On this date in 1907, John Wayne, an actor who came to epitomize the American West, is born in Winterset, Iowa. Born Marion Michael Morrison, Wayne’s family moved to Glendale, California, when he was six years old. As a teen, he rose at four in the morning to deliver newspapers, and after school he played football and made deliveries for local stores. When he graduated from high school, he hoped to attend the U.S. Naval Academy. However, after the school rejected him, he accepted a full scholarship to play football at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

In the summer of 1926, Wayne’s football coach found him a job as an assistant prop man on the set of a movie directed by John Ford. Ford started to use Wayne as an extra, and he eventually began to trust him with some larger roles. In 1930, Ford recommended Wayne for Fox’s epic Western The Big Trail. Wayne won the part, but the movie did poorly, and Fox let his contract lapse. During the next decade, Wayne worked tirelessly in countless low-budget western films, sharpening his talents and developing a distinct persona for his cowboy characters. Finally, his old mentor John Ford gave Wayne his big break, casting him in his brilliant 1939 western, Stagecoach. Wayne played the role of Ringo Kid, and he imbued the character with the essential traits that would inform nearly all of his subsequent screen roles: a tough and clear-eyed honesty, unquestioning valor, and a laconic, almost plodding manner.

After Stagecoach, Wayne’s career took off. Among the dozens of Westerns he appeared in—many of them directed by Ford-were memorable classics like Tall in the Saddle (1944), Red River (1948), Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949), Rio Bravo (1959), and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). In all these films, Wayne embodied the simple, and perhaps simplistic, cowboy values of decency, honesty, and integrity. Besides Westerns, Wayne also acted in war films. It was a small leap from the valorous cowboy or cavalry soldier to the brave WWII fighters of films like Sands of Iwo Jima (1949) and Flying Leathernecks (1951). Deeply conservative in his politics, Wayne also used his 1968 film, The Green Berets, to express his support of the American government’s war in Vietnam.

By the late 1960s, some Americans had tired of Wayne and his simplistically masculine and patriotic characters. Increasingly, western movies were rejecting the simple black-and-white moral codes championed by Wayne and replacing them with a more complex and tragic view of the American West. However, Wayne proved more adaptable than many expected. In his Oscar-winning role in True Grit (1969), he began to escape the narrow confines of his own good-guy image. His final film, The Shootist (1976), won over even his most severe critics. Wayne—who was himself battling lung cancer—played a dying gunfighter whose moral codes and principles no longer fit in a changing world. Three years later, Wayne died of cancer. To this day, public polls identify him as one of the most popular actors of all time.

On this date in 1977, 20th Century Fox releases George Lucas’ space odyssey Star Wars. After Lucas’ second feature film, American Graffiti (1973), became a hit, Fox agreed to put up $9.5 million for the writer-director’s next project. After four years in production, including location shots in Tunisia and Death Valley, California, Star Wars was ready for its release. Its relatively unknown cast featured Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker, who teams with the roguish Han Solo (Harrison Ford) to rescue Princess Leia (Carrie Fisher) from captivity on a space station commanded by the menacing Darth Vader (voiced by James Earl Jones). The alien creatures, massive space station, elaborate space battles and other special effects came courtesy of Lucas’ company, Industrial Light and Magic.

Though Fox released Star Wars in only 42 theaters, it primed its target audience of science-fiction fans with a massive publicity campaign. By the end of its first week, the film had made $3 million, and by the end of the summer it would rake in some $100 million. Adjusting for inflation, its box-office haul was second only to Gone with the Wind. In addition to its commercial success, Star Wars was well received by critics and was nominated for 10 Academy Awards, including Best Picture. It won in six categories, mostly technical, and received an additional Oscar for Special Achievement in Sound Editing.

The success of Star Wars was credited with reviving the science-fiction film genre, which had previously been considered highly unprofitable, and–along with Steven Spielberg’s 1975 hit Jaws–with introducing the concept of the summer blockbuster. It also sparked a Hollywood trend away from smaller films and toward big-budget action movies targeted at young audiences. Lucas would follow up on the success of his hit movie with two sequels, The Empire Strikes Back (1980) and Return of the Jedi (1983), fueling a huge marketing juggernaut that included clothing, toys, videos and other merchandise. The popularity of the Star Wars franchise lasted well into the 1990s, and was encouraged by a theatrical re-release of the trilogy in 1997.

