paranoia

serial-killers-101:

The Murder of Elizabeth Short, AKA The Black Dahlia

On the morning of January 15, 1947, a housewife named Betty Bersinger was walking down a residential street in central Los Angeles with her 3-year-old daughter when something caught her eye. It was a cold, overcast morning, and she was on her way to pick up a pair of shoes from the cobbler.

At first glance, Bersinger thought the white figure laying a few inches from the sidewalk was a broken store mannequin. But a closer look revealed the hideous truth: It was the body of a woman who’d been cut in half and was laying face-up in the dirt. The woman’s arms were raised over her head at 45-degree angles. Her lower of half was positioned a foot over from her torso, the straight legs spread wide open. The body appeared to have been washed clean of blood, and the intestines were tucked neatly under the buttocks. Bersinger shielded her daughter’s eyes, then ran with her to a nearby home to call the police.

Two detectives were assigned to the case, Harry Hansen and Finis Brown. By the time the duo arrived at the crime scene — on Norton Avenue between 39th and Coliseum streets in Los Angeles — it was swarming with reporters and gawkers who were carelessly trampling the evidence. The detectives ordered the crowd to back off, then got down to business.

From the lack of blood on the body or in the grass, they determined the victim had been murdered elsewhere and dragged onto the lot, one piece at time. There was dew under the body, so they knew it had been placed there after 2 a.m., when the outside temperature dipped to 38 degrees.

The victim’s face was horribly defiled: the murderer had used a knife to slash 3-inch gashes into each corner of her mouth, giving her the death grin of a deranged clown. Rope marks on her wrists and ankles indicated she’d been restrained, and possibly tortured.

By measuring the two halves of the corpse, the detectives estimated the victim’s height to be 5’6 and her weight to be 115 pounds. Her mousy brown hair had been recently hennaed, and her fingernails were bitten to the quick.

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ramirezdahmerbundy:

Women On Death Row.

It is indeed rare for a woman to be given the death sentence in the United States. Of the 3,487 persons on death row in the U.S. as of June 2004, only 49 of them, or 1.3 percent, were women.

Of the 49 women who were on death row in 2004, 55 percent (27) of them were convicted of killing their children, their husbands and/or boyfriends or both, according to Victor L. Streib’s research in “Death Penalty For Female Offenders, January 1, 1973 through June 30, 2004.” Seven of those 27 women who killed family members killed more than one victim.

Few Women on Death Row

There are approximately 50,000 women in prisons in the United States, only 0.1 percent of them are on death row. In comparison to men, death sentencing rates remain very low, with only 566 total executions carried out against women since the first recorded execution in 1632 — or less than 3 percent of the total executions.

Very few women enter the capital murder system, and fewer still are ever actually executed, according to the Death Penalty Information Center:

• Women account for only 1 in 10 murder arrests.
• Women account for only 1 in 50 death sentences imposed at the trial level.
• Women account for only 1 in 71 persons presently on death row.
• Women account for only 1 in 92 persons actually executed in the modern era (since 1976).

Some Female Executions:

• Velma Barfield in North Carolina, November 2, 1984
• Karla Faye Tucker in Texas, February 3, 1998
• Judy Buenoano in Florida, March 30, 1998
• Betty Lou Beets in Texas, February 24, 2000
• Christina Riggs in Arkansas, May 2, 2000
• Wanda Jean Allen in Oklahoma, January 11, 2001
• Marilyn Plantz in Oklahoma, May 1, 2001
• Lois Nadean Smith in Oklahoma, December 4, 2001
• Lynda Lyon Block in Alabama, May 10, 2002
• Aileen Wuornos in Florida, October 9, 2002.
• Frances Newton in Texas, Sept. 15, 2005.

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W.E

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