Above is an August 1962 Master Detective with great cover art of a lady in red being taken into custody, and clearly this isn’t a Wall Street bank she works at, because at those taxpayers’ money is free for the taking. Since it’s getting toward the best part of baseball season over in the U.S., the blurb that intrigued us the most on this cover was the final one, telling us that Tito Francona—father of current Boston Red Sox manager Terry Francona—was somehow involved in solving a murder. We’re told that he “belted a homer that led Tucson police to a killer”, and we were expecting the story to be some kind of convoluted mystery. But no—the blurb is meant literally. Francona hit a home run during a Cleveland Indians spring training game in Tucson and the ball actually landed next to a body that was hidden in brush beyond the right field wall. The body belonged to a fugitive who was wanted for the murder of his unfaithful wife’s lover. He had chosen that unlikely spot to commit suicide by shooting himself. Case solved. So Francona didn’t exactly enter stage right and help unravel a Da Vinci Code style puzzle, but the story is still an interesting historical footnote. Baseball is the type of sport where players and fans tend to believe in curses, so maybe a purification ceremony where the body was found would help the Indians finally win a World Series. It’s been sixty-two years and counting. 

In Los Angeles on Friday, two women working in the famous Glen-Donald building in the city’s MacArthur Park neighborhood found the remains of two infants in a locked steamer trunk. One infant was in embryonic form, while the other had reached full term; one was wrapped in a 1933 edition of the Los Angeles Times, while the other was wrapped in a 1935 edition. The trunk was labeled Jean M. Barrie, and contained postcards addressed to her, as well as other items, including ticket stubs to the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics. But who, exactly, Jean M. Barrie was, is unclear. The papers in the trunk indicate she may have been a nurse who lived in Los Angeles around that time, but the Glen-Donald building would have been an unlikely residence for such a person because it was a ritzy address in the 1930s, a place where galas were staged in a grand basement ballroom. However, there was at least one other Jean M. Barrie alive in the 1930s—the woman you see in the above ad from a 1918 issue of The Lyceum Magazine. This Jean M. Barrie was a relative of Peter Pan author James M. Barrie and a semi-famous storyteller in her own right. Authorities are pursuing the lead because the trunk contained a copy of Peter Pan and a membership certificate for the Peter Pan Woodland Club, located in Big Bear, California. It also seems much more likely for this second Jean M. Barrie to have lived at the Glen-Donald building, however it’s unclear whether she ever lived in Los Angeles at all. Only a detailed investigation will tell which woman—the anonymous nurse or the well-known storyteller—owned the steamer trunk. In the meantime, LAPD pathologists are examining the infants in an effort to determine why they never got to live their lives. 

In Phuket, Thailand—a place known as one of the hellraising capitals of the world—a manhunt is underway after a British kickboxer killed an American marine following a fight at a nightspot called the Freedom Bar. The alleged killer is 28-year-old Lee Aldhouse, above left, who had lived in the Phuket area for about four years. According to witnesses, Aldhouse instigated an altercation with Dashawn Longfellow, 23, who was in the bar visiting a female employee. The fight between the two foreigners—who are “falang” in Thai parlance—ended with Longfellow as the victor, and shortly thereafter he and the employee left the bar. Aldhouse then went into a nearby 7-11 store, where he was caught on security cam (above) either stealing or buying a knife. He immediately went to Longfellow’s apartment, knocked on the door, and allegedly stabbed the marine to death in front of a witness. Official accounts stop there, but unofficial accounts posted on a Phuket-based internet forum describe Aldhouse as a well-known troublemaker, someone police were well aware of due to previous run-ins and who locals avoided because of his violent temper and knowledge of Muay Thai kickboxing. He had fought professionally, and considered himself a disciple of the art. At least one witness described Aldhouse as enraged to have lost a fight to someone with no professional ring experience, and suggested that, for a man with such an erratic nature, embarrassment was motive enough for murder. The killing is one of several so far this year in Phuket involving falang, including one just last month in which a former U.S. Navy officer killed a local girl and disposed of her body by stuffing it in a travel bag and dumping it by a deserted roadside. The expat propensity toward violence is a constant source of friction in Thai resort towns, and the Aldhouse/Longfellow murder has only served to ratchet up tensions even more. Police are scouring the Phuket area for Aldhouse, but so far haven’t located him. 

At trial Martin pleaded insanity. The jury wasn’t buying. Rhonda Belle Martin was executed in October 1957 in the Alabama electric chair. As to whether she was truly insane like the aunts in Arsenic and Old Lace, we’ll never know, but her third husband, an orderly at a Veteran’s hospital that housed hundreds of insane people, said she wasn’t. “Rhonda Belle, she ain’t no good-looking woman,” he said, “but she’s got personality and she’s smart.” In the end though, she wasn’t smart enough to elude detection. And as far as her magnetic personality went—when she was buried there were fewer people at her graveside than she had killed.     