Starting in the late 1990s, Lucas released a new series of Star Wars movies, set in a time period before the original trilogy and featuring a new, younger cast (notably Ewan McGregor, Natalie Portman and Hayden Christensen) and an updated arsenal of special-effects technology. Though the three newer films–Stars Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace (1999), Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones (2002), and Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith (2005)–were all huge-box office hits, they failed to match the critical acclaim garnered by the original series.

On this date in 1863, the good citizens of Bannack, Montana, elect Henry Plummer as their new sheriff, not realizing he is a hardened outlaw who will use his office to rob and murder them. Born and reared in Maine, Plummer went west in 1852 and settled in the California gold mining town of Nevada City. There he opened a bakery and became active in the Democratic Party. Well-spoken, friendly, and ambitious, Plummer won election to sheriff in 1856 and performed well enough to win re-election the following year. Later in 1857, however, Plummer suffered two setbacks. First, he lost his bid to win a seat on the California legislature. Then he was convicted of second-degree murder for killing an unarmed man in the line of duty. Plummer claimed he had acted in self-defense, but the jury apparently believed witnesses who said the true motive lay in an affair he was having with the murdered man’s wife.

Plummer served six months in San Quentin prison before the governor pardoned him. When he returned to Nevada City, he won reappointment as an assistant marshal. In 1861, however, he fatally wounded a man in a whorehouse brawl and fled to avoid prosecution. During the next several years, he wandered through the gold country of Nevada and Idaho. Eventually, he took up with a band of desperados who were robbing and killing miners in Idaho. When a blunt and brave saloonkeeper named Patrick Ford began to voice suspicions about Plummer, the outlaw arranged for him to be killed in a shootout. Misgivings about Plummer continued to grow, however, and he fled once more.

When Plummer arrived in Bannack, Montana, in October 1862, the people of the booming little mining town knew nothing of his record. With the Idaho gold fields beginning to give out, many of Plummer’s old partners in crime followed him to Montana. Plummer quickly reorganized his gang and called the motley band “The Innocents.” Skillfully maintaining his public role as an honest citizen, Plummer then managed to convince 307 inhabitants of Bannack to elect him sheriff in May of 1863.

Plummer’s office of sheriff was the perfect cover for operating an effective and deadly criminal ring. Plummer provided his henchmen with information on the movements of gold shipments and ensured that they avoided capture. During the next six months, road agents ruthlessly terrorized the people of Bannack and the nearby town of Virginia City. To the dismay of the townspeople, Sheriff Plummer seemed unable to stop them. After more than 100 people were robbed or murdered, the settlers organized a vigilance committee of nearly 2,000 members in December 1863.

The Montana vigilantes destroyed Plummer and his gang in a surprisingly short time. Among their first victims was Erastus “Red” Yeager, who revealed Plummer’s complicity and the names of the other gang leaders before he was hanged. Early on a bitterly cold Sunday morning, January 10, 1864, the vigilantes arrested Plummer and two of his lieutenants. While his cronies swore and resisted, Plummer reportedly wept and begged to be spared, but to no avail. All three men were hanged at once on a Bannack gallows Sheriff Plummer had prepared for another. The vigilantes rode away, “leaving the corpses,” as one contemporary wrote, “stiffening in the icy blast.” By spring, all of Plummer’s Innocents were either dead or departed.

On this date in 1934, famed fugitives Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker are killed in a police ambush near Sailes, Louisiana. A contingent of officers from Texas and Louisiana set up along the highway, waiting for Bonnie and Clyde to appear, and then unloaded a two-minute fusillade of 167 bullets at their car, killing the criminal couple. Bonnie Parker was 19 years old when she met Clyde Barrow while visiting her husband in a Texas jail. Barrow, serving time for burglary, obviously made quite an impression on Parker, because she smuggled a gun, taped to her thigh, into prison to help him escape. He was eventually caught in Ohio and brought back to prison. When a personal appeal from his mother to the Texas governor earned his release in 1932, he vowed never to return.

Bonnie and Clyde teamed up shortly thereafter. After Bonnie was caught stealing a car, she had to spend three months in prison, while Clyde went on a robbery spree. He then killed a sheriff and deputy at a barn dance in Oklahoma. In the fall of 1932, the pair spent their time carrying out small-time robberies throughout Texas and Oklahoma. At one such robbery, they picked up W. D. Jones, a gas station attendant, who joined their team for the next 18 months. Buck Barrow, Clyde’s brother who was recently pardoned by the new Texas governor, Ma Ferguson, also joined the gang.

