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Post by Joanna on Apr 21, 2015 18:11:47 GMT -5
Who Killed Elsa Nickell?
PANHANDLE, Tex. – Sprawled across the bed, the petite 24-year-old brunette lay lifeless, her radio playing on that hot summer day. There were visible bruises on her face and neck. In the kitchen were two unwashed wine glasses. Life would never be the same for many in Panhandle after Sunday, July 13, 1969.
Just the day before, Panhandle Police Chief Sam Teague had dropped by Elsa Romo Nickell’s home at 610 Maple Street to pick up his sons, Sam and Dan, and chatted with Elsa briefly while the boys finished mowing her lawn. As always, she offered them an ice cold Coca-Cola and a piece of candy. Teague had no inkling of the events that would transpire just hours later.
Elsa was a well-liked 24-year-old secretary who worked for Panhandle attorney Marshall Sherwood. Just four days before her death, she had started paperwork to file for divorce from Bill Nickell, her husband of nearly six years.
Elsa’s younger brother, Jesse Romo, came by twice that Sunday to check on his sister and the second time walked around to the back. The screen was latched, but the back door was open. There was no answer when he called her name, so Jesse cut the screen and went inside. There, to his horror, his sister lay dead, a pillow covering her face.
Carson County Sheriff John Nunn was the first to arrive on the scene. When he arrived, well-meaning neighbors had already cleaned up Elsa, changed her gown and the bedding and vacuumed the floor, not wanting her to be seen or photographed in the condition in which she was found. One woman washed the two wine glasses that had been left on the kitchen counter.
Teague, who was visiting his sister and brother-in law, arrived at the scene a few hours later. He was upset when he discovered the scene had been compromised and evidence destroyed. Prior to moving to Panhandle, Teague had worked for the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department in Colorado, west of Denver. The county was known to have the best solved murder rate in the US at that time. He knew what needed to be done to preserve a crime scene and gather evidence. It had been many years since there had been a murder in Panhandle, and protocol for handling a murder scene had not been followed.
Teague investigated as best as he could under the circumstances. A few hairs were discovered, so he went about fingerprinting and taking hair samples from anyone who could have possibly had a motive. Polygraph tests were administered. Bill Nickell, initially a suspect, was cleared of any involvement in the crime by the first test.
Some witnesses claimed to have seen a black car with “lots of chrome” in the driveway the night Mrs. Nickell was murdered. There was also a mysterious woman identified simply as “Mrs. G,” who wrote a letter. Police finally tracked her down and she provided some pertinent information, but it was not enough to crack the case.
The homicide shook the small town to its core. There were numerous break-ins, prowlers and scares that left everyone on edge. After many months of fear, an additional police officer was hired and lighting was added to dark streets, but the case grew cold. A disheartened Teague moved on to another job in another town.
According to Diane Teague Isch, Teague’s daughter, it was something he carried with him for the remainder of his life. “Dad said he was pretty sure it was one of two people who committed the crime, but wouldn’t tell anyone who the two people were,” she said. “He even said he was pretty sure which of the two was guilty, but there was nothing he could do about it.” Isch also said an FBI agent interviewed her father in the mid-1980s about the case, “but he still wouldn’t tell any of us what transpired.”
The Nickells bought the house at 610 Maple early in 1969. After Elsa and Bill separated, she was known for her work at the Children’s Home, where she would make arrangements to take one or two girls home for the weekend, so she could cook and make things for them.
Sheryl Sherwood Oliver, Marshall Sherwood’s daughter, remembered Elsa fondly. “I remember how much she loved and doted on me,” she said. “We would bake cookies. I thought she was so beautiful and she wore the most fashionable shoes. As a 4-year-old, my mother’s shoes were way too big for me, but Elsa’s fit me perfectly.” She also remembered how devastated her dad was when he was considered a suspect. A polygraph cleared him – he “passed with flying colors,” she insisted.
Oliver also remembered her dad taking the family to Amarillo the day Elsa was killed. They bought a bucket of chicken and had a picnic on the walking bridge at Amarillo College, where her father nervously stared all around for a very long time. She found out later it was because he thought someone might be after him. As a child, she never quite knew what became of Elsa, but when Oliver brought mentioned her one evening at dinner when she was in her teens, her father finally told her what happened. Her parents spoke fondly of Elsa and were heartbroken that her murder was never solved. Oliver said Elsa was one person who had a great impact on her – in life as well as in death.
In 2013, a person came forward and the Panhandle Police Department and Carson County Sheriff’s office were provided some previously unknown information on the 44-year-old case and they reopened the unsolved murder. Sheriff Loren Brand said he and Police Chief Sace Hardman have made some progress toward solving the crime. “We’ve had success in locating potential witnesses or sources of information from 1969 and have finally been able to establish both motive and opportunity concerning the murder of Elsa Nickell,” Brand said. “We needed to establish why anyone would want to kill the victim, who may have wanted Elsa Nickell dead, and also who would have had the opportunity to commit the crime. “Chief Hardman and I feel that we’ve been able to find a lot of pieces to an old puzzle, but we still have a long way to go,” he said.
If you have any information, even if you feel it is insignificant, call Brand at 806-537-3511, Hardman at 806-537-3225, or contact Amarillo Crime Stoppers at 806-374-4400.
Source: Margie Braidfoot, Lubbock Avalanche-Journal, April 6, 2015.
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Post by Joanna on Apr 19, 2015 13:44:56 GMT -5
1977 Murder of Debbie RosencransIn the 1950s, Chicago was stunned by three murder cases involving children ranging in age from 11 to 15. In October 1955, the bodies of brothers John and Anton Schuessler and their friend Robert Peterson were discovered stacked like firewood in a forest preserve parking lot. Fifteen months later, the bodies of Barbara Grimes, 15, and her 13-year-old sister, Patricia, were found frozen on a country road near Willow Springs. It was just seven months later that the unthinkable happened again. In August 1957, an unwary fisherman reeled in two oil drums from the waters of Montrose Harbor and discovered the dismembered body of Judith Mae Andersen, which had been divided between the two containers. The 1955 case was ultimately solved after 40 years. In 1955, Kenneth Hansen, associate of the late and notorious Silas Jayne, was convicted of killing the three boys, and died while serving a 300-year sentence. The other two cases remain unsolved to this day.
In the early 1970s the Chicago area was marked by several police killings and a rash of murders of teenage girls, an infant, and one 24-year-old woman. Yet, until John Wayne Gacy killed 33 young men and boys in the late 1970s, there appeared to be progressively less fanfare about these cases.
Amy Alden, 15, was featured in the newspapers for just one day after she was found strangled to death September 22, 1972. The following day, Deborah Koslarek and Carolyn Vandermolen, two teenagers from the Southwest Side, made headline news when they were found shot – execution-style – in Washington Park. That case disappeared from the newspapers within a week, and neither was solved.
Five years later, the photograph of an unidentified girl in a hospital bed appeared the papers with a plea for anyone who recognized her to come forward. The unconscious teenager had been bludgeoned and died 12 days after she was discovered in Schiller Park Woods. Her name was Deborah Lynn Rosencrans (above), and to this day, no one has been arrested for her murder. Friends Debra Kundert and Charlene Catizone wish the case could be reopened and her killer brought to justice. They regret that her death appears to have been forgotten. The following poem was found among the belongings of Debbie Rosencrans:
Respect One Another
Be misty-eyed with each kiss goodbye, And regret the return with a wave and a sigh. Consider each night as you gaze above. But prelude to another day with your love.
