
Above: another promo image of June Havoc from 1947’s Intrigue. This one might be even nicer than the last one we shared. What we need to do now is watch the film. We’re working on that.
vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news

Above: another promo image of June Havoc from 1947’s Intrigue. This one might be even nicer than the last one we shared. What we need to do now is watch the film. We’re working on that.

Above is a nice photo of Canadian actress June Havoc made for her 1947 drama Intrigue. We were intrigued by her name, an obvious pseudonym, but it turns out it wasn’t far off from her real name—Hovick. She was born Ellen Evangeline Hovick. In our opinion there’s a missed opportunity there. Her stage name should have been Helen Havoc. Or even Hellen Havoc. You can see a couple more shots of her here and here. And while you’re doing that we’ll be playing Scrabble. Don’t know why, but we’re suddenly in the mood for a game or two.
Update: We received an e-mail from Herman, who helps us with celebrity and model identifications: “Please tell me you know that June Havoc is Gypsy Rose Lee’s sister. You’ve posted information about her without mentioning so, and it made me wonder.”
Wonder no longer. We had no idea. Or if we did, we forgot. We also forgot to get back to Gypsy’s second crime novel, something we said more than a year ago we’d do. So your message has killed two birds with one stone. Thanks, as always.
Albert DeSalvo, the serial killer who became known as the Boston Strangler, is convicted of murder and other crimes and sentenced to life in prison. He serves initially in Bridgewater State Hospital, but he escapes and is recaptured. Afterward he is transferred to federal prison where six years later he is killed by an inmate or inmates unknown.
In the U.S., eleven thieves steal more than $2 million from an armored car company’s offices in Boston, Massachusetts. The skillful execution of the crime, with only a bare minimum of clues left at the scene, results in the robbery being billed as “the crime of the century.” Despite this, all the members of the gang are later arrested.
Convicted murderer Gary Gilmore is executed by a firing squad in Utah, ending a ten-year moratorium on Capital punishment in the United States. Gilmore’s story is later turned into a 1979 novel entitled The Executioner’s Song by Norman Mailer, and the book wins the Pulitzer Prize for literature.
American actress Carole Lombard, who was the highest paid star in Hollywood during the late 1930s, dies in the crash of TWA Flight 3, on which she was flying from Las Vegas to Los Angeles after headlining a war bond rally in support of America’s military efforts. She was thirty-three years old.
Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, two of the most prominent socialists in Germany, are tortured and murdered by the Freikorps. Freikorps was a term applied to various paramilitary organizations that sprang up around Germany as soldiers returned in defeat from World War I. Members of these groups would later become prominent members of the SS.