The Naked City

January 27 2025

A MATCH MADE IN HELL

The couple that slays together pays together.

We’ve dug deep into the archives today for a magazine we bought about ten years ago, back when we were writing a lot about historical crimes. We stopped because all the online newspapers we used for research got locked behind Newspapers.com’s pay interface, but we still have some crime magazines sitting around. Above you see a January 1950 cover of Uncensored Detective featuring lovers/killers Martha Beck and Ray Fernandez, who were convicted of murdering a lonely window and her toddler daughter, and ended up dying in the electric chair at Sing Sing Prison. Juries tend to look with particular disfavor upon child murderers, but especially when the method is to swing the kid by her feet in order to shatter her skull against a brick wall. Few mourned when Beck and Fernandez met their fate. We have about twenty-five scans from the magazine below.

Uncensored Detective, Martha Beck, Ray Fernandez, true crime magazine, murder

Femmes Fatales

August 25 2021

SAINT OF STRIPTEASE

She was a higher being in the church of burlesque.

Is this Lili St. Cyr’s most beautiful photo? Maybe, but why choose? They’re all great, such as the ones we showed you here, here, and here. This shot is usually tagged with a date of 1956, but it’s actually from no later than 1952. St. Cyr certainly could have worn this eye catching bustier for multiple photo sessions, but if you look at the cover of the true crime magazine Uncensored Detective below, you’ll notice that she looks identical all the way down to the cowlick on her forehead and the curls above her ear. Her eye makeup is a little different, but that could have happened mid-shoot. The minutely identical hair leaves no doubt that both images are from the same session. The magazine is from May 1952, so we’ll go with 1952 on the shot. But really, she’s timeless.

Uncensored Detective, Lili St. Cyr, true crime magazine, burlesque

The Naked City

December 12 2014

THE CIRCUS COMES TO TOWN

He’s more of a laughing-on-the-inside kind of clown.

We would love if this issue of Uncensored Detective published this month in 1946 had a story relating to the desperate clown on the cover, but no such luck. You can read the text of the issue at this link, but we’ll summarize for those short of time—you learn about cheating spouses, a killer cop, and a millionaire con artist, but no clowns. The stories are all interesting (as are the photos and photo-illustrations posed by models that probably barely earned meal money for the week), but the tale of double homicide on Lowry Air Force Base in Denver is the one that caught our interest.

The details of the murders are not in any way fantastic, but because the parties of interest are all Chinese cadets Uncensored Detective gets to drop lines like this one: The workings of the Oriental mind are strange indeed. And this one: What secret mechanism in the Oriental mind caused a normal Chinese student to go berserk and commit murders for pride? Oh, those inscrutable Chinese.

The story is a classic case of framing the banal as somehow alien when it involves other ethnic groups, and it’s a lazy, vicious form of journalism you see often in both old magazines and modern cable news. The mechanism of murder in the Denver crime was indeed pride, and that’s not so secret or strange. The other murders in the magazine were committed for jealousy, money, and lust, and there’s nothing secret or strange about those either. What would be strange is clowns. But there isn’t a single damned one in the magazine.

Denver, Lowry Air Force Base, Uncensored Detective, true crime magazine, murder

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HISTORY REWIND

The headlines that mattered yesteryear.

January 18

1967—Boston Strangler Convicted

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.

January 17

1950—The Great Brinks Robbery Occurs

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.

January 17

1977—Gary Gilmore Is Executed

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.

January 16

1942—Carole Lombard Dies in Plane Crash

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.

January 15

1919—Luxemburg and Liebknecht Are Killed

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.

DON GIOVANNI

Giovanni Benvenuti was one of Italy's most prolific paperback cover artists. His unique style is on display in multiple collections within our website.

WALKING AFTER MIDNIGHT