Crime and Punishment; they go together like pen and paper, like summer and barbeques,
and like bacon and…well… bacon goes with everything. But sometimes you get crime without
punishment and society feels like it’s been hard done by. We all love a good bit of justice
and there’s nothing quite like a great detective unravelling a criminal’s evil scheme, although
it’s not always possible; a vital clue is missing, witnesses disappear or a bloody fingerprint
turns out to be ketchup from a hungry detective’s lunch.
So let’s get together Sherlock Holmes, Poirot, Columbo and that guy from CSI Miami who was
always taking off his sunglasses, and investigate some of the world’s greatest unsolved crimes.
Elizabeth Short was a lot shorter when they found her since somebody had cut her right
in half. She remains one of Los Angeles longest unsolved cases and The Black Dahlia, as she
is commonly known, inspired many a good book, movie and TV show through the years. The nickname
is likely linked to the 1946 film The Blue Dahlia, a crime thriller written by one of
the greatest detective novelists of all time; Raymond Chandler.
Elizabeth had a difficult life before her ugly death. She grew up in Massachusetts and
when she was just six years old, her father’s car was found parked on a bridge and it was
assumed that he had committed suicide after losing everything in the 1929 stock market
crash. But a letter arrived from California, years later, with her father apologising and
telling her he lived in California. He couldn’t find the “sorry I faked my death and ran
away” apology card at the gas station. Elizabeth eventually moved to join her father
in California and they lived together in LA for a while but she moved towns after they
had an argument and she flitted around various California locations. Until she was found
dead in Leimert Park, California. Right, I guess you want the grizzly details
now, don’t you? Maybe load up a video of puppies, you know, as back up. So, when Betty
Bersinger and her three-year old daughter found Elizabeth Short on 15th January 1947,
they thought she was a shop mannequin since the top and bottom halves of her were over
a foot apart and she was posed with her hands above her head. She had whole pieces of flesh
removed and was largely drained of blood, some of which was found in a cement sack nearby.
She also had a Glasgow Smile, where the corners of her mouth were sliced up to her ears.
There have been many suspects over the years, including Walter Bayley, a surgeon; Norman
Chandler, publisher of the Los Angeles Times; Mark Hansen, a Hollywood nightclub owner and
the most compelling suspect Dr George Hill Hodel. You can see why they made movies out
of the story, can’t you? There are so many rumours about The Black
Dahlia, such as her being a sex worker, and even the opposite, that she was unable to
have sex due to a birth defect, none of which have ever been substantiated.
Our next pair of murders involved a whole lot of beef. But it’s okay vegetarians,
no cows were harmed, just two of the world’s greatest rappers; Biggie and Tupac.
In 1994, Tupac survived a shooting outside New York's Quad Studios and he managed to
get into an elevator and get back upstairs to where Biggie and some of his crew were.
Tupac and Biggie were friends at this point but Tupac accused Biggie of knowing that the
shooting was going to take place. Biggie denied it but soon after released the song “Who
Shot Ya?” and, although probably just a taunt, Tupac took it to heart. Things escalated
quickly into a full east coast - west coast rivalry.
Rap beefs are pretty common, and they give the industry a lot of entertainment value,
often becoming a sort of x-rated soap opera. But whereas these days, it probably ends with
Azealia Banks being banned from twitter, Tupac and Biggie had a much more final ending when
both were gunned down, 6 months apart in ‘96 and ’97. No killer has been brought to justice
for either murder, there are just rumours of various gangsters and even the FBI being
responsible. Let’s have a break from murder, shall we?
No one died for this crime but, it could be said it actually represented a far more dangerous
threat than everything else on this list. On Christmas Eve, 2000, a hacker named “Leaf”
accessed a Navy computer in Washington and stole most of the source code for Exigent's
OS/COMET software, which is used to guide satellites and missiles. Some geeks have a
very weird idea of what makes a good present; what is wrong with reindeer print socks?