Rejoice at her or his voice. Find delights when she or he writes. Though around you people may call it square, It’s a well-rounded world with someone to share.
On September 6, 1977, a young man hitchhiking on Irving Park Road near Schiller Park Woods heard moans coming from the underbrush. Upon investigation, he discovered a young girl wrapped in a bloody blanket bound with a rope knotted like a hangman’s noose. He hailed a passing driver, who notified police.
The girl appeared to have been hit with a meat mallet. For almost two weeks, she lay unconscious and unidentified in Resurrection Hospital on Chicago’s far Northwest Side. Anxious parents with missing daughters called Chicago police from around the country; some joined local parents who visited the hospital and filed past her bed to rule out the possibility she was their daughter. When the comatose teenager died September 18, she was still without a name. Then on October 3, Deborah Lynn Rosencrans, 16, was identified, first by friends, then by her maternal grandmother, Dorothea Jaeger.
At the time of her disappearance, Debbie, as she was known, had been living temporarily at the home of Patricia Weinacker at 2027 North Honore Street. Mrs. Weinacker’s daughter Charlene and Debbie had known each other since the two girls attended Monroe Elementary School together at 3651 West Schubert Avenue. “She was my best friend,” says Catizone, still feeling the loss after 38 years. “She stood up at my wedding, and then I never saw her again. It was eerie, how she gave me her St. Christopher medal as a wedding present and then in less than two weeks this awful thing happened to her.”
Debbie had lived with her divorced mother and two siblings at 6420 North Newgard Avenue until around September 1st. At the time of the girl’s disappearance, her mother, Patricia Nash, had moved to Florida and was honeymooning with her new husband Albert.
“We all loved Debbie as though she was a member of our family,” Catizone’s older sister Debra Kundert says today. “At first we weren’t worried when Debbie didn’t come home,” she remembers. “We thought she probably spent the night with other friends.” After time passed and they became alarmed, she and another sister, Terri Weinacker, asked police to allow them to view photographs of the unconscious victim. However, because of a miscommunication concerning the dates involved in Debbie’s disappearance – last time seen and when she was discovered – police insisted the hospitalized girl found in Schiller Park Woods could not be Debbie. It was several days and Debbie had died before they acquiesced.
“She looked different because she was so battered,” Kundert says of the police photos, “and I couldn’t see her scar.” She explains: “When Debbie was little, her brother accidentally shot her with a bow and arrow and it left a mark on her head. Her grandmother told us to be sure to look for that mark when we viewed the pictures.” Kundert says she knew in her heart that it was Debbie in the photos, but she just didn’t want to face it by making a definite statement.
Kundert’s brother Patrick Weinacker and family friend Irv Lorenz took on the horrific task of viewing the body to be sure – and sure they were. To everyone’s dismay, the dead girl was their dear friend Debbie. Once the positive identification was made, they broke the news to Debbie’s grandmother, who also viewed the body. “Fortunately,” recalls Kundert, “she was somewhat braced for the news, since we’d believed it was Debbie for so long.”
Debbie’s mother was another matter. She traveled by train from Orlando and arrived at Union Station, only to discover, to her horror, that her daughter, whom she thought had been in an accident, had been brutally murdered.
“Debbie really loved her mother,” Kundert says, “but she felt left out, not being included in the move to Florida and her mother’s plans. Her mother was ‘getting things ready’ for Debbie in their new home down there, but that seemed to be dragging out, and every time they talked on the phone, Debbie would be upset.” Kundert explains that Debbie, like any teenager, hated to leave her friends, but she missed her mother and was looking forward to joining her once the honeymoon was over. On September 5th, her plan was gruesomely aborted when someone bludgeoned her and left her for dead in the woods.
While the investigation of her murder was free of the jurisdictional conflicts such as those present in the murders of Barbara and Patricia Grimes two decades earlier, it was not free of dramatic twists, and ultimately, it, too, defied resolution.
Police administered 14 polygraph tests, according to newspaper accounts, to Jerry Then, the 22-year-old man who had discovered the girl in Schiller Park Woods, and he failed all of them. Then claimed that police harassment had been so relentless and traumatic he was forced to give up his apartment in Franklin Park and move back into his mother’s home in Elk Grove Village. Elaine Then defended her son: “No wonder people are afraid to get involved,’ she lamented to a Chicago Tribune reporter. “[Jerry] was only trying to do good and look where it’s gotten him.” Mrs. Then complained that her attempt to engage an attorney to represent her son had resulted in a request for a $1,400.00 retainer and suggestion that she mortgage her house to pay his fees.
Then stuck to his story that he’d been walking at Irving Park and River roads and heard moans coming from the woods. “It looked like something wrapped in some kind of cloth and a blanket ... I went to touch the front of it and my hands were all wet with blood.” Then said he splashed water from a puddle into the girl’s face, trying to revive her, to no avail. At that point, he flagged down a car traveling west and asked the driver to get the police.
Leads were scarce. Police sought information about a new boyfriend Debbie had mentioned to her friends. That his name was “Michael” was all anyone seemed to know. Debra Kundert recalls that Debbie, who was prone to adopting orphaned creatures, was terribly worried about the fate of her three cats that she was boarding during her transition. Left to pay for the boarding costs herself, she had been babysitting for another friend, Sandra Diorka, to earn money to cover the fees.
Debbie was scheduled to visit a friend the evening she disappeared but never arrived at the friend’s home. The next morning, September 6th, according to Kundert, Diorka woke up early with a pounding headache. She’d heard the phone, but thought she’d also heard someone – a female – calling to her, possibly from outside the Diorka home. Was it a dream? she wondered. Perhaps, she thought later, it was Debbie crying out for help.
When detectives questioned Debra Kundert, she recalls they seemed suspicious because of her abundant knowledge about Debbie and the people in her life. “They were anxious to solve the case,” she says today. She and her sister are fairly certain that someone Debbie knew was responsible for her death, that she would not have gotten into a car with a stranger. “She had a naïve quality about her,” Kundert says, “and she was so concerned about her cats, she might have trusted someone who offered to take her somewhere to facilitate helping her find them homes or deliver them to a shelter in Hinsdale where she was thinking of taking them.”
Kundert believes the person responsible had an accomplice or at least a sympathizer. A detective told her that during Debbie’s stay in the hospital, prior to her death, a nurse received a call from someone who asked, “How is Debbie?” According to Kundert, “That was before she was identified and it was a female voice. It was probably someone involved with the killer.”
Catizone and Kundert both describe Deborah Rosencrans as a beautiful girl with striking green eyes and a sweet personality. Despite their close friendship with Debbie, they were excluded from her private, family-only funeral and graveside service. As the 38th anniversary of her death draws near, they both maintain hope that someone will come forward and provide information that will spark interest in the case and lead to Debbie’s killer.Source: Tamara Shaffer, Ray Johnson (Chicago History Cop), April 17, 2015.
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Post by Joanna on Apr 17, 2015 21:01:54 GMT -5
'Champ': American 'Nessie'That something lurks in the depths of Lake Champlain has been the source of debate for more than a century. Sightings of the mysterious creature affectionately known as "Champ," date to pre-colonial times and are still occurring today.