For some reason, the media latched onto Bonnie and Clyde. The pair loved the attention, posing for snapshots with their arsenal of weapons. In early 1934, they barely escaped a trap in Missouri, for snapshots with their arsenal of weapons. In early 1934, they barely escaped a trap in Missouri, killing two lawmen in the ensuing shootout. Buck and his wife, Blanche, were shot and captured, but Buck died from his wounds. Texas Ranger Frank Hamer finally caught up with Bonnie and Clyde in May, after tracking them for more than three months. Today, Bonnie and Clyde have an unwarranted reputation as charming Robin Hoods, mostly due to the sympathetic personalities portrayed in the 1967 classic movie Bonnie and Clyde, starring Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway.

On this date in 1701, British privateer William Kidd, popularly known as Captain Kidd, is hanged for piracy and murder. Born in Strathclyde, Scotland, Kidd established himself as a sea captain before settling in New York in 1690, where he bought property and married. At various times he was commissioned by New York and other American colonies to rid the coast of enemy privateers. In 1695, while on a trip to London, the recently appointed governor of New York commissioned him to defend English ships from pirates in the Red Sea. In 1696, Kidd sailed to New York aboard the Adventure Galley, enlisted men for the mission, and set sail for the Indian Ocean. The expedition met with little success and failed to capture a major prize until February 1698, when the Quedagh Merchant, an Indian vessel allegedly sailing under a French pass, was taken. Word of Kidd’s capture of the boat, which was loaded with gold, jewels, silk, sugar, and guns, aroused significant controversy in Britain, as the ship had an English captain.

Suspicions that he had turned to piracy were apparently confirmed when he sailed to St. Mary’s, Madagascar, an infamous pirate haven. From there, he traveled to the West Indies on the Quedagh Merchant, where he learned of the piracy charges against him. Intending to clear his name, he sailed to New York and delivered himself to the colonial authorities, claiming that the vessels he had attacked were lawful prizes. He was arrested and taken to London. In 1701, he was tried on five charges of piracy and one charge of murdering a crewman. The Tories used the trial as a political opportunity to embarrass his Whig sponsors, and the latter chose to give up Kidd as a scapegoat rather than back his possibly correct claims to legitimacy. Convicted on all counts, he was executed by hanging on May 23, 1701. In later years, a colorful legend grew up around the story of William Kidd, including reports of lost buried treasure that fortune seekers have pursued for centuries.

Murder & Mayhem 52 Crimes that Shocked Early California 1849-1949 was named the WINNER of the 2012 JPX Media International Book Awards in the Non-Fiction/ True Crime category

http://www.internationalbookawards.com/2012awardannouncement.html

On this date in 1924, fourteen-year-old Bobbie Franks is abducted from a Chicago, Illinois, street and killed in what later proves to be one of the most fascinating murders in American history.

The killers, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, were extremely wealthy and intelligent teenagers whose sole motive for killing Franks was the desire to commit the “perfect crime.” Leopold, who graduated from the University of Chicago at age 18, spoke nine languages and had an IQ of 200, but purportedly had perverse sexual desires. Loeb, also unusually gifted, graduated from college at 17 and was fascinated with criminal psychology. The two made a highly unusual pact: Loeb, who was a homosexual, agreed to participate in Leopold’s eccentric sexual practices in return for Leopold’s cooperation with his criminal endeavors. Both were convinced that their intelligence and social privilege exempted them from the laws that bound other people. In 1924, the pair began to put this maxim to the test by planning to commit a perfect murder. They each established false identities and began rehearsing the kidnapping and murder over and over. Loeb stabbed Bobbie Franks (who was actually his distant cousin) several times in the backseat of a rented car as Leopold drove through Chicago’s heavy traffic. After Franks bled to death on the floor of the car, Leopold and Loeb threw his body in a previously scouted swamp and then disposed of the other evidence in various locations. In an attempt to throw police off their trail, they sent a ransom note demanding $10,000 to Franks’ wealthy father.

But Leopold and Loeb had made a couple of key mistakes. First, the body, which was poorly hidden, was discovered the next day. This prompted an immediate search for the killers, which Loeb himself joined. The typewriter used to type the ransom note was recovered from a lake and, more important, a pair of glasses was found near Franks’ body. When the glasses were traced to Loeb’s optometrist, police learned that the optometrist had only written three such prescriptions. Two were immediately accounted for and the third belonged to Nathan Leopold, who calmly told detectives that he must have dropped them while bird hunting earlier in the week. This explanation might have proved sufficient, but reporters covering the case soon discovered other letters from Leopold that matched the ransom note. When confronted with this evidence, Leopold and Loeb both confessed.

