst of machine-gun fire. McGurn’s killer remains unidentified, but it was most likely Moran, though he was never charged with the murder. Moran was relegated to small-time robberies until he was sent to jail in 1946. He died in Leavenworth Federal Prison in 1957 of lung cancer.

Michael Thomas Barry is a columnist for www.crimemagazine.com and is the author of numerous books that include Murder and Mayhem 52 Crimes that Shocked Early California, 1849-1949.

On February 12, 1976, actor Sal Mineo is stabbed to death in Hollywood, California. Mineo was parking his car behind his apartment when neighbors heard his cries for help. Some described a white man with brown hair fleeing the scene. By the time they reached Mineo, he was almost dead from a deep wound to his chest. He died minutes later. Sal Mineo was a famous teen actor in the 1950s. He co-starred with James Dean in both Rebel without a Cause and Giant. The transition to adult roles did not come easily for him, but he later appeared in films such as The Longest Day and Escape from the Planet of the Apes, and consistently performed guest spots on television series. On the night he was killed, Mineo was returning from rehearsing for a play. For two years, the police searched in vain for clues to the killer’s identity. At first, they suspected that Mineo’s work for prison reform had put him in contact with a dangerous ex-con. Then their focus shifted to Mineo’s personal life. Investigators had discovered that his home was filled with pictures of nude men, but the homosexual pornography also failed to turn up any leads. Then, out of the blue, Michigan authorities reported that Lionel Williams, arrested on bad check charges, was bragging to everyone that he had killed Mineo. Although he later retracted his stories, at about the same time, his wife back in Los Angeles told police that he had come home the night of the murder drenched in blood. However, there was one major discrepancy, Williams was black with an Afro and all of the eyewitnesses had described the perpetrator as a white man with long brown hair. Fortunately, the police were able to unearth an old photo of Williams in which his hair had been dyed brown and processed so that it was straight and long. In addition, the medical examiner had made a cast of Mineo’s knife wound and police were able to match it to the description of the knife provided by Williams’ wife. Lionel Williams was convicted and given a sentence of life in prison.

Michael Thomas Barry is a columnist for www.crimemagazine.com and is the author of numerous books that include Murder and Mayhem 52 Crimes that Shocked Early California, 1849-1949.

On February 11, 1916, Emma Goldman, a crusader for women’s rights and social justice, is arrested in New York City for lecturing and distributing materials about birth control. She was accused of violating the Comstock Act of 1873, which made it a federal offense to distribute contraceptive devices and information through the mail or across state lines. In addition to advocating for women’s reproductive rights, Goldman, who was later convicted and spent time in jail, was a champion of numerous controversial causes and ideas, including anarchism, free speech and atheism. Nicknamed “Red Emma,” was arrested multiple times for her activist activities.

Goldman was born into a poor Jewish family in Russia in 1869. She fled her homeland as a teenager in 1885 and ended up in Rochester, New York. There she was employed at a factory and became involved in the labor movement, protesting poor working conditions and advocating for unions and an eight-hour workday. She was influenced by the Haymarket Riot in Chicago in 1886, in which a rally organized by anarchist workers turned into a violent confrontation with police. Goldman later relocated to New York City, where she joined the anarchist movement and was romantically linked to anarchist and fellow Russian Alexander Berkman. In 1892, he attempted to kill Henry Clay Frick, the owner of Carnegie Steel, following a strike in Homestead, Pennsylvania. Goldman, who was believed to have known about the plan, was released due to a lack of evidence.

In New York, Goldman spent time working as a nurse and midwife among the poor. Her experiences convinced her that birth control was essential to women improving their lives and achieving economic and sexual equality. Goldman, a skilled writer, editor and orator, spoke publicly about contraception and was a mentor to Margaret Sanger, who founded the organization that would become Planned Parenthood. In addition to advocating for women’s reproductive rights, Goldman was an anti-war crusader. In 1917, she was arrested, along with Berkman, for protesting America’s involvement in World War I and the draft. Both spent two years in prison and were then deported back to Russia. Goldman lived the rest of her life in Russia, Europe and Canada, and died in Toronto in 1940 at age 70. She was buried at the German Waldheim Cemetery, near Chicago, the burial place of the Haymarket anarchists and other political radicals.

Michael Thomas Barry is a columnist for www.crimemagazine.com and is the author of numerous books that include Murder and Mayhem 52 Crimes that Shocked Early California, 1849-1949.

On February 6, 1891, the Dalton Gang attempted their first train robbery near Alila, California. Bob, Emmett, and Grat Dalton were only three of Lewis and Adeleine Dalton’s 10 sons. The brothers grew up on a succession of Oklahoma and Kansas homesteads during the post-Civil War period, when the region was awash in violence lingering from the war and notorious outlaw bands like the James-Younger Gang. Still, the majority of the Dalton boys became law-abiding citizens, and one of the older brothers, Frank, served as a deputy U.S. marshal. Ironically, Frank’s position in law enforcement brought his younger brothers into lives of crime. When Oklahoma whiskey runners murdered Frank in 1887, Grat took Frank’s place as a deputy marshal and recruited Emmett and Bob as assistants. Disillusioned by the fate of their older law-abiding brother, the three Dalton boys showed little respect for the law and began rustling cattle and horses to supplement their income. The brothers soon began to use their official law enforcement powers for their own ends, and in 1888, they killed a man for pursuing Bob’s girlfriend.