Lake Champlain is huge, almost 125 miles long, it borders two states, Vermont and New York. It is very deep and very old and for hundreds of years, people have reported seeing something out in the lake that isn't supposed to be there. "I had my doubts too, it's almost like Santa Claus, is it real or is it not real? When I finally saw it for myself, it totally, it just amazed me,” Katy Elizabeth says. She is the founder of a research group called "Champ Search" and has written two books on the subject: Water Horse of Lake Champlain and Water Horse of Lake Champlain II. Her initial skepticism has now transitioned into a dedicated quest to prove Champ's existence. She has spent years on the lake, logging some convincing evidence, including both video and audio data. She believes the creature is a prehistoric remnant called Tanystropheus. “A Tanystropheus,” she explains, “had a long neck, it was a lizard like animal, the neck was longer than it's body and tail combined, so it was a very bizarre looking creature, had webbed feet."
There have been many photos of Champ, but one of the most convincing (above) was taken in 1977 by Sandra Mansi, a Vermont resident. The original is now located at the Echo Lake Aquarium in Burlington and treated with almost iconic reverence. Although there remains speculation as to what it shows, the photo has been deemed authentic. Linda Bowden of the Echo Lake Aquarium describes what happened. "Sandra Mansi was advised to have that photo authenticated and so she did. She sent it to the University Of Arizona, their photo department, and had them take a look at it, now this is back in the 70s, early 80s, she took that photograph in 1977, so when the photograph came back, they said it was a photograph that had not been touched up in any way, and of course, that was way before you can do the Photoshopping you can do today."
Mansi described the experience as life-changing and other eyewitnesses echo this sentiment. Christine Heberts' family has owned a boat house on the lake for decades and her two sightings more than 25 years ago remain as clear to her as if it had happened yesterday. "I could see something coming, there was no ripple in the water, it was just magnificent. It got here under the light and of course the ramp was here so it didn't know what to do, because the ramp was in the way, it turned around, it looked just like a dinosaur. My mother was with me a couple weeks later and we were in that window again and the same thing happened, same thing, only this one wasn't green and it wasn't as big, it was brown, and it was smaller."
Christine's experience tallies with the belief of many that there is more than one animal living in the lake. Their existence has provided more than just a mystery for people to debate, Champ has also been an economic boost to struggling local economies like Port Henry N.Y. The town even greets people with a large sign documenting area sightings dating to the 1800s. Matt Brassard, Port Henry's Deputy Mayor, says, “It's national, it's worldwide. You know, you have the one in Scotland and this one, so it brings quite a few people through the village, it really does."
The enigma of Champ’s existence will continue until proof is found. Those who have seen the creature are certain something lives within Champlain’s deep dark waters. “When they start smirking, that's when I say, I don't care if you believe me or not,” Hebert relates. “It doesn't matter. I know what I saw and you can't take it away from me."
"Until you see it for yourself,” Elizabeth adds, “you're not going to believe it, there's no way! It's been a life-changing thing, it really has."Source: WGRZ News, October 25, 2014.
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Post by Joanna on Apr 16, 2015 17:25:17 GMT -5
Haunted Building to Be Razed to Make Way for HotelFORT COLLINS, Colo. – It's been a carriage house, a hay loft, a repair shop and a car dealership. But through its long life in Old Town Fort Collins, the garage near the corner of Walnut Street and Mountain Avenue has mainly held stories. The white brick garage in the parking lot of the former Armadillo Restaurant sits on the site of a future 165-room Old Town hotel that was announced late last year. The property is owned by Walnut Street 354, LLC, part of Bohemian Companies. The Armadillo, which used the garage for storage since the 1970s, closed two years ago. The property will be leased by Loveland's McWhinney real estate company and Denver-based Sage Hospitality, which will manage the hotel and open a restaurant. A spokesman for McWhinney said the garage will be de-constructed prior to construction of the hotel, which is still in the planning stages. A timeline for its construction has yet to be determined.
With its days numbered, tour company Fort Collins Tours is still taking groups through the garage as part of its haunted tour offerings. Given its dark past, the white brick building has been a spooky cornerstone in Fort Collins' "haunted" history. "It's one of the three most haunted, maybe one of the two most haunted (places in Fort Collins)," Lori Juszak, of Fort Collins Tours, said of the garage. "We've had some really strange, unexplainable things happen there."
Pacing around the property's perimeter Friday, Shane Sheridan, lead tour guide for Fort Collins Tours, used a wooden cane to point out the building's original foundation and where its footprint has changed since. "Local history is a bit dodgy," he said, "... [but] we believe this is actually the old carriage house for James and Eva Howe."
The Howes, a couple who moved to Fort Collins in the late 1800s, landed in local history books after James, drunk and in broad daylight, slit Eva's throat in the front yard of the couple's home April 4, 1888. An angry mob of Fort Collins residents decided to take matters into their own hands, broke James out of his jail cell that night and hanged him in Larimer County's first and only lynching, according to Juszak's book, Ghosts of Fort Collins.
"In addition to the Howe murder and lynching there are, depending on which accounts you believe, between three and four suicides that are associated with this property as well," Sheridan said. According Juszak's book, one suicide took place on the property in the 1960s, when the garage was a Rambler car dealership and its general manager came in one morning to find one of his salesmen hanging from a beam in the dealership's showroom. Other accounts contend the garage was also used to store wreckage from a 1951 United Airlines flight that crashed on Crystal Mountain west of Fort Collins, killing all 50 people on board.
As the building's uses have changed over the years, it transitioned into a dedicated storage space for the Armadillo Restaurant and is filled with old benches, stacked boxes and dusty restaurant booths. Since the restaurant's closure, the garage has been mainly used by Fort Collins Tours, which opened in 2011. Juszak said the company hosts tours at haunted spots in Old Town year round – about five per week out of season and up to 40 per week during the fall.
Over the past four years, there have been several strange occurrences reported at the garage during ghost tours, Juszak said. "We've seen multiple full-body apparitions, full silhouettes (in pictures)," Sheridan confirmed, adding that once, while getting her picture taken inside the garage, a woman said she felt something grab her ankle. In the photograph, Sheridan said you could see the fuzzy image of what looked like a fist near the woman's ankle. And while he's never experienced anything other than "ominous feelings," Sheridan said some of the company's other guides, "don't like to come here at all." Once, while giving a tour to a Colorado State tourism class, Juszak said she had her back to the empty back half of the building when she heard a stack of plastic chairs moving behind her. When she looked, however, there was nobody there.
So will the garage be missed when the property is transformed for the Old Town hotel project? "From an entertainment standpoint, yes," Juszak said. "From a personal standpoint, it's a place that honestly gives me the creeps. I'm not unhappy to never have to go in there again."Source: Erin Undell, The Coloradoan, April 16, 2015.
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Post by Joanna on Apr 15, 2015 23:21:04 GMT -5
I have cousins in Fall River and when I went to visit them one summer when I was in my teens, we went to the location in Freetown Forest where Drew and his followers practiced Satanism and the women were killed. It was getting dark by the time we got to what was supposed to be the spot where everything happened and we heard what sounded like chanting. At the time, we were all terrified that there were Satanists practicing blood rituals and they would sacrifice us to the devil. So we ran like crazy back to the car. It was probably just another bunch of kids out looking for thrills and pretending they were witches or devil worshipers, but when I went back home to Maine, my cousins and the other two kids who were with us were still talking about it and wondering if the Satanists had gotten their license plate number and would come looking for them.
