A couple of weeks ago we said we’d get back to more Alain Gourdon, aka Aslan album sleeves, so above is a rather eye-catching one for a collection of Cure songs entitled The Spell’s Unbroken. It’s a live release that was recorded in Birmingham, England in 1985 and pressed in Germany in 1986, and it’s got such Cure goodies as “Kyoto Song,” “Let’s Go to Bed,” and the excellent “In Between Days,” as well some more obscure tracks. The album is unofficial—or a bootleg, if you prefer that term—so in theory it was pressed and sold without the band’s participation. We also assume Gourdon hadn’t a clue about the art. And wouldn’t you know it—the record sells for exorbitant amounts of money, routinely over a hundred dollars. We don’t know about you, but that’s enough to cure us of any urge to buy it.

Loretta Young, née Gretchen Young, began her career in cinema in 1917 and worked in both film and television until 1953, along the way appearing in such efforts as The Accused, The Bishop’s Wife, and The Farmer’s Daughter. Apart from her work, Young is also remembered for the daughter she bore out of wedlock. In a classic bit of Hollywood subterfuge, six months into the pregnancy she took a vacation to England and returned weeks after the secret birth to start a new movie. Nineteen months later, she adopted a baby daughter. The ruse fooled virtually nobody, but it did preserve her image to the extent that she could go on working without repercussions. The father, by the way, was Clark Gable. This promo of Young in astonishing fur pants was made for the classic film A Night To Remember in 1942. 

Yesterday in Manchester, England, 46-year-old Stephen Seddon was found guilty of murdering his parents for £235,000 in insurance money. Robert and Patricia Seddon were found shot dead in their home in July 2012, a sawed-off shotgun on the scene indicating a possible murder/suicide. But ballistic experts decided that scenario was not possible, and soon Stephen Seddon—who had boasted to acquaintances before his parents’ deaths that he was about to come into a large sum of money—was arrested. Yesterday’s conviction marked the final chapter of just another sad, senseless murder tale. What’s shocking, though, is the preamble.

In March 2012 Seddon was driving with his parents on a highway when his car hit a brick and skidded into a canal. He dragged his nephew Daniel from the car, then went back for his father while bystanders saved his mother. Seddon was hailed as a hero. Some details of the accident were strange, but police glossed over them. The details? There was no evidence of the car hitting a brick, and Seddon coincidentally happened to be carrying a knife with which to cut his seatbelt and a wheel lock with which to smash out the driverside window as the car went down. Oh, and several witnesses saw him jumping up and down on the roof of the car as it sank. Red flag? You’d tend to think so.

Something a bit different today. We saw this poster and loved its colors and vibrancy. It’s for the 1968 counterculture movie Joanna, which was about a young woman in swinging 1960s London. Think of it as a distaff version of Alfie, but with the added taboo of interracial romance. The star is Geneviève Waïte, and Donald Sutherland also puts in an appearance. Like a lot of movies that tried to capture the spirit of the ’60s, Joanna has not aged particularly well, but it’s beloved by many who were in high school or college when it came out. The movie is well before our time, but we liked it anyway. It isn’t perfect, but it has some really great moments, including an interlude in Morocco. As a bonus, we’ve posted the English, Spanish and Italian promos below. You’ll note that the Italian version was painted by Enzo Nistri. He did quite a bit of nice work in the ’60s and ’70s. We’ll get back to him. 

The two victims never knew each other, but Heather Barnett and Elisa Claps are forever linked by their stolen lives, stolen hair, and tragic acquaintance with a third person, a strange, compulsive man neither of them suspected was capable of violence. Danilo Restivo, an Italian national who spent much of his life in the remote town of Potenza, Italy, was convicted yesterday for the 2002 mutilation and murder of Heather Barnett. The killing took place in the British town of Bournemouth, where Barnett lived and where Restivo had relocated. But the Restivo saga may actually have begun seventeen years ago, when young Elisa Claps disappeared from a church in Potenza, Italy.

The Church of the Most Holy Trinity, known in Potenza as Chiesa della SS. Trinità, is one of the few old churches in a town that was destroyed by an 1857 earthquake and again by an Allied bombardment during World War II. The town was shaken yet again in 1993 when Elisa Claps disappeared. Then sixteen, Claps had agreed to meet nineteen-year-old Danilo Restivo at morning mass, but he claimed afterward that Claps left while he remained behind to pray. A missing persons case was soon launched but Claps seemed to have disappeared into thin air. Police suspected Restivo, but there was no evidence against him, and with mass just ending there seemed too many witnesses to a potential crime for him to have harmed her. Yes, there was a cut on his hand, but Restivo claimed to have fallen at a construction site, and he was cool when questioned.

