 Stop fighting bitch, *grunt*, we told you, *gasp*, we’ve a lovable space that needs your face. It’s girl-on-girl action on this lesbian-themed September 1970 cover of Front Page Detective where a reluctant blonde is taking a kicking before getting her licking. Maybe she’d take her medicine without a fight if only the brunettes knew the right words to convince her. But we can help with that. Okay, girls, a-one and a-two and... Come and knock on our door… We've been waiting for you... Where the kisses are hers and hers and hers, Three’s company too.
 But I didn’t steal the money, I swear—it was a bailout. 
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.
 Oh my, I don't know whether to call a lifeguard, the police, or British Petroleum. 
This Master Detective from July 1960 has cover art that incorporates two elements millions of people dream about every night—a beautiful girl and a dead BP executive. Inside is a grisly story on housewife Nancy Haas, who was murdered by nineteen year-old Robert Elton Edwards in March 1960. Edwards’ MO was to knock on the doors of houses with For Sale signs in the yards, then rob the people inside. In this case, he tried to chain Haas to a bed but when she struggled he shot her dead with a .22 pistol. She was the first woman Edwards had killed, and the last, because Haas’s daughter, who was only three, told police, “A bad man hurt mommy and drove away in a white car.” That simple description led to police arresting Edwards three days later in Arizona, driving a stolen white 1959 Plymouth Fury. Edwards pleaded guilty to murder and at his sentencing the judge said he’d contemplated sending Edwards to the gas chamber, but changed his mind. The judge explained: “I’m not doing you any favors.” Then he sentenced Edwards to life in prison.
 A real life case of arsenic and old lace. Above is a Police Files from fifty years ago this month with a story on an Alabama waitress named Rhonda Belle Martin who killed her mother, two husbands, and three of her children by poisoning them with arsenic. It’s one of the most bizarre stories of the time. Martin was fifteen the first time she married. That union ended in divorce four years later. She married again, at twenty-one, to a man named George Garrett who became her first poisoning victim. She had no motive for killing him. There was an insurance policy, but she was well aware it would do little more than cover funeral expenses. Like the delusional old aunts in Arsenic and Old Lace, her reasons for killing seemed unfathomable. Martin married a third time but divorced after five months. Or at least she tried to—but somehow, she married her fourth husband before the divorce was final. Her fourth had a son named Bud. When Martin poisoned husband number four, stepson Bud became her companion, and soon thereafter her fifth husband. This would normally have led to a prosecution for incest, but the fourth wedding was invalid from the start due to Martin’s failure to obtain a divorce from her third husband. This meant Bud had never legally been Martin’s son-in-law. She claimed to love Bud with all her heart, but the old compulsion took hold and she poisoned him too. But this time she botched the job and left him not dead, but paraplegic. Bud’s illness set off police warning bells, finally, and prompted an investigation that uncovered the suspicious deaths of not just two previous husbands, but three children and Martin’s mother. All had been buried in the same cemetery and police exhumed the bodies in a carnival atmosphere as the story caught like wildfire and dominated front pages nationwide. A Montgomery Advertiser article blared: “Waitress Admits Guilt in Seven Poison Cases; Six Victims Met Death.”
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.
 When the moon goes full people always go a little crazy. 
June 1968 cover of Master Detective. This particular true crime magazine was launched in 1924, and there is an identically named magazine being published today, but we suspect it’s a different imprint despite the fact that we saw an ad online claiming the two magazines are one and the same. But frankly, we don’t believe them. The vintage Master Detective was published in the U.S., while the new one is UK based. So that’s a dead giveaway right there. But we hate to be wrong, so we’ll do the heavy research on this after the World Cup is over.
 Sure is peaceful out here in nature all by myself. Yep, really glad I decided to do this. Above is a June 1955 issue of True Detective, with a woman proving yet again that—on pulp covers at least—it’s always a bad idea to wander in the woods alone. But at least she has a chance to run away, unlike these women who got fully naked and leaped into the nearest pond before being surprised by intruders. Inside this True Detective is a story on the Ann Yarrow murder of February 1955. Little known now, at the time it was a major story, mixing those favorite pulp elements of sex, race, and brutality into a stew that had all New York City gripped during the winter of that year. Ann Yarrow was a twenty-three-year old NYU honors graduate who was found raped, strangled, and stabbed thirty-seven times in a cheap apartment in an area of Manhattan known today as the East Village. Yarrow was an unusual woman for the times in that she judged people by neither social standing nor skin color. Thus she had friends from all walks of life and at the time of her murder had just split with her African-American boyfriend Ernest Jackson. Once police learned of Jackson’s existence he became the prime suspect, though his exemplary background made him an unlikely candidate. The New York tabloids published tales of tawdry interracial sex, but it soon became so obvious that Jackson was not the killer that even while he was in custody Ann Yarrow’s father tried to contact him to offer sympathy and reassurance. When the police finally decided they couldn’t make the case, they moved on to Yarrow’s last known acquaintance, Angelo “Mike” Morelli. They knew Morelli had called Yarrow’s apartment at least once, and one of the last letters written by Yarrow mentioned a person named Mike. When arrested, Morelli still bore a woman’s scratches on his back and a little legwork revealed that he had sent his suit to the cleaner the day after Yarrow’s murder. Morelli’s alibi was thin. He claimed that he had spoken to Yarrow but had never actually met her. He said the scratches came from a prostitute he had scuffled with the night of the murder. And he said he had sent his suit to the cleaner as a matter of course rather than to