Carl Drew claimed that he didn't kill the women and that it was Karen Murphy, who was around 18 at the time, who killed them. Murphy made a deal with the prosecution and testified against Drew and she claimed that she was possessed by the devil when the murders took place. She said that the reason the women were murdered was as sacrifices to Satan. One strange thing about the case is that a police detective who went undercover and managed to infiltrate the cult claimed that Murphy, not Drew, was the leader of the cult and he wasn't convinced that Drew was present when the murders occurred. Drew appealed his conviction and requested a new trial, but his appeals were denied.
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Post by Joanna on Apr 15, 2015 22:45:31 GMT -5
The Mysterious Berkeley BoomFor more than a month, residents around Berkeley have wondered online about a recurring nighttime boom that has woken babies, freaked out pets and set off car alarms. The sound, which has become known on Twitter as the #BerkeleyBoom, has been heard around the city, though it has been concentrated primarily in the southern part of town. On numerous occasions, police have investigated, but were unable to locate the source and found no indication of a crime. City spokesman Matthai Chakko said Monday there have been no calls to Berkeley’s 311 service center about the sound. So its source remains a mystery.
On Sunday, a Twitter user named LP described the “Loudest #Berkeleyboom yet. Scared me half to death. @berkeleyside – seriously – is this still ‘fireworks’?!”
Heather Hardison added: “I could hear all my neighbors up talking about it in startled voices. What the heck is it?”
Wrote cirus206: “I might not know what #berkeleyboom is but damn would I like to find out.”
Some have likened the sound to a gunshot, while others said it sounded more like a pipe bomb or flash grenade, or perhaps just fireworks or “a single firework.” One said it sounded “M80-ish… but more concussive.”
Many have adopted an attitude of bemusement online about the phenomenon (“What’s so classic about this is we’re watching Mary Poppins w/our kid and she’s afraid of the Admiral’s booms!”). Others have also described it as “very scary,” and have not been pleased about the repeated interruptions.
“Another loud boom, seems unfriendly,” David Heron Wallace wrote. “Where Berkeley once stood for radicalism, must we now stand being cool, and collected?”
On some nights, reports have been scattered and infrequent, but on at least six nights, slews of tweets have come in around the same time and seem to confirm the existence of the notable sound. The nights with the most reports reviewed by Berkeleyside have been Feb. 26 and March 3, 15, 17, 25 and 29. Most of the incidents have taken place from around 8-10 p.m. There’s no discernible pattern as far as days of the week.
Berkeleyside has twice reported on the boom, first on February 26. In that instance, calls about a single “loud report,” in police parlance, caused the the 911 switchboard lines to light up, reported dispatchers over the scanner. Police went out to the 2800 block of Acton Street at 8:40 p.m., but ultimately didn’t find anything.
Wrote Paul Rauber on Twitter: “Kid wanted to know what huge report just now was. Treasure Island shelling W. Berkeley? I said ask @berkeleyside, they’ll know.”
That night, Tajalli Love wrote that the noise sounded like a small explosion from a pipe bomb or something similar. From Alcatraz Avenue and Sacramento Street, Love added, “Windows shook.”
Dan Bostonweeks wrote that he “saw a flash from 55th & San Pablo before the bang.”
Two nights later, Feb. 28, a handful of people thought they heard it again.
Wrote Barbara Henry on Berkeleyside’s Facebook page: “So, I hope that whoever or whatever is causing the loud startling explosive sounds in South Berkeley every other night this week is found out soon. It is not amusing.”
The next night, one local resident said he thought he had found the cause. Jim Emerson said, also on Berkeleyside’s Facebook page, “Explosive mystery solved in South Berkeley. For second night a loud boom rattled windows, vibrated floorboards and set off car alarms. This time (maybe it was about 9:30?) an orange colored, apparently homemade, fireworks rocket streaked upwards in the sky and really spooked my dog while he was attending to his evening business. It appeared to originate near Ashby and Sacramento, though it have been closer to Alcatraz.”
March 3, many local residents said they heard the sound a third time, around 9:40 p.m. Berkeley Police spokeswoman Officer Jennifer Coats said officers did respond to a loud report call that night, but didn’t find anything.
The #BerkeleyBoom hashtag appears to have originated Feb. 26 when Twitter user Domain Awareness wrote: “The Great #BerkeleyBoom Mystery @berkeleyside will get to the bottom of this ASAP.”
Since then, at least 70 people have pondered the boom online, sharing theories and information about it on Twitter. The label built momentum as the booms continued, causing even those who had not heard the sound to weigh in. Wrote Fire Catcher: “This #Berkeleyboom sounds like a catchy new exercise craze like zumba.”
Some wondered if it might be linked to the AC Transit hydrogen refueling station at San Pablo Avenue and 47th Street, or to a PG&E equipment problem of some kind. But officials reported no outages or associated problems.
Berkeley nights were largely free of the boom for the better part of the next two weeks. Then, March 15, a slew of new reports came in around South Berkeley. And roughly a dozen more tweets about the sound surfaced over the next couple days.
Wrote Eric Smillie: “Now I think every noise is a #Berkeleyboom,” to which Brock Winstead responded, “Wait, I just heard a boom. Same boom? Competing booms? Boomtown?! I need to lie down.” Smillie replied: “How to know if a mystery boom is the mystery boom? Booms beget booms.”
On March 25, about a dozen people said they heard the sound around 8:20 p.m. Most of those reports were in South Berkeley, but some said they thought they heard it north of downtown, at Hearst and Martin Luther King Jr. Way, and on University Avenue at Curtis Street.
“IT’S BACK,” wrote one person on Twitter. Another described it as a “big echo-y bang near McGee,” adding: “I’m not going out there.”
Another noted that it was louder that before, from Ward Street and San Pablo Avenue, but said there were “No smoke plumes visible.”
Source: Emilie Raguso, Berkeleyside, March 31, 2015.
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Post by Joanna on Apr 14, 2015 0:19:18 GMT -5
Was 1977 Abduction of 5-Year-Old the First of Three Murders?It’s a case that has haunted investigators almost four decades. Five-year-old Stephanie Boller (above) left her Beaver Falls home around 1 p.m. on Saturday, January 8, 1977, to visit the home of a friend. Unfortunately, upon arrival, her friend’s mother asked the little girl to return home because three of her children were sick with the flu, after which the woman watched as the fair-haired child, wearing a green winter coat and boats, walked in the direction of her house. Robin Sell, Stephanie’s mother, later told police she was away from home that day from 3 to 7 p.m. and when she returned and couldn’t find her daughter, she reported her missing. Neighbors were questioned, but no one had seen the child and a massive search party was formed to scour the neighborhood.
Then-coroner Harper Simpson was also a member of an Army Reserve unit that mobilized to assist in the search. “So our whole unit went up to Mount Washington and moved through there with everyone else searching, prying open trunks of abandoned vehicles, going in abandoned buildings, going through cellars, and everything, looking for this little 5-year-old girl,” he recalled.