There hasn’t been much real-world pulp of late, but here’s an interesting item: yesterday Juan-Carlos Cruz—once the host of a Food Network weight loss show entitled “Calorie Commando” and the author of a low calorie cookbook—pleaded not guilty to attempting to hire three Los Angeles area homeless men to kill his wife of twenty years. Cruz was arrested Thursday after police confirmed the plot by recording a meeting between Cruz and the would-be killers at a Santa Monica dog park. The men told officers that Cruz offered them $1,000 if they would ambush his wife and cut her throat. When one of them objected to that as too public a murder, Cruz allegedly offered the use of an empty apartment, even demonstrating how to avoid video monitors while slipping into the building. He also allegedly supplied box cutters, gloves, a cell phone for keeping in contact, and a down payment consisting of the halves of ten $100 bills. As of right now the motive for the plot is unclear. If convicted, Cruz faces life behind bars, where he’ll find an entirely new recipe for keeping his weight down—heaping spoonfuls of unidentifiable prison slop. 

We found two nice covers for Murderer's Holiday by Donald Henderson Clarke, one from the original hardback (left), and one from the Avon paperback published in 1951. Clarke is not what you'd call well-known now, but during his heyday of the 1930s and 1940s he was one of the most popular pulp authors, writing a number of risqué thrillers, and seeing five of them adapted for the screen. He was born in the Northeast and became a journalist in New York City, where he socialized with some of Manhattan’s shadier characters, including Arnold “The Brain” Rothstein, who is thought to be the man who fixed the 1919 World Series. Rothstein was murdered in 1928, and the next year Clarke published a biography entitled In the Reign of Rothstein. This was the book that really launched his literary career, leading to bestsellers like Millie and The Impatient Virgin. There isn’t much info on Clarke out there, but we’re going to dig up more.

The Los Angeles Police Department has apolo- gized to the family of Robert Kennedy and pulled from display items of clothing worn by the Senator the night he was shot in L.A. in 1968. The items—a tie, shirt, and jacket stained with blood—had been part of an exhibit hosted at the Palms Casino, and created for the 2010 California Homicide Investigators Assn. Conference.

The Kennedy family claims to have requested the return of Robert Kennedy’s effects more than ten years ago, to no avail, and called the LAPD’s official apology "insufficient." Department spokesmen claim to have been trying merely to put together a professional and educational display, not a “freakshow.” The exhibit does contain crime scene evidence rarely seen in public, including hundreds of photographs dating back as far one hundred years, but it also features sensational items such as the rope used to restrain Sharon Tate the night of her murder, and various O.J. Simpson artifacts.

Asked whether they would agree to the request made by the Kennedy family and return the items—a move that would comply with California state law regarding personal effects of murder victims—a spokeswoman for the L.A. County District Attorney’s office declined to answer in the affirmative about the potentially valuable collection, instead saying only that they were “looking into it.”

Photo of Lee Harvey Oswald on the cover of Life, published today 1964. Some people think this photo is fake. But Dartmouth College professor of computer science Hany Farid weighs in on this convincingly and his conclusion is the photo is legit. Great. Now maybe people can focus entirely on the laughable lone gunman theory. Just saying. 

Despite Shelton's takedown of two highly respected medical figures, there has been surprisingly little resistance to his assertions so far. Researchers of the 1700s usually obtained medical specimens from hospitals or morgues, and were known to employ graverobbers as well. But such specimens would have been diseased, aged, or physically damaged, whereas Hunter and Smellie would have needed young, physically fit subjects. According to Shelton, this prompted them to employ henchmen who most likely supplied bodies via “burking,” a technique named after serial killer William Burke, in which a person is slowly suffocated, thus leaving no damage to the cadaver and no detectable signs of foul play to alert police. Shelton's exhaustively researched study allegedly proves that no other method could have produced the steady stream of healthy mothers-to-be Hunter and Smellie desired. When interviewed about his claims by England’s Guardian newspaper, Shelton admitted they were shocking, but quoted Sherlock Holmes: “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, is the truth.”     

It was today in 1947 that Elizabeth Short, aka The Black Dahlia, was found dead in Leimert Park in Los Angeles, sparking a massive investigation that ultimately came up empty. Short’s may be the most famous unsolved murder in Los Angeles history. It’s certainly one of the most grotesque. She had been beaten, mutilated in numerous vicious ways, cut in two, drained of blood, and arranged in an explicit, spread-legged pose. The killer is always thought of as a man. Safe assumption. The crime just screams hatred and fear of women. The poet Robert Burns wrote famously of man’s inhumanity to man, but he could have added that there seems to be a special type of inhumanity reserved for women. Dahlia material fills the web, so we don’t really need to add much more. But we’d have been remiss in not noting this day—after all, pulp would not be the same without poor Elizabeth Short. But her death serves another purpose besides literary inspiration, in our view—it reminds us that murder is the obscenity that trumps all others.