vintage and modern pulp fiction; noir, schlock and exploitation films; scandals, swindles and news
Above: another photo from the coffee table book so morbid it will put you off your coffee—Scene of the Crime: Photographs from the LAPD Archive. This image shows the aftermath of a suicide leap from L.A.’s 7th Street Bridge, today 1959.
Her name was Mary Lindsay, but she also went by the alias Mary Irving, and she was found stabbed to death one Friday in L.A.’s Wilshire district, in an apartment known to police as an illegal speakeasy and gaming establishment. The murder weapon, which you can see above in the foreground on the table, is probably at least a foot long.
Irving/Lindsay’s live-in companion Emmett Hicks went missing after the killing along with a length of clothesline from the yard. Police later found Hicks hanged by that clothesline from a high-tension electrical tower in South Central Los Angeles, near East 99th Street and Zamora Avenue in a vacant lot. Their verdict: murder/suicide, case closed. That was today in 1931. The photo comes from the 2004 book Scene of the Crime: Photographs from the LAPD Archive.
American blues and jazz singer Billie Holiday records “Strange Fruit”, which is considered to be the first civil rights song. It began as a poem written by Abel Meeropol, which he later set to music and performed live with his wife Laura Duncan. The song became a Holiday standard immediately after she recorded it, and it remains one of the most highly regarded pieces of music in American history.
American actress and playwright Mae West is sentenced to ten days in jail for obscenity for the content of her play Sex. The trial occurred even though the play had run for a year and had been seen by 325,000 people. However West’s considerable popularity, already based on her risque image, only increased due to the controversy.
In the U.S, cult leader Charles Manson is sentenced to death for inciting the murders of Sharon Tate and several other people. Three accomplices, who had actually done the killing, were also sentenced to death, but the state of California abolished capital punishment in 1972 and neither they nor Manson were ever actually executed.
In New York City, Yankee Stadium, home of Major League Baseball’s New York Yankees, opens with the Yankees beating their eternal rivals the Boston Red Sox 4 to 1. The stadium, which is nicknamed The House that Ruth Built, sees the Yankees become the most successful franchise in baseball history. It is eventually replaced by a new Yankee Stadium and closes in September 2008.
A group of CIA financed and trained Cuban refugees lands at the Bay of Pigs in southern Cuba with the aim of ousting Fidel Castro. However, the invasion fails badly and the result is embarrassment for U.S. president John F. Kennedy and a major boost in popularity for Fidel Castro, and also has the effect of pushing him toward the Soviet Union for protection.