For months, police pursued leads that led nowhere. Then, on November 6 of that year, men walking through Bradys Run Park in search of cans and bottles spotted what appeared to be human remains. Police determined the men had found Stephanie. She had been hit on the head and apparently died from a skull fracture.
Police Officer Dick Pegg was one of the first to respond to the park. “And at that time, Officer Jones and I remained (at the scene) overnight, and we remember it was cold, just like the day it was when she went missing,” he remembered.
Police don’t believe Stephanie was killed in the park and because so many months had passed between her disappearance and the discovery of her body, there was no physical evidence upon which to rely. “That’s what made it frustrating because we had nothing other than she came up missing on 12th Avenue and then they find her remains. It was a very difficult case,” former Beaver Falls Police Chief Harry Pease said. He had been a sergeant at the time the child went missing. “It bothered all of us a great deal, all of us, I think,” he added.
Pegg has never forgotten the case either – he still carries photos and newspaper articles about Stephanie – and continues to hope the case will one day be resolved. “There are several cases that stick with you forever and this is one of them,” he declared. “It was – I think what was stark about it was she was such a little girl. Even to this day, when I look at my daughter, who’s well into her 40s, I think what would Stephanie be doing, what was her contribution. This case has been with me always since the beginning.”
* * * Woman at the Bus Stop. Around 8:30 on the morning of Wednesday, November 23, 1977, a woman stood alone at a Port Authority Transit stop in Wilkinsburg, Penn., waiting for the bus that would take her to her job in downtown Pittsburgh. The 24-year-old had grown up in Wilkinsburg and she and her husband were remodeling a home they had purchased on nearby Rebecca Avenue. The bus stop was close by on Ardmore Boulevard. As she waited in the chilly November air, a motorist pulled his car off the street, partially into an alley and onto the paved area of an auto repair garage – right next to her. “To the best of my recollection,” the woman recalled during a 2011 interview, “... he made a suggestion I did not appreciate.” Something about the man instinctually heightened the woman’s sense of danger. When she threatened to call the police, he made a U-turn on Ardmore and headed back toward the Parkway East. In 1977, there weren’t any cell phones, so she would have had to walk to a nearby business, home or perhaps to Johnston Elementary School across the street to make the call. The man left and she did not report the incident to police. Nonetheless, she wrote down the red-and-white Ohio license plate number and noted the man was driving a blue car. “I didn’t think about it anymore,” she admitted.
Beth Lynn Barr. At approximately 2:15 p.m. that same day, Beth Lynn Barr, age 6, left Johnston Elementary School on Franklin Avenue, which dismissed an hour early because of the Thanksgiving holiday. She crossed the street with classmates and began the two-fifths-of-a-mile walk to her Princeton Boulevard home alone, making her way up Ardmore in the direction of the WTAE-TV station – past the bus stop where the man had approached the woman hours before. Beth turned left on to Marlboro Avenue, then immediately right on to Traymore Avenue. At this point, a witness saw a man carrying a young girl fitting Beth’s description to a dull blue sedan with red-and-white license plates. This was the last time anyone saw the child. Beth’s father, Charles Barr, was a Wilkinsburg police officer and when his daughter didn’t come home after school, the police force sprang into action.
That evening, officers knocked on the woman’s Rebecca Avenue door as they canvassed the neighborhoods near the school. She shared the information about the man who had approached her that morning. Her description of the man and car closely matched that of the witness who saw Beth (above) being carried to a vehicle. Police described the suspect as a white male in his 40s, 5'10" to 5'11" and of medium build with medium brown, curly hair. He was wearing a grey suit and square, blue-tinted sunglasses. “He would have reminded me of someone with an office job,” the first witness said, adding that he was possibly wearing a necktie. She also remembered “he was not an attractive person.” Later, the lady admitted she was surprised the police didn’t seem particularly interested in her encounter. “I never heard anymore about it,” she said, noting more than a year had passed before police contacted her again.
Investigators thought they had found the car involved at Conley’s Motor Inn (now the site of a Home Depot) on Business Route 22 in Wilkins Township. The vehicle belonged to a car rental agency located in the motel and, according to records, had not been signed out on the day of, or near, Beth’s abduction. A search of the blue car with red-and-white Ohio plates turned up nothing. Wilkins police and other local law enforcement agencies assisted Wilkinsburg officers in combing woods behind Conley’s, but there were no clues. Nothing turned up during the search of various houses and woods in Wilkinsburg either.
On December 10, 1977, there seemed to be a break in the case. Police arrested a McCandless Township salesman in connection with the kidnaping, but charges were dropped when it was established he had been in Johnstown that day. Both the salesman and his brother agreed to submit to polygraph examinations. Lt. Robert Thomas, then officer in charge of the Wilkinsburg Police Department, said in 1979 that he wasn’t positive the brothers ever took the tests or, if so, what the results showed.
A psychic was called in soon after the abduction and some seven to nine others recounted “visions” they had concerning Beth Barr’s whereabouts, some of which included “water” and “grave markers.”
In March 1979, Joseph Leonard stumbled upon a partially exposed skeleton as he walked through the woods off Johnston Road in Monroeville, across from the portion of Restland Memorial Cemetery where the duck pond is located. There was no doubt the remains were those of Beth Barr. Though brush, dirt and leaves covered her bones, she remained dressed in the red pants outfit, blue tennis shoes and plaid coat she had worn to school that fateful day in November 1977. Thomas delivered the sad news to Donna and Charlie Barr and their son James at their Princeton Boulevard home exactly 16 months to the day and within the same hour that Beth disappeared.
The mounded grave appeared more “piled” than shoveled, former Monroeville Detective Willis Greenaway said at the time. He noted that according to the crime lab, bodies sometimes surface following freeze-thaw conditions.
Autopsy revealed the little girl had been stabbed several times in the chest. Then Assistant Chief Deputy Coroner Anthony Pankowski indicated the condition of the skeleton was consistent with the child’s having been dead since the time of her disappearance. He also said there was no way to determine if she had been sexually molested, though the lab intended to run tests on her clothing.
Some newspapers reported the area adjacent to Restland Cemetery had been searched following the child’s disappearance, however, police officials at the time claimed the area had never been searched.
The woman waiting for the bus that morning said police tracked her down at work and interviewed her a second time, which she believed was around the time Beth’s body was discovered. “I said to them, ‘What ever happened?’” They explained the car had been traced to the rental agency, which is about three miles driving distance from where Beth Barr’s body was eventually located. When the woman asked about the car, she was informed the rental agency manager said it did not leave the premises that day. “I found that absolutely astounding,” she said. “Obviously, they found the car. But the investigation never went anywhere. Frankly, that was the last I ever heard from them.”