Claps, below, remained missing and, as often happens, the vacuum in the case was filled by the general public as rumors sprang up, articles and opinion pieces were published, and websites were launched. Perhaps Claps ran away with a lover. Perhaps she was abducted by Albanians and sold into sexual slavery. Maybe there was a police cover-up. Or perhapsthe church was involved—after all, the priest of della Trinità was a curious man named Mimi Sabia and he wasn’t entirely cooperative with police, having refused to let authorities disrupt his church with forensic investigations. The case wore on and the obsession about it spread from Potenza to the rest of Italy.

Danilo Restivo eventually left Italy. By 2002 he was living in Bournemouth, England, where he was a neighbor of Heather Barnett. On November 12 Barnett’s two children found their mother mutilated and dead in the bathroom of their home. She was partially nude, her throat was slit and her breasts cut off. She was also holding a lock of her own hair. Local police immediately suspected Restivo. They learned that Barnett’s keys had gone missing just after Restivo had been inside the house asking about having some curtains made. When they interviewed him days later they found that he was soaking his Nike trainers in bleach. But suspicions do not a murder case make and so police did not detain him—however, unlike in Italy they decided to keep him under surveillance.

What they learned was extremely disconcerting. Restivo haunted a local park, where he would spy on single women, darting between bushes or ducking behind stands of grass. He wore gloves during these outings, and he often returned to his car to change shirts or shoes. They also learned that he had a habit of stealing girls’ and women’s hair. Two teenagers reported that someone had cut their hair while they rode in a bus. They couldn’t say for sure who did it, but they were able to identify Restivo as one of the people who had sat behind them. Police also learned that at the age of fourteen Restivo had tied up and tortured two boys whose families later dropped charges in exchange for financial compensation from Restivo’s family. And perhaps most worrying, other women had been murdered and mutilated in places where Danilo Restivo resided and passed through.

All of this was uncovered through years of police work, and though the case against Danilo Restivo was looking stronger and stronger all the time, it wasn’t until this March that police caught the break they needed. That was when two workers back in Potenza, intending to repair a leak in the roof of della Trinità, found Elisa Claps’ body in the very church where she had been last seen. Her skeletonized remains, covered by mummified skin and the rags of her clothes, had been hidden in a small tower room beneath some old tiles. In one of the corpse’s hands was a lock of hair, and subsequent forensic analysis revealed that she had been mutilated in almost identical fashion as Heather Barnett. A case that had spawned numerous articles, websites, multiple investigations and hundreds of conspiracy theories, had come full circle. British police arrested Danilo Restivo, the court tried him, and yesterday, with Barnett’s family members present, a jury convicted him.

Now all eyes turn to Potenza. Mimi Sabia the uncooperative priest had long been suspected by some of hiding something. His was the only church that didn’t ring bells on the anniversary of Elisa Claps’ disappearance. Now there was a body in that bell tower belonging to a girl who would have been found probably the very day she was killed if onlyDon Mimi had helped. During investigation into the case he claimed not to know Danilo Restivo even though Restivo had been to della Trinità and Sabia was once photographed, just above, at a birthday party thrown for Restivo. But these questions will possibly never be answered because Don Mimi Sabia died in 1998.

However there are other questions. Della Trinità's newest priest claims that Elisa Claps’ body wasn’t found in March 2011, but two months earlier by two cleaners. The priest claims he informed church officials but was told to keep quiet while they decided what to do. Two months of secret deliberations later, two more workers were called in to repair a leaky roof that in fact wasn’t leaking at all. A body that had been completely covered with tiles was now partially exposed in order to ensure its discovery. Or so the new priest says, which means the Catholic Church is accused by one of its own of operating outside the law. It would be shocking if it hadn’t happened so many times before with regard to child molestation cases, but only time will tell if these specific allegations are true. Meanwhile, all the details of Elisa Claps’ last day on Earth are set to emerge—Danilo Restivo is being extradited to Italy to stand trial for her murder. 

The giant aquatic creature Bownessie, thought by some to reside in Lake Windermere, in England’s Cumbria region, was supposedly spotted this week by a pair of kayakers taking part in a corporate team building exercise. One of them, Tom Pickles, had a camera phone handy and shot the image above. Pickles says the creature surfaced about 160 meters from his kayak and swam for twenty seconds before disappearing. “At first I thought it was a dog,” he said, “then I realized it was much bigger and moving really quickly. Each hump was moving in a rippling motion and it was moving fast. I could tell it was far bigger underwater from the huge shadow around it.” Pickles’ kayaking partner Sarah Harrington corroborated Pickles’ account, saying, “It was like an enormous snake. It freaked us out. All I could think about was that I had to get off the lake.” Bownessie experts hail the sighting and photo as the best evidence yet that the monster exists. Work is now underway to positively identify the creature, with particular focus on Harrington’s descriptive phrase: “enormous snake.” No word yet on whether Davy Cameron was in the Lake Windermere region that morning. 