The FBI’s Chris Murray played down the importance of the hack, saying it wasn’t an intelligence
disaster since the data was unclassified. But it’s still pretty worrying that you
could potentially have some thirteen-year-old kid sitting on classified military information.
Although, to be fair, we did let George W Bush have the nuke codes, and he choked on
a pretzel. Leaf’s identity has never been discovered.
The hack was traced back to the University of Kaiserslautern in Germany but the trail
went dead. This is not the only time an unknown hacker
has messed with the US government. In 1989 a digital worm was created, called WANK, which
stood for Worms Against Nuclear Killers. It infected NASA computers and cost half a million
dollars of time and resources to fix. Computers infected with the virus were presented with
a message onscreen that said “Your system has been officially WANKed”. It’s rumoured
that one of the hackers, could have been Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange.
A heist now, one of the biggest unsolved hauls in history. On February 25th 2005, men disguised
in KLM uniforms, that’s the major Dutch airline, tricked their way out on to the tarmac
of Amsterdam’s airport, Schiphol. They had a stolen KLM cargo vehicle and they managed
to stop an armoured truck which was transporting uncut diamonds. They took the diamonds at
gun point, although no shots were fired, and then made off.
The truck was found abandoned but the identities of the robbers remains a mystery. It’s hard
to estimate how much their haul was worth, since the diamonds were uncut and the cutting
determines a lot of their value. But, it’s thought to haven been well over $100 million
so that’s not bad for an afternoon’s work. It’s been noted that this heist bares a
lot of similarities to the 2013 one in Antwerp, where men in security uniforms, driving the
vehicles of Belgian security forces, raced out on to the runway and took 120 boxes full
of diamonds that were being loaded onto a plane bound for Zurich. In both cases; no
guns were fired, they knew the exact time and location of the diamonds and the diamonds
were uncut, which also makes them harder to track. This one was only a haul of a meagre
$50 million though, hardly seems worth the bother, doesn’t it?
If there is one man you don’t want to mess with, it’s Vladimir Putin; he runs one of
the world’s most powerful countries, and he rides a horse without his shirt on, he’s
the manliest of men. But Alexander Litvinenko decided it would be a good idea to poke the
angry bear, and, rather than ripping him in half, the great bear knocked him off with
a sneaky bit of radioactive poisoning. This is all conjecture, of course.
Alexander Litvinenko was a former Russian FSB officer, who ended up living in London.
The Russian FSB are the successors of the infamous KGB. He left Russia under controversial
circumstances, having been investigated when he publically accused his superiors of ordering
the assassination of Russian tycoon Boris Berezovsky. Berezovsky had been a friend of
Putin’s from the early 90s but their relationship deteriorated soon after Putin left his position
as head of the FSB and became president in 2000.
Litvinenko was acquitted twice, in ‘99 and 2000 and subsequently fled to London, where
he worked with British intelligence and wrote two books, accusing the FSB of some shady
behaviour which helped Putin claim power. On 1st November 2006, he fell ill and was
hospitalised, quickly diagnosed as being poisoned by radioactive polonium-210, which is one
of the most toxic substances known to mankind. Obviously, access to the substance is strictly
controlled and there’s also the small fact that you need access to a nuclear reactor
to actually obtain it. So if you happen to be at a business meeting with two other Russians
and drink tea containing a lethal dose of polonium-210, just like Litvinenko did, then
it’s probably no accident. He died on 23rd November.
A British investigation pointed to Andrey Lugovoy, a Russian government agent, but nothing
could be proven since Russia refused to extradite him, so the case remains open. The only thing
we know for sure is if a Russian man offers you a glowing sandwich, politely tell him
you’re not hungry. Okay, let’s play a quick game of odd one
out. Which of these sounds like something you shouldn’t find at the beach; crabs,
sand, seagulls, disembodied human feet, ice cream. If you said “ice cream”, you had
a very depressing childhood. Along the coast of the Salish Sea, in British
Columbia, Canada some 20 human feet have been found on the shore in the last 10 years. Almost
all have been right feet. Also, almost all of the washed-up feet were wearing running
shoes. What’s happening then? A serial killer?