Barbara Jean Lewis. Through the years, the woman who had the presence of mind to write down the plate number has thought about the little girl who never made it home. A few years ago, she and an old friend discussed how they had once gone to see “Walkin’ Rosie,” the apparition of a woman said to leave her tomb at night and walk about Restland Memorial Cemetery. The friend recalled that Beth’s body had been discovered adjacent to the cemetery – and that her killer had never been named. The same friend mentioned a cold case story about Beth’s murder that appeared in Gateway Star Newspapers in 2003. The witness looked it up online and found herself mentioned as the “woman at the bus stop.” But as she read the article, something bothered her. The story noted that the day Beth Barr was abducted, three newspapers in the former Dardanell Publications weekly chain – the Penn Hills Progress, Churchill Area Progress and Wilkinsburg Gazette – all ran a story about the one-year anniversary of the strangulation murder of 30-year-old Barbara Jean Lewis (above) of Penn Hills, a woman whose body was found in a trash bin in the Blackridge Civic Association parking lot on Long Road in Churchill. Ms. Lewis’s belongings were recovered in a wooded area off Princeton Boulevard in Wilkinsburg, the street where the Barr family lived. And then came the sentence that hit a little too close to home: the one that indicated Lewis, too, had been waiting at a bus stop on Long Road in Penn Hills on the morning of November 19, 1976 – the day she was murdered! “There were just too many coincidences,” the witness reasoned. “There’s got to be a connection.”
In fact, there has been some speculation that the killing of Barbara Lewis was the last in a string of what are believed to be serial murders in western Pennsylvania in 1976 and 77. And just a few weeks before Beth Barr disappeared, two boys walking in the woods at Bradys Run Park found the skeletal remains of Stephanie Ann Boller of Beaver Falls, an apparent homicide victim – and there were similarities in the cases.
Some investigators believe Beth Barr’s abductor was likely a pedophile and there might not have been a connection to the incident at the bus stop earlier in the day. In retrospect, the woman feels very fortunate she was standing on the passenger side of the car that day 37 years ago. She prefers not to think about what might have happened if she’d been on the driver’s side. “That could have made a world of difference,” she observed.
In retrospect, the bus stop witness thinks Wilkinsburg police “botched the case” by holding on to it so long before turning it over to Allegheny County police detectives and refusing help from more experienced Pittsburgh police detectives, and she isn’t alone. A man, who identified himself as the son of a former Turtle Creek policeman, also contacted Zandy Dudiak after reading an account of Beth Barr’s murder. According to the gentleman, his father was at Keller’s Hardware Store in Turtle Creek around the time of the little girl’s abduction, when a man walked in and bought a shovel and a few other items that raised the policeman’s suspicions. The son remembered his father called Wilkinsburg police with the information, but no one ever checked out the lead. Had the man who kidnaped Beth continued along Ardmore Boulevard, it is not out of the question that he might have been in Turtle Creek, taking the back roads to Monroeville.
Eight months after Beth Barr was laid to rest at Woodlawn Cemetery in Wilkinsburg, the witness and her husband relocated to a distant city. “I always wonder why I moved away from Wilkinsburg,” she pondered. She might have answered that question several years ago when she began to feel “not so safe” in the city where she had lived more than 20 years. That’s the reason she and her family moved again. “It’s a shame,” she reflected, referring to the fact Beth Barr’s killer has never been found. “I still don’t believe it’s a lost cause. Someone’s going to come forward.”
___________
Almost 40 years after the death of Barbara Lewis, many residents in Penn Hills still remember her name, but local police have no idea who killed her. She worked as a secretary in downtown Pittsburgh and when she didn’t show up for work November 19, 1976, her coworkers alerted the authorities. When her body was found, it was discovered some of her undergarments were inside-out and autopsy revealed she had been strangled.
Years later, the death of the seemingly ordinary Penn Hills resident is still a mystery. “Once cases go cold, they mostly just lay there and get colder,” Penn Hills police Chief Howard Burton remarked. In the aftermath of her death, Burton remembered stopping cars on Long Road to see if commuters saw anything involving the young woman. “Penn Hills was a bedroom community with 70,000 blue-collar workers at the time,” he continued. “Something like that [the murder] was unheard of.” According to Burton, not many tips have come in to the department since her death.
Penn Hills native Zandy Dudiak, a former reporter and editor for Gateway Newspapers, recalled being able to see the spot where the body was found from her bedroom window and riding the bus with Barbara Lewis’s sister. “It was a scary time. There were a lot of murders around [Western Pennsylvania] in the 1970s,” she said. “I remember being terrified driving home from college some nights.”
Dudiak has written about the murder and several other cold cases during her career. Now a communications coordinator with Mercy Health Systems, Dudiak is writing about another cold case, the death of Beth Lynn Barr, on her blog One Day in November, whokilledbethbarr.wordpress.com. She draws parallels between the deaths of Lewis and Bar. “I have no idea if they're connected,” she admitted, “but there’s a number of coincidences there that will make you think twice.” The two homicides took place almost exactly one year apart, both Lewis and Barr were near bus stops when they went missing and the coat Lewis was wearing, as well as her purse, were found close to the Barr home.
Allegheny County police handled the Lewis investigation and Burton conceded he isn’t familiar with the specifics of Barr’s death, but unlike Dudiak, he doesn’t believe the cases are related.
Crime author John Cameron speculated that both Barr and Lewis may have been killed by the same man, Edward Wayne Edwards, the subject of his book, It’s Me, Edward Wayne Edwards, the Serial Killer You Never Heard Of. Cameron noted that Edwards was released from probation in Western Pennsylvania around the time Barr and Lewis were killed. The former parole board analyst got to know Edwards while working for the Montana Board of Pardons and Parole in Deer Lodge Prison. Edwards was convicted in the slayings of three individuals, one of them a boy who lived with Edwards and his wife. He was sentenced to life in prison and died in 2011. Although there was a 25-year difference in the ages of Lewis and Barr and the method of killing and modus operandi do not match, Cameron doesn’t think Edwards should be ruled out as a suspect. “He killed just to kill,” the author insisted.
Sources: Megan Lavey-Heaton, PennLive, April 6, 2015; Kelsey Shea, TribLIVE, January 7, 2014; and Zandy Dudiak, The Patch, November 23, 2011.
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Post by Joanna on Apr 10, 2015 1:11:46 GMT -5
Fork-tongued 'Devil' pleads guilty in gruesome murder caseLANCASTER COUNTY, S.C. – The closing comment from by prosecutor Randy Newman in the murder plea of David Pate could not have been more blunt. "This is an evil man standing before you. If anyone deserves life in prison, it’s David Pate," Newman said. Pate, 25, pled guilty to stabbing 33-year-old Ricky James 39 times with a butcher knife, then tying up his body with a rope and leaving him under a pile of leaves. The details of the crime were so disturbing that members of James' family broke down in court and looked away as prosecutors told the story. Pate and James were both drinking in the early morning hours of October 18, 2013, when Pate lured James to a wooded path behind Mullis Road to kill him. There was no evidence of an argument between the two men, or any motive for the murder. "I didn't know, I thought I might cut his head off," Pate said in a taped interview with deputies later, boasting about what he had done. Pate admitted stabbing James, covering his body with leaves and brush, then going home to wash his blood-covered jacket. He then burned his other clothes in a fire pit outside his home. Family members immediately filed a missing persons report on James, but it was a month later, on November 16, when children playing found his decomposed remains. Pate even admitted he may not be finished killing. "I wanted to remember that spot where he was because I may want to kill another person there some day," he said. A search of his home later turned up dozens of knives and at least 20 homemade masks Pate had made himself. Deputies also found James' belongings. Pate confessed to taking James’ wallet, his belt (which he often wore) shoes and a ring that he sold. In court Thursday, prosecutors showed a 15-minute video clip of the interview Pate gave to Lancaster County sheriff's deputies in November 2013. He calmly talks about killing James with a big knife, asking deputies if they'd ever heard of the character Michael Myers from the Halloween movies. Pate describes killing James in detail and at one point even blamed the victim for his own death. "It was his fault. Why would anyone go drinking and go into the woods with someone who looks like me?" he reasoned. Pate had even told his mother how much he remembered of the crime.