cover up a crime. A few days after his arrest, Morelli was able to pass a note to an acquaintance, who took it to the New York News. The note, gleefully published by the paper, claimed cops had beaten Morelli while in custody to coerce a confession. But beaten or not, he never confessed, and soon he made $10,000 bail and was freed (above left, with his lawyer) pending further investigation. Weeks later, less than a month after Yarrow’s death, police arrested a former psychiatric patient named William Patrick Farrell on the charge of raping his sister-in-law Irene Miller. While in custody, police asked him if he had committed similar crimes before, and he allegedly said he had, and confessed to the Yarrow killing, even adding that he had disposed of the knife in a sewer. Days later he recanted, saying, “I didn’t do it. I didn’t. I don’t know why I made a confession.” Nevertheless, he was a deeply disturbed man who had raped Irene Miller in front of her three-year-old son, and about this there was no doubt—Miller’s stepfather had called the police after Farrell chased him at knifepoint from the apartment. That apartment was only blocks from where Yarrow had been living. The case against Farrell was entirely circumstantial, but he had confessed and police expressed no doubts he had spoken the truth. From his confession: “I just caught sight of her on the street. I took a fancy to her and followed her home. I rang the doorbell and when she opened it I put my foot in it.” If DNA testing had existed at the time, perhaps Mike Morelli would have been the one facing a judge, but he walked, and Farrell was tried and convicted of murder and sent to the Matteawan Hospital for the Criminally Insane, in Beacon, New York. Ann Yarrow’s slaying had fueled the tabloids for weeks, and most of those stories questioned the wisdom of her associations and stirred up racial animus, but ultimately it may have been a random encounter that led to her ugly demise. The murder was all anyone wanted to talk about during the winter of 1955, but in the end, other crimes filled the tabloids and New Yorkers went on as if William Patrick Farrell, Mike Morelli, Ernest Jackson, and Ann Yarrow had never existed.
 Here’s a cover I came across that I thought you guys would like. The header I wrote is the absolute limit of my cleverness, so no subhead, sorry to say. Feel free to add one. The year on this is 1968. Submitted by Will N. You’re right, we do like this. As far as adding to what you wrote, we could do it but that would defeat the purpose of us not doing any work on these. Regarding reaching the limit of your cleverness, you’ll notice that never stops us.
 Well, yes sir, I can tend to your member too, I suppose, but you don’t look wounded. 
Above is a True Detective cover from August 1960, with a story about convicted rapist Caryl Chessman. Chessman had been executed in the California gas chamber several months earlier, but not before the U.S. Supreme Court heard his appeal. The case was complicated. Chessman was the Red Light Bandit, a rapist who preyed on motorists parked in secluded areas. Using what looked like a dome light to make them think he was a policeman, he would approach them, rob them at gunpoint and sometimes violate the women. At trial prosecutors used the Little Lindberg Law to argue for the death penalty. That law was written to punish criminals who kidnapped their victims. Chessman hadn’t done that, but he had dragged one girl a short distance away from her car. Prosecutors argued that this constituted kidnapping, and in so doing promptly gave anti-death penalty advocates a textbook example of death penalty abuse. The case became national news, but after ten years of various legal battles, Chessman finally met the executioner on May 2, 1960. Three months later, True Detective waded into the continuing uproar over abuse of the Little Lindberg Law to remind people that there were actual victims involved. Their article claimed that the end justified the means. We bet how you feel about that depends on how you feel about the legal system in general. But as far as how you feel about True Detective's cover art, we'll go out on a limb and assume you think it's as brilliant as we do.
 Why you wanna make me blue? 
Amazing cover of Amazing Detective Cases, published seventy years ago, February 1941.
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The headlines that mattered yesteryear.
1962—Marilyn Monroe Sings to John F. Kennedy
A birthday salute to U.S. President John F. Kennedy takes place at Madison Square Garden, in New York City. The highlight is Marilyn Monroe's breathy rendition of "Happy Birthday," which does more to fuel speculation that the two were sexually involved than any actual evidence. 1926—Aimee Semple McPherson Disappears
In the U.S., Canadian born evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson disappears from Venice Beach, California in the middle of the afternoon. She is initially thought to have drowned, but on June 23, McPherson stumbles out of the desert in Agua Prieta, a Mexican town across the border from Douglas, Arizona, claiming to have been kidnapped, drugged, tortured and held for ransom in a shack by two people named Steve and Mexicali Rose. However, it soon becomes clear that McPherson's tale is fabricated, though to this day the reasons behind it remain unknown. 1964—Mods and Rockers Jailed After Riots
In Britain, scores of youths are jailed following a weekend of violent clashes between gangs of Mods and Rockers in Brighton and other south coast resorts. Mods listened to ska music and The Who, wore suits and rode Italian scooters, while Rockers listened to Elvis and Gene Vincent, and rode motorcycles. These differences triggered the violence. 1974—Police Raid SLA Headquarters
In the U.S., Los Angeles police raid the headquarters of the revolutionary group the Symbionese Liberation Army, resulting in the deaths of six members. The SLA had gained international notoriety by kidnapping nineteen-year old media heiress Patty Hearst from her Berkeley, California apartment, an act which precipitated her participation in an armed bank robbery. 1978—Charlie Chaplin's Missing Body Is Found
Eleven weeks after it was disinterred and stolen from a grave in Corsier near Lausanne, Switzerland, Charlie Chaplin's corpse is found by police. Two men—Roman Wardas, a 24-year-old Pole, and Gantscho Ganev, a 38-year-old Bulgarian—are convicted in December of stealing the coffin and trying to extort £400,000 from the Chaplin family.
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