On September 19, 1980, Veronica Compton attempted to strangle a 26-year-old woman at a motel in Bellingham, Washington. The attack was part of a plot to convince authorities that imprisoned Hillside Strangler Kenneth Bianchi was innocent—and that the real killer remained at large.
Bianchi had supplied Compton with a semen-filled condom concealed in the spine of a book. She was to plant its contents at the scene of a staged rape and murder, creating false evidence to cast doubt on his guilt. But the woman survived, and the scheme unravelled.
Compton was convicted of first-degree attempted murder in March 1981. She remained imprisoned until 2003.
Close-up of worn book spine titled Modern English Drama
Patty Hearst, granddaughter of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, was abducted from her Berkeley apartment in February 1974 by the self-styled Symbionese Liberation Army, a small but violent radical cell. Within weeks the group released tapes in which she renounced her family and adopted the nom de guerre Tania, and in April 1974 she was photographed wielding a rifle during the SLA's armed robbery of a Hibernia Bank branch in San Francisco.
For nineteen months Hearst remained with her captors turned comrades as the group moved between safe houses, evading one of the largest manhunts in FBI history. She was finally arrested in San Francisco on September 18, 1975, and later stood trial for bank robbery, where her defence argued she had been brainwashed and coerced.
Convicted despite that defence, Hearst was sentenced to prison, but her sentence was commuted by President Jimmy Carter and she was granted a full pardon by President Bill Clinton in 2001.
Patty Hearst hideout, Golden Gate Avenue, San Francisco
At 12:01 pm on September 16, 1920, a horse-drawn wagon parked across from the J.P. Morgan & Co. headquarters at 23 Wall Street exploded, packed with 100 pounds of dynamite and 500 pounds of cast-iron sash weights turned into shrapnel. Thirty people died instantly and eight more later succumbed to their wounds, with 143 seriously injured and hundreds hurt in total. Witnesses saw the driver step down and vanish down a side street moments before the blast; he was never identified.
Within a minute, the New York Stock Exchange president suspended trading to head off panic. A 17-year-old messenger, commandeered a parked car and used it to ferry 30 wounded victims to hospital as police seized nearby vehicles for the same purpose. Crews worked through the night to clear the wreckage so the Exchange could reopen the next morning, but in doing so destroyed evidence that might have identified the bomber.
Investigators from the Bureau of Investigation, forerunner of the FBI, suspected the attack was the work of Galleanist anarchists responsible for a string of bombings the previous year, but no one was ever charged. More than a century on, the Wall Street bombing remains unsolved, its perpetrator and motive still unknown.
Historic photo of bombing aftermath on Wall Street
On September 16, 2007, O.J. Simpson led a group of armed men into a room at the Palace Station Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, seizing sports memorabilia he insisted had been stolen from him. He was arrested and charged with multiple felonies, including armed robbery and kidnapping, though he denied that anyone in his group had carried a weapon.
The case drew intense attention largely because of who Simpson was: the former football star had been famously acquitted in 1995 of the 1994 murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, one of the most watched criminal trials in American history. More than a decade later, he found himself back in handcuffs, this time over a hotel room confrontation staged to reclaim items he believed were rightfully his.
Assorted vintage sports equipment including helmet and gloves