"I remember everything, every little thing. I made a point to remember, because I enjoyed it," he told deputies. On Thursday, two of James' brothers spoke in court."You're a devil! People like you shouldn't be allowed to live on the earth," said Antwon James. "I hope you suffer. I hope you feel my pain. Give him everything you can give him, and let him suffer," Rayshawn James added. Pate’s mother was also in the courtroom, but did not speak up for her son. Judge Dan Hall sentenced Pate to life in prison with no chance for parole, calling the murder a “senseless and remorseless” act. Pate himself never addressed the James family or offered an apology. A mental health evaluation had earlier found him competent to stand trial, but Pate indicated to his lawyer that he wanted to enter a plea and get it over with. Outside the courtroom, Rayshawn James said he was relieved Pate will never get out of prison and that he could never understand him. "He really is the devil. There's something wrong with the kid," he said.Source: WSOC News, April 9, 2015.
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Post by Joanna on Apr 10, 2015 0:53:04 GMT -5
Andrew Danziger (right) The Pilot's Story People love to ask pilots questions. But my favorite, and certainly the most interesting, is “Have you ever seen a UFO while flying?” The answer is yes. And here’s how it happened.
It was April 10, 1989, and early in my career. I was still a first officer at a regional airline. It was about 8 p.m. and we had just taken off from Kansas City International Airport bound for Waterloo, Iowa. It was a beautiful evening, with a full moon, clear skies and crisp early spring temperatures. The weather forecast for Waterloo was as nice, with clear skies and unlimited visibility.
After a short taxi and take-off, Air Traffic Control (ATC) cleared us to our cruise altitude of 15,000 feet. We established a Northeasterly heading, pointed strait at Waterloo, about 200 miles ahead. There were thin wispy clouds all around us, illuminated by the light of the full moon that shone through the captain’s-side window at our left. Despite the presence of these clearly visible wispy clouds everywhere, we weren’t flying through any of them. There was also a white disc dimly but clearly visible through those clouds just off to our right.
We flew on and I commented to Bruce, the captain, about this dimly visible disc. He said that he’d been watching the same thing since we had leveled off. It looked similar to the moon faintly visible though thin fog, except the two were visible at the same time on opposite sides of our cockpit. We looked down below for search lights, you know, the kind that’s sometimes used for aerial light displays or advertising at a car dealer, but there was no beam of light coming from the ground, no search light from an airport either. The captain and I had cumulatively spent many years flying and were accustomed to seeing – day and night – all manner of airplane, blimp, hot air balloon, satellite and bird. But neither of us had any idea what this disc could be.
We spent 20 to 30 minutes at our cruise altitude, all the while staring at this white disc dimly visible through some clouds that we somehow never seemed to fly through. Within about 40 miles of Waterloo, ATC confirmed the weather, still clear skies and unrestricted visibility at our destination as we began to descend. We got busy with our flying duties and for a short while, maybe for a minute, both of us had looked away from the disc, but when I looked up at it again I saw something that has been burned into my memory. I yelled to Bruce, “Holy shit!” He immediately looked over from what he was doing. Above the clouds, where the white disc had been, was a now giant red ball. It was big and bright and just sat there above the clouds. It wasn’t intense enough to illuminate us with a red glow but it was still plenty bright. We sat there in stunned silence. We obviously didn’t want to hit it but quickly saw that it was flying parallel to our course. We weren’t on a collision course and we also weren’t gaining on it. Time became a blur as we continued our descent, this giant, red ball holding its course.
We slowly lost altitude and at around 13,000 feet, the brightly glowing ball began a gradual descent, too. As it did, it slowly started disappearing behind those wispy clouds. In about 30 seconds, like a setting sun but not nearly as bright, it vanished behind the clouds. The instant it fully disappeared, hundreds of lights began flashing from within the clouds. As I looked on in disbelief, the flashing lights were brighter than ever and I could see that the section of the cloud that the glowing red ball had descended behind was starting to stretch apart like a piece of “Silly Putty,” two halves being pulled slowly apart with the middle getting thinner and thinner. This continued until the halves grew so thin that it tore apart and, pop! Everything was gone. The dimly lit disc, the flashing lights, the thin wispy clouds that we had with us for the last 40 minutes; all of it, gone. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. Only the full moon remained off to our left.
Bruce and I just looked at each other. “Oh my God! What the fuck was that?” was all I could muster. My colleague just stared out the windscreen, mesmerized. We discussed whether we should report what we had just witnessed. After a few minutes, I picked up the radio mic and asked the Kansas City Center controller if they had anything on radar. “Nope, nothing but you,” came the response. “No, not right now but a couple minutes ago, at 1 or 2 o’clock,” I replied. “No,” he repeated, “It’s a slow night. I’ve got the entire sector between Kansas City and Waterloo and you’re all that’s been in it for the last hour.” Bruce and I again just looked at each other, completely dumbfounded. “So for the last say 40 minutes or so you’ve had no traffic at all, not at our 1 or 2 o’clock?” I asked. “No sir, not at your 1 or 2 o’clock, not anywhere, you’re all there is,” he assured us.
A minute or so later, from over the radio came, “Air Midwest, do you want to report a UFO?” We looked at each other for a couple seconds and Bruce nodded his head. “Yes sir, we do,” I finally replied. “Okay, take down this number and call when you get on the ground.”
After deplaning we called the number. “National UFO Reporting Center” said the voice from the other end. At the time I didn’t even know such a place existed, but they took collect calls from pilots and air traffic controllers. Bruce told the person on the other end of the line that we wanted to report a UFO. We were interviewed separately, first the captain and then me. When my interview was finished the man on the other end of the line said that we would never hear from him again and would never receive any additional information, this was going to be our first and only contact regarding the sighting. I asked, “Can I ask just one question, do you think we’re crazy, has anyone else ever reported something like this?”
“Oh no, you’re not crazy at all,” he replied. “This very same thing has been reported by pilots countless times.” And while neither of us had any idea what we had saw one thing we were certain of, it wasn’t from here.
Our airline had no official UFO policy (nor did any that I ever worked for), but at the time we were both young with long and promising careers in front of us. We knew through the grapevine that pilots weren't supposed to talk about UFOs so we swore the station agent on duty to secrecy and agreed not to talk about our incident to any of our co-workers.
That was more than 25 years ago. Today I’m older, wiser and at the end of my career. In my last few years of flying the subject of UFOs occasionally came up in the cockpit. If it was brought up at all, it was usually by a younger, newer first officer who’d say something with much trepidation. More than a few pilots have shared their UFO stories with me, too. I’m not going too far out on a ledge to say that virtually all pilots believe in UFOs. Little green men, “close encounters,” alien kidnapings, ... not so much, but with billions of stars and trillions of planets out there, “ya gotta believe,” and almost all of us do.
Andrew Danziger is a 28-year airline veteran, with experience in turboprops and Boeing aircraft. He was an international 757/767 captain for the last 14 years. He has served as an airline ground school instructor and check pilot in both simulators and aircraft and was one of the pilots for Barack Obama during his 2008 presidential campaign.