By 1890, all three men were discredited as lawmen, though they managed to escape imprisonment. Taking up with some of the same hardcore criminals they had previously sworn to bring to justice, the Daltons decided to expand their criminal operations. Bob and Grat headed to California, leaving Emmett behind in Oklahoma because they felt he was still too young for a life of serious crime. In California, they planned to link up with their brother Bill and become bank and train robbers. The Dalton Gang’s first attempt at train robbery was a fiasco. On February 6, 1891, Bob, Grat, and Bill tried to rob a Southern Pacific train near Alila, California. While Bill kept any passengers from interfering by shooting over their heads, Bob and Grat forced the engineer to show them the location of the cash-carrying express car. When the engineer tried to slip away, one of the brothers shot him in the stomach. Finding the express car on their own, Bob and Grat demanded that the guard inside open the heavy door. The guard refused and began firing down on them from a small spy hole. Frustrated, the brothers finally gave up and rode away. The Daltons would have done well to heed the ominous signs of that first failed robbery, but instead, they returned to Oklahoma, reunited with young Emmett, and began robbing in earnest. A year later, the gang botched another robbery, boldly attempting to rob two Coffeyville, Kansas, banks at the same time. Townspeople caught them in the act and killed Bob, Grat, and two of their gang members. Emmett was seriously wounded and served 14 years in prison. Of all the criminal Dalton brothers, only Emmett lived into old age. Freed from prison in 1907, he married and settled in Los Angeles, where he built a successful career in real estate and contracting.

Michael Thomas Barry is a daily columnist at www.crimemagazine.com and is the author of numerous books that include Murder and Mayhem 52 Crimes that Shocked Early California, 1849-1949.

On February 4, 1974, Patricia Hearst, the 19-year-old granddaughter of publishing icon William Randolph Hearst, is kidnapped from her Berkeley, California apartment. Stephen Weed, Hearst’s fiancé, was beaten unconscious by the two abductors. Soon, a ransom demand came from the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), a radical activist group led by Donald DeFreeze.

DeFreeze had formed the SLA in 1973 after he escaped from prison. About two years before Hearst’s kidnapping, an SLA bomb-making factory had been discovered by the police. On November 6, 1973, the SLA shot and killed Marcus Foster, Oakland’s superintendent of schools, with bullets laced with cyanide. The SLA instructed Patty’s father Randolph Hearst to distribute $70 in food for ever poor person from Santa Rosa to Los Angeles. Hearst agreed to give away $2 million to the poor in Oakland in exchange for his daughter’s release. The Black Muslims, Malcolm X’s former organization, were chosen to manage the food distribution, which turned into a riot when more than 10,000 people showed up and fought for the food. Afterwards, the SLA demanded an additional $6 million giveaway. Hearst refused and they did not release Patty.

The Hearst saga took a strange and unexpected turn two months after the abduction, when the SLA robbed the Hibernia Bank in San Francisco. The surveillance cameras clearly showed that Patty Hearst was one of the machine gun-toting robbers. Soon after followed a taped message from the SLA in which Hearst claimed that she had voluntarily joined the SLA and was now to be known as “Tania.” On May 17, 1974, police were tipped that the SLA leaders were at a Los Angeles home. With 400 police and FBI agents outside the house, a tremendous gun battle broke out. The police threw gas canisters into the house and then shot at them, sparking a fire in which DeFreeze and five other SLA members died. However, Hearst was not inside. She was not found until September 1975. Patty Hearst was put on trial for armed robbery and convicted, despite her claim that she had been coerced, through repeated rape, isolation, and brainwashing, into joining the SLA. Prosecutors believed that she actually orchestrated her own kidnapping because of her prior involvement with one of the SLA members. Despite any real proof of this theory, she was convicted and sent to prison. President Carter commuted Hearst’s sentence after she had served almost two years. Hearst was pardoned by President Clinton in January 2001.

Michael Thomas Barry is a regular columnist for www.crimemagazine.com and is the author of numerous books that include Murder and Mayhem 52 Crimes that Shocked Early California, 1849-1949.

On January 31, 1606, Guy Fawkes, a chief conspirator in the plot to blow up the British Parliament building, jumps to his death moments before his execution for treason in London. On the eve of a general parliamentary session scheduled for November 5, 1605, Sir Thomas Knyvet, a justice of the peace, found Guy Fawkes lurking in a cellar of the Parliament building. Fawkes was detained and the premises thoroughly searched. Nearly two tons of gunpowder were found hidden within the cellar. In his interrogation, Fawkes revealed that he was a participant in an English Catholic conspiracy organized by Robert Catesby to annihilate England’s entire Protestant government, including King James I. The king was to have attended Parliament on November 5th.

Over the next few months, English authorities killed or captured all of the conspirators in the “Gunpowder Plot” but also arrested, tortured, or killed dozens of innocent English Catholics. After a brief trial, Guy Fawkes was sentenced, along with the other surviving chief conspirators, to be hanged, drawn, and quartered in London. On January 30, 1606, the gruesome public executions began in London, and on January 31st Fawkes was called to meet his fate. While climbing to the hanging platform, however, he jumped from the ladder and broke his neck, dying instantly. In remembrance of the Gunpowder Plot, Guy Fawkes Day is celebrated across Great Britain every year on the fifth of November. As dusk falls in the evening, villagers and city dwellers across Britain light bonfires, set off fireworks, and burn an effigy of Guy Fawkes, celebrating his failure to blow up Parliament and James I.

Michael Thomas Barry is a columnist for CrimeMagazine.com and is the author of numerous books that include Murder and Mayhem 52 Crimes that Shocked Early California, 1849-1949.