Clarence Darrow agreed to defend Leopold, and the trial soon became a national sensation. Darrow, who didn’t argue the boys’ innocence, directed one of his most famous orations against the death penalty itself. The judge was swayed and imposed life sentences. Apparently unsatisfied with the attorney’s work, Leopold’s father later reneged on his contract to pay Darrow. In January 1936, a fellow inmate killed Loeb in a bloody razor fight in the prison’s shower. Leopold was released on parole in 1958 with help from noted poet Carl Sandburg, who testified on his behalf. He lived out the rest of his life in Puerto Rico, where he died in 1971.

On this date in 2005, ex-teacher Mary Kay Letourneau marries her former victim and the father of two of her children, Vili Fualaau. Just nine months earlier, Letourneau had been released from prison after serving a seven-and-a-half year sentence for raping Fualaau. Letourneau first met Fualaau when she was a teacher at Shorewood Elementary School, in the Seattle suburb of Burien, Washington, and he was a second-grader. During the summer of 1996, Letourneau, then 34 and a married mother of four, began a sexual relationship with her former sixth-grade student, then 12. The relationship was eventually discovered and in February 1997, Letourneau was arrested for rape. In May, the former teacher, who was born Mary Katherine Schmitz in California in 1962, gave birth to the couple’s first child, a daughter named Audrey. That August, Letourneau pled guilty to two counts of second-degree child rape. Judge Linda Lau of King County Superior Court showed Letourneau leniency by suspending her 89-month sentence and the former teacher was ordered to serve six months in jail, attend a treatment program and have no contact with Fualaau and her case sparked tabloid frenzy as well as a national debate over whether female sex offenders are treated differently than men who commit similar crimes.

On February 3, 1998, after being released from jail in six months, Letourneau was discovered in a parked car with Fualaau and arrested for violating the conditions of her suspended sentence. Investigators found a large amount of cash in the vehicle, along with a passport and some baby clothes, indicating that the couple might have been planning to flee the area with their young daughter. Three days later, on February 6, Judge Lau reinstated Letourneau’s original sentence and sent her back to prison. In October, Letourneau gave birth to her second child with Fualaau, a daughter named Alexis. The children were raised by Fualaau’s mother while Letourneau remained in prison. Fualaau and his mother, Soona, later sued the Highline School District and the city of Des Moines, Washington, for over $2 million, claiming police and school officials didn’t do enough to protect Vili. In May 2002, a jury ruled the Fualaaus were not entitled to any money.

In August 2004, Letourneau was released from prison, and a judge lifted a ban prohibiting her from contacting Fualaau, by then an adult. On this day in 2005, Letourneau and Fualaau wed, amid tight security, in a ceremony at the Columbia Winery in Woodinville, Washington, outside Seattle. The couple’s two daughters served as flower girls and Letourneau’s daughter from her first marriage, which lasted from 1984 to 1999, was the maid of honor. The television show Entertainment Tonight negotiated exclusive rights to film the ceremony.

On this date in 1926, Aimee Semple McPherson, a nationally known evangelist, disappears from Venice Beach in Los Angeles, California. Police dispatched planes and ships in an effort to find her, but she was nowhere to be found. Authorities later discovered that radio announcer Kenneth Ormiston, a friend of McPherson, had also vanished. McPherson was the Billy Graham of her time. In 1923, she opened Angelus Temple in Los Angeles, where she consistently amassed overflowing crowds. McPherson claimed to have faith-healing abilities and put on wonderfully entertaining shows for the public. Because of her religious nature, McPherson’s relationship with Ormiston created something of a scandal in 1925, and their disappearance in 1926 made headlines across the country. A month later, McPherson turned up in Agua Prieta, New Mexico, with a wild tale of being kidnapped, but reporter’s quickly uncovered information to prove that she had been with Ormiston the entire time. Although obstruction of justice charges were filed against her, they were later dropped, allegedly because McPherson came up with $30,000 to appease law enforcement officials. McPherson attempted a comeback evangelism tour after the scandal had died down, but it flopped and she slowly faded from the public’s memory.