Fussy sharks? A really strong ankle high current? Well, a body can remain in the water for up
to three decades and feet can easily become detached through natural decomposition. So
the feet could have just washed up from bodies of people who have drowned at sea, but why
British Columbia? Nowhere else in the world have feet washed up on beaches in one location
with such frequency. Does British Columbia have its very own Dexter-style murderer on
the loose? One of the biggest problems in identifying
the source of the lost limbs is that the feet themselves become difficult to analyse, since
they produce a lot of adipocere. Adipocere is known as corpse wax and it’s an organic
substance produced by bacteria during the decomposition of body fat. It causes difficulties
in forensics because it’s very temperature dependant so unless you know the exact environment
the body was in during decomposition, it makes age estimation very difficult.
Some feet are from people believed to have committed suicide. There’s was also a case
of a missing fisherman in the area. It’s been suggested that some could have come from
the 2004 Asian tsunami, which would match some of the running shoe’s production locations
and the direction of the currents. Or perhaps it’s all the work of a serial killer who
has a grave dislike for those blasted runners who keep treading up his front yard every
morning. He did warn them! There’s a surprisingly large crime industry
around our next topic; after drugs, money laundering and arms dealing, it’s one of
the biggest illegal businesses in the game. What do you think it is? Carjacking? Armed
Robbery? Really awful parking? It’s actually, the romantic world of art
theft, which clocks in at about $6 billion annually. And the greatest art heist of all
time was from The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, in Boston, USA. In the early hours
of 18th March 1990, two men dressed as local police arrived at the museum and told the
security they’d been called for a disturbance in the yard. They then proceeded to truss
up the guards and walked off with an incredible collection of work from master painters such
as Degas, Rembrandt and Manet. It’s hard to put a price on it but some say it was almost
half a billion dollars of classic art. There were no real leads and none of the art has
resurfaced. The museum director Anne Hawley saw the bigger
picture and went as far as to release details for the thieves as to how best to store the
paintings, thinking it’s better that they at least survive intact, even if they are
hanging in some shady billionaire’s pool room.
It seems like it’s surprisingly easy to pick up a Picasso or steal a Schiele. In 2010,
a lone thief just broke a window and cut a padlock, and that’s all it took to get into
the Paris Museum of Modern Art and dance off with a Matisse and a Picasso, among others.
Not exactly what I would call state-of-the-art security. But rather than cashing in on his
millions, one of his accomplices claimed, while being questioned by the police, that
he had panicked and just thrown the paintings into a rubbish truck, rather than paint himself
into a corner and have a nasty brush with the law.
We’re staying with art for our last crime but now, rather than stealing, the creating
is the crime. It’s the world’s favourite graffiti artist,
the mysterious Banksy. He’s a British artist that grew out of the underground scene in
Bristol and his work, often highly political in nature, has appeared everywhere from London
to Disneyland to the Gaza strip. Pieces of his work have sold for over $1 million and
he’s even made an Oscar nominated documentary called Exit Through The Gift Shop.
But he, or she or them, has never revealed their true identity, perhaps to enjoy the
anonymity but probably due to the illegality of his work. It’s not just graffiti since
he’s also done things like produce fake British bank notes with Princess Dianna replacing
the Queen and “Banksy of England” written on them. He also messed with Paris Hilton’s
album launch in 2006 by switching out her CDs and replacing them with his own remixed
version, including tracks like Why am I Famous?, What Have I Done? and What Am I For?
A UK newspaper The Mail on Sunday claims to have proven that Banksy is actually a man
called Robin Gunningham, using geographic profiling to match his locations and his activity,
a process normally reserved for serious crime and tracking viral outbreaks. So maybe the
writing is on the wall for his anonymity but, until he’s caught red handed, the mystery
of this world-famous criminal-slash-artist will remain.