USA - Dark Stories True Crime Tours

1998: The Trunk Murderess Dies on the Exact Anniversary of Her Own Surrender

Winnie Ruth Judd earned the tabloid name the Trunk Murderess after she shot two friends in Phoenix, Arizona, then packed their bodies into steamer trunks and shipped them by rail to Los Angeles in 1931. When the trunks began to leak, she walked into a Los Angeles police station and gave herself up.

Convicted of murder in 1932, she was declared insane and spent much of the next four decades confined to an Arizona mental institution, escaping it several times before finally being paroled in 1971. She died in Phoenix on this day in 1998, aged 93, exactly 67 years to the day after she had first surrendered to police.

Portrait of Winnie Ruth Judd convicted of murdering two nurses 1932

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Arizona California Los Angeles Mental Illness Murder Phoenix Prison Trial USA

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1979: The Hillside Strangler Was Two Men: Kenneth Bianchi Named His Own Cousin to Save Himself

Kenneth Bianchi confessed to being the Hillside Strangler, but he did not go down alone. To save himself, he named his older cousin, Angelo Buono, as his accomplice, and on this day in 1979 Buono was arrested in Los Angeles.

The betrayal inverted everything investigators assumed about the case. It was Buono, not Bianchi, who turned out to be the predatory sexual sadist and driving force behind their partnership, having first drawn his younger cousin into crime years earlier by suggesting they go into business together as pimps. That shared criminal history curdled into a killing spree, and when the pressure of capture came, it was Bianchi who broke family loyalty to shift the blame onto the man who had led him there.

Hillside Strangler: Aerial view of rush hour traffic on the 101 Ventura Freeway

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Arrest Los Angeles Murder Serial Killer Trial USA

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1960: Martin Luther King Jr. Arrested in an Atlanta Sit-In, Then Sentenced to Hard Labour

Martin Luther King Jr. was arrested on this day in 1960 alongside dozens of students and local activists after refusing to leave his seat at a segregated department store lunch counter in Atlanta. The protest was part of a sit-in movement that had spread across the South since four students staged the first one at a Woolworth’s in Greensboro, North Carolina, earlier that year.

Most of the group had their charges dismissed, but King alone was held over a probation violation tied to an earlier case and sentenced to months of hard labour. The arrest drew national attention when presidential candidate John F. Kennedy personally intervened to help secure his release, a move credited with swinging crucial Black support behind Kennedy weeks before he won the presidency.

Martin Luther King Jr Memorial. The statue memorial for Martin Luther King Jr. in West Potomac Park, Washington D. C.. | ID 36894618 © Atomazul | Dreamstime.com — ID 36894618 © Atomazul | Dreamstime.com

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Arrest Atlanta Civil Rights Georgia Political History Protest USA

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1973: Nixon Defies the Courts: the Watergate Tapes Standoff That Doomed a Presidency

Richard Nixon had a choice: hand over the secret Oval Office recordings a court had ordered released, or dig in. On 19 October 1973, he chose defiance, rejecting an Appeals Court demand to turn over the Watergate tapes, recordings that held the conversations investigators believed would prove his role in the cover-up.

The refusal pushed Nixon to the edge of contempt of court and deepened a crisis that had already consumed his presidency. Rather than hand over the evidence, he tried to offer summaries in its place, a move that satisfied no one and only hardened suspicion that the tapes contained exactly what his accusers suspected. The standoff over those recordings would drag on for months, and it was the eventual release of the tapes that sealed his resignation the following year.

President Richard Nixon made of Wax. Wax figure Richard Nixon reading documents with american flag at desk | ID 59298060 © Lequint | Dreamstime.com — ID 59298060 © Lequint | Dreamstime.com

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Corruption Political Crime Scandal USA

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