This True Detective from November 1939 features a cover painting of mobster Louis “Lepke” Buchalter, whose flight from authorities had taken him from the U.S. to Mexico, and then to Costa Rica, Puerto Rico and Cuba, and across the ocean to England, France and Germany. Buchalter had begun his career in organized crime by shaking down pushcart operators in Brooklyn, and had risen through the ranks of the criminal-controlled fur industry by doing every type of dirt imaginable, from issuing threatening phone calls to garment union activists to throwing acid in a competitor’s face. Eventually he was running a criminal empire that stretched to both coasts, and was acting as head of the infamous assassination squad Murder, Inc.

In 1936 Buchalter went into hiding after he became aware that criminal charges were being prepared against him. Not long after he dropped out of sight, he was indicted for smuggling an estimated $10 million in heroin into the U.S. from Hong Kong. The FBI printed a million posters and displayed them in every post office, police station, and federal building in America. All this attention was a problem for U.S. mob bosses, and so with characteristic unsentimentality, they decided Buchalter had to surrender. Convincing him was not difficult. While he undoubtedly had the flair and intelligence to dodge the feds indefinitely, living in another country away from the old neighborhood and away from the hundreds of underlings who respected him was not his style. Buchalter was a mobster through-and-through. To him, an anonymous existence, even in a tropical paradise or cosmopolitan foreign capitol, was little different from being in prison.

Buchalter’s associates got word to him that if he came back to the U.S. he would be able to surrender personally to J. Edgar Hoover. Surrendering to the Feds meant he would not face a more serious group of charges brought by Manhattan D.A. Thomas Dewey. But it was wishful thinking. The federal charges were rapidly followed by Dewey’s charges and Buchalter earned a fourteen-year jolt in the pen. His legal team hoped tohave the sentence reduced via appeals and procedural maneuvers, but when a snitch fingered Buchalter for ordering the murder of a candy store owner named Joe Rosen, he was tried for the killing, convicted, and sentenced to execution. By some estimates Buchalter had been responsible for a thousand murders as head of Murder, Inc., but all it took was one to seal his fate. Louis "Lepke" Buchalter was electrocuted in Sing Sing prison's famous "Old Sparky" electric chair on March 4, 1944, perhaps while realizing life on a beach in Costa Rica hadn’t been so bad after all.

The world famous tea shop Bettys, based in Harrogate, England, recently unveiled a vintage line of chocolates based on one of their popular selections from the 1920s. The flapper figure perched atop the original papier-mâché box has a partially unbuttoned blouse and a mischievous expression that—in our humble view, at least—is perfect for the guilty pleasure of chocolate. But when the line goes on sale later this month, the flapper will have been bounced in favor of a more conservative breed of woman. Bettys execs are quoted in various British newspapers stating their belief that the 1920s figure is too risqué, and expressing their amazement that such a box was even made back then. A Telegraph quote from a Bettys archivist sums up their view: “I am surprised at how daring the original chocolate box is for its time as there is quite a lot of flesh on display. The fact that it is still a bit risqué even nowadays shows it must have caused quite a stir.”

Bettys management may believe the original box got everybody’s knickers in a twist, but in actuality, the 1920s were a sexually open decade. It was an attitude shift that arose among those who survived the generation-killing horror known as World War I. Life was to be enjoyed, because ten million dead on the battlefields of Europe proved it could be over in a flash. But the change also had to do with the rising numbers of women going to college (thus finding themselves in less protected social environments where they could make their own sexual decisions). Studies show that in the 1920s roughly 50% of American and British women were having sex before marriage. And let's not even get the French, Dutch and Scandinavians involved. We haven't researched it, but we'd bet they were humping like rabbits. The point is, though it’s possible Bettys' suggestive flapper caused a stir, we wouldn’t assume it. And if it did, the reaction may well have been considered a boon to the product. What’s changed in 2010 is our default position—i.e., sexualization is automatically bad, even though sex is that thing we do that enables our survival. So the question becomes are we evolving to a better state, or a worse one? 

Roman Polanski’s first English-language film was Repulsion, starring Catherine Deneuve as a disturbed woman whose neuroses slowly escalate into a full-scale psychotic break when the departure of her sister leaves her in isolation in an apartment they share. We won’t pretend to have any new insights into such a rapturously praised film save to say that it’s certainly one of Polanski’s most interesting, a visual masterwork in deeply shadowed black and white that manages to be beautiful even as it descends into paranoia and violence. Highly recommended. And as a side note, we wouldn’t mind terribly if Deneuve’s hairstyle came back into vogue. Batshit insane never looked so glamorous. Repulsion opened in Japan today in 1965.