This two-color cover from Headquarters Detective appeared in March 1958 and features a pose that you see quite a bit on vintage crime magazines—the man standing above a terrorized woman, often with a phallic symbol in hand. We’ve been gathering up some covers in this style and we’ll share what we’ve found pretty soon. This cover is also noteworthy because it reports at bottom left on the last of six murders that occurred in the Chicago area between October 1955 and August 1957. Three boys and three girls ranging from ages eleven to fifteen were stripped, battered, strangled, and in the cases of two of the girls, raped.

But it was the sixth murder that truly horrified already shaken Chicago residents. The killer—and if it was the same killer his violent tendencies were growing—dismembered Judith Anderson and set the body parts afloat in Montrose Harbor in two metal drums. The smaller drum contained the girl’s head, right arm and left hand, the second the rest of her. The head had four bullets in it. Police followed many leads—according to at least one account they investigated 109,000 homes, 40,000 to 50,000 garages and basements, 900 businesses, and 200 boats. They heard countless confessions, all of which turned out to be false—save for possibly one.

Some local fishermen told police that several nights before Anderson’s remains turned up they saw a car on the opposite shore of the harbor. They knew it had backed up to the water because they could see its brake lights. A person they described as well-built got out, opened the trunk of the car and threw something—or several somethings—into the water. When he drove away they noticed that one of his brake lights was out. The detail of the broken light helped generate a suspect, someone with a criminal record and a history of sexual violence, but police were never able to pin the killing on him even though at least one investigator claimed he had confessed. Ultimately police never solved Anderson's murder, or the other five.

Today we have another copy of Myron Fass’s true crime magazine Crime Does Not Pay, with one of its infamous torture covers. We thought the last one was bad, but this time the uncredited artist opts to depict the dreaded blowtorch treatment. This issue is from September 1969, and inside you get stories on Vito Genovese, Elliot Ness, Bugsy Siegel, Abe Hummel, Charles Ponzi, and various other crooks, cops, feds, crooked cops, and crooked feds. Twenty-one scans below, and you can see more gory goodness from Crime Does Not Pay here.

 

It’s amazing how fertile France is for vintage pulp. It’s by far the best hunting ground after the U.S., and that’s true even in smaller cities like Bayonne. For example, Bayonne is a town that we made time to go to for one reason—because we knew of a restaurant that specialized in duck hearts. Afterward, feeling strong like a duck, we strolled the cobbled side streets and stumbled into two vintage bookshops straightaway. Actually, one was a bookshop. The other was an African handicrafts store with two big shelves of printed matter. See what we mean? Even a handicrafts store might have something great. Qui? Police has a vintage feel, but this issue actually dates from 1979, so that makes it modern pulp, the way we categorize things. So what do we know about this mag? Not much. We saw an issue published in February 1947 that was numbered 33, so on a weekly schedule that gives an inception year of 1946, with the first issue hitting newsstands in June. And that’s pretty much the extent of our knowledge. But we’ll find out more. In the meantime check out the inside of this thing. It’s a black, white, and red amalgam of true crime reportage, grainy photography, excellent courtroom art, cartoon humor, and cheesecake. Paging through it conjures all our favorite French words—crime, vengeance, rage, menace, lurid, voyeur. Did you know those were all French words? Well, there you go. You’re well on way to having the tools you need to survive a trip to France. Eighteen scans below.

The above Special Detective-Crime from August 1972 promises tales of thrill-seeking wives and more, but how can we possibly get past the cover? Look at this poor guy. He told his hairstylist to turn him into Rod Stewart but instead she turned him into a Ukrainian field hockey player. The cops are screaming at him to let the woman go, and he’s screaming back that he wants his bangs redone. It’s not going to end well.

Above, a cover of Master Detective from July 1949, inside of which is a story on Ruth Snyder. In March 1927 Snyder garroted her husband with the help of her lover, a corset salesman named Henry Judd Gray. The couple had been after insurance money, but instead they were caught, tried, and sentenced to death by means of electrocution. On the day of the event, which took place at Sing Sing Prison, a photographer named Tom Howard entered the execution chamber as a witness. He was under assignment for the New York Daily News, but was actually based in Chicago, which meant he was unknown to prison authorities in the New York area. That was important, because Howard’s assignment was to illegally take a photo of Ruth Snyder’s execution, which had considerable tabloid value because she would be the first woman put to death at Sing Sing since 1899. Howard was ingeniously prepared—he had strapped a camera to his ankle, and had fed a shutter release up one pant leg to an accessible point inside his suit jacket. At the moment the executioner threw the switch, Howard lifted his pant leg and snapped the blurry photo below, which appeared the next day in the New York Daily News under a huge header that read simply: Dead! The issue was a sensation, the image became iconic, and Howard became nationally famous. 

Above, Front Page Detective with two great cover models that reappear in panel nine below, posing for Stanley Harrison’s exposé “The Story Behind the Texas Girl Racket,” which, as you might guess, has to do with prostitution (specifically, in and around the Fort Worth and Trinity River area). Inside the magazine you find more models posing for more crime stories, a few actual perp shots, and a couple of nice illustrations. All below, March 1955. 

Above is an Inside Detective published February 1963, containing a feature on Albert Nussbaum and Bobby Wilcoxson, a pair of armed robbers who were among the most sought after fugitives of their time. Nussbaum was the brains of the operation, and was adept at chess and photography, and was a locksmith, gunsmith, pilot, airplane mechanic, welder, and draftsman. With his spatial and mechanical aptitude, many careers would have been available to him, but he chose instead to become a bank robber. Predictably, he was good at that too.  

But brains are not the same as intuition. Nussbaum was clever enough to arrange a meeting with his estranged wife right under the authorities’ noses, but apparently had no clue his mother-in-law was capable of dropping a dime on him. What followed was a 100 mph chase through the streets of Buffalo that ended only after a civilian rammed Nussbaum’s car.Wilcoxson was arrested soon afterward in Maryland, and both robbers were convicted of murder. But where Wilcoxson got the chair (a sentence which was commuted to life upon appeal), Nussbaum got forty years, which made him eligible for parole.