Source: Andrew Danziger, The New York Daily News, April 7, 2015.
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Post by Joanna on Apr 10, 2015 0:33:36 GMT -5
Professor says he’s translated part of Voynich manuscriptA researcher claims he's decoded 10 possible words in the famously unreadable Voynich manuscript, which has eluded interpretation for a century. The book's 250 vellum pages are filled with writings in an unknown alphabet and elaborate drawings depicting a range of subjects from female nudes to medicinal herbs to Zodiac symbols. The medieval text was discovered by an antique book dealer in 1912, and it has been rather stingy in giving up its secrets ever since.
Now Stephen Bax, a professor of applied linguistics at the University of Bedfordshire in England, says he's deciphered 14 characters of the script and can read a handful of items in the Voynich text, such as the words for coriander, hellebore and juniper next to drawings of the plants. He says he's also picked out the word for Taurus written beside an illustration of the Pleiades, a star cluster in the constellation Taurus. "I hit on the idea of identifying proper names in the text, following historic approaches which successfully deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphs and other mystery scripts, and I then used those names to work out part of the script," Bax said in a statement. "The manuscript has a lot of illustrations of stars and plants," Bax added. "I was able to identify some of these, with their names, by looking at mediaeval herbal manuscripts in Arabic and other languages, and I then made a start on a decoding, with some exciting results."
The Voynich manuscipt now sits in a rare books library at Yale University. Carbon dating proved it dates to the 15th century and researchers believe it was written in Central Europe. While some scholars have written it off as a Renaissance-era hoax full of nonsense text, others say the pattern of the letters and words suggest the book was written in a real language or at least an invented cipher. A recent statistical study published in the journal PLOS ONE found that Voynichese adheres to linguistic rules.
Bax notes the manuscript is still a long way from being understood and he is coming forward with what he's found thus far in the hopes other linguists will work with him to crack the code. For now, he thinks the book is "probably a treatise on nature, perhaps in a Near Eastern or Asian language."
Bax has explained his ideas in a manuscript and in a YouTube video on his website: stephenbax.net/Source: Megan Gannon, LiveScience, January 9, 2015.
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Post by Joanna on Apr 7, 2015 23:49:24 GMT -5
Story-telling around campfires is just another casualty of cell phones. I went on a ghost tour in Damariscotta last summer and some people were talking on cell phones during the tour. Finally, I said something and the guide asked that everyone turn off their cell phones. Now, I understand that the company that hosts the tours require that their guides tell people to turn off their cell phones at the beginning of the tour.
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Post by Joanna on Apr 7, 2015 23:42:44 GMT -5
Ireland's First Pagan Priest Since the DruidsA Belfast shamanic healer has become the first pagan priest to be certified by the authorities since the time of Saint Patrick. Patrick Carberry, who is based in Glengormley, applied to Stormont five months ago to be certified as a holy man and officials have now got back to him to say he can now carry out religious ceremonies for people who follow Irish pre-Christian religions.
Patrick, who has been attacked in the past for his beliefs, says he hopes the fact pagans have official recognition means they will now be more readily accepted in society. “I am the very first pagan priest in Northern Ireland and it’s a big milestone because until now Stormont has point blankly refused to recognize paganism,” he said. “In 2009 I set up a church called the Order of the Golden River but the members and I agreed to keep it underground because the people were afraid of being targeted.”
Patrick says the fear of attack is well-founded because he was assaulted at a small outlet he opened in the Park Centre last September. But he says he’s now happy to announce he is a full-time priest in the pagan religion now he has official recognition. “I’m not in the slightest bit bothered. I am a full-time pagan priest and it’s as simple as that. That’s what I do. Other people have jobs and do their paganism outside of that but I am the same level as any priest or reverend and I have now been recognized as such.”
Patrick said the Order of the Golden River deserves to be respected along with other religions. “Now we are officially recognized as a church and it comes down to the fact it’s the first time paganism has been officially recognized since Saint Patrick came here and did away with all the pagans and made the whole place Christian. This is the first time pagans have had the opportunity to officially celebrate their beliefs. We are a pagan order which believes everyone has the right to live and have their own faith without fear. We were underground but at a meeting the Order members agreed to speak out about our faith and stand up for our beliefs. We are happy to explain our faith to anyone who asks because our aim is to dispel all the misinformation which people have about paganism.”
Patrick says he can now perform weddings in full compliance with the law. “I can marry people in stone circles or ancient woodlands. It really is a milestone for Northern Ireland and a great day for pagans.”
Patrick’s commitment to the spiritual life has placed him in harm’s way more than once. Last year he was in Ukraine filming for a psychic television program when he was caught up in the fighting there. He had been attending a gathering of 150 psychics from around the world organized by Ukranian TV.Source: Evan Short, Belfast Media, April 7, 2015.
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Post by Joanna on Apr 6, 2015 23:44:22 GMT -5
Evolution of Southern GothicI didn't set out to write a Southern Gothic novel, though that's how it has been described. Opinions vary about what makes a Southern story Gothic, but some things to look for include dreariness, dark obsession, the supernatural, wincing humor, sacrilege, perversion, drug addiction, alcoholism and character deformity, both mental and physical.
My novel, Soil, is set in the sparse Mississippi hill country. The main character is a would-be organic farmer, who, in a downward spiral, composts a dead body he finds in his flooded field. The dead man shows up later as a ghost or a buzzard, maybe just a hallucination. There's a drunken, lame, shotgun-toting old woodsman and a peeping-tom deputy prone to seducing the female citizenry.
Nice ladies have asked why I write about difficult people in depressing circumstances. Because many of us Southerners would rather read about the aberrant among us, the lowly and damned. Maybe it's because we're always on the bottom and wouldn't mind looking down on someone else for a change.
"Southern Gothic" spread from the Gothic literary movement of the 19th century, when romance novels were dressed up in dreary ambience and set in spooky castles and decrepit manors, shot through with excess, fear and madness. The best of the lot – classics like Frankenstein, Dracula, Wuthering Heights and the stories of Edgar Allen Poe – used fantastical devices and aberrant behavior to get at the ugly truth all trussed up in pomp and formality.
Aristocratic Southern society, in its post-bellum heyday, erected a similar façade of gentility and custom to hide the way people really lived. Southern writers like William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor and Tennessee Williams contrasted these customs with grotesque caricatures and shocking imagery to amplify the contradictions of Southern society. Some examples that spring to mind are Faulkner's rotting corpse in the frilly upstairs bed from "A Rose for Emily" or Flannery O'Connor's low-class country people, running roughshod over civilized white dignity and vice versa. In his stage dramas, Tennessee Williams put fine Southerners on their worst behavior and I especially love the Gothic sensibilities in Elia Kazan's film Baby Doll, an adaptation of Williams's one-act play 27 Wagons Full of Cotton, in which two feuding cotton gin owners in the Mississippi Delta use a lusty, virginal teen as a bargaining chip.
As for my own, I'm not convinced that Southern Gothic is completely viable in a modern-day story. With the flattening of the South, the old aristocrats have all moved to the city. Some stubborn hold-outs and strange relatives have stayed behind in dilapidated mansions, but the rest have been bulldozed to make room for trailer parks and Wal-Marts. Today Southern gentility has been replaced by conservative