On this day in 1929, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences hands out its first awards, at a dinner party for around 250 people held in the Blossom Room of the Roosevelt Hotel in Hollywood, California. The brainchild of Louis B. Mayer, head of the powerful MGM film studio, the Academy was organized in May 1927 as a non-profit organization dedicated to the advancement and improvement of the film industry. Its first president and the host of the May 1929 ceremony was the actor Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. Unlike today, the winners of the first Oscars–as the coveted gold-plated statuettes later became known–were announced before the awards ceremony itself.

At the time of the first Oscar ceremony, sound had just been introduced into film. The Warner Bros. movie The Jazz Singer–one of the first “talkies”–was not allowed to compete for Best Picture because the Academy decided it was unfair to let movies with sound compete with silent films. The first official Best Picture winner (and the only silent film to win Best Picture) was Wings, directed by William Wellman. The most expensive movie of its time, with a budget of $2 million, the movie told the story of two World War I pilots who fall for the same woman. Another film, F.W. Murnau’s epic Sunrise, was considered a dual winner for the best film of the year. German actor Emil Jannings won the Best Actor honor for his roles in The Last Command and The Way of All Flesh, while 22-year-old Janet Gaynor was the only female winner. After receiving three out of the five Best Actress nods, she won for all three roles, in Seventh Heaven, Street Angel and Sunrise.

A special honorary award was presented to Charlie Chaplin. Originally a nominee for Best Actor, Best Writer and Best Comedy Director for The Circus, Chaplin was removed from these categories so he could receive the special award, a change that some attributed to his unpopularity in Hollywood. It was the last Oscar the Hollywood maverick would receive until another honorary award in 1971.

The Academy officially began using the nickname Oscar for its awards in 1939; a popular but unconfirmed story about the source of the name holds that Academy executive director Margaret Herrick remarked that the statuette looked like her Uncle Oscar. Since 1942, the results of the secret ballot voting have been announced during the live-broadcast Academy Awards ceremony using the sealed-envelope system. The suspense–not to mention the red-carpet arrival of nominees and other stars wearing their most beautiful or outrageous evening wear–continues to draw international attention to the film industry’s biggest night of the year.

On this date in 1856, angered by the shooting of a prominent journalist, San Franciscans form their second vigilance committee to combat lawlessness. The need for vigilance committees in San Francisco was obvious. Only two years after gold was discovered at Sutter’s Mill in 1848, San Francisco had grown from a sleepy little village with 900 inhabitants to a booming metropolis with more than 200,000 residents. The sudden influx of people overwhelmed the city. Harried law enforcement officials found it nearly impossible to maintain law and order, and chaos was common in the streets, which were lined with saloons and gambling parlors. Attracted by the promise of gold, marauding bands of Australian criminals called “Sydney ducks” robbed and extorted the people of San Francisco with near impunity.

San Franciscans formed their first vigilance committee in 1851. About 200 vigilantes enrolled, most of them from the elite professional and merchant class of the city. They had headquarters along Battery Street, where they could temporarily imprison criminals, and the ringing of the city’s fire bell would summon the vigilantes to action. A handful of men who were found guilty of serious crimes like murder were hanged from a nearby derrick normally used to haul freight into the second story of a warehouse. More commonly, though, the vigilantes simply deported criminals like the “Sydney ducks” back to their homelands.

Whether due to the vigilante actions or because conventional law enforcement became more effective, things eventually quieted down in San Francisco and the first vigilance committee disbanded. In 1856, however, a rigged election put an Irish-Catholic politician named James P. Casey on the city board of supervisors. James King, a crusading editor of the Daily Evening Bulletin, accused Casey of being involved in criminal activity in the city. On May 14, 1856, Casey confronted King in the street and fatally wounded him with a Colt navy revolver. The next day, angry San Franciscans created the second vigilance committee. This time, however, they could not claim that the city government was not enforcing the law–the sheriff had already arrested Casey and put him in the county jail pending trial. Acting more like a raging mob than an instrument of justice, 500 vigilantes surrounded the county jail and removed Casey from the sheriff’s custody on May 18. After a short but reasonably fair trial, they hanged him.

Some historians have argued that the second vigilance committee was less interested in suppressing crime than in attacking its political enemies. Casey’s election signaled a shift in power to the dominant faction of recently immigrated Irish-Catholic Democrats. The vigilantes, who were largely native-born Protestants, reasserted their control by arresting and exiling their political opponents from the city. As before, they hanged several men. Regardless of the vigilantes’ true motives, a number of Irish Catholic leaders did leave the city and the Protestant elite managed to regain control of the government. Late in 1856, the vigilance committee formally disbanded and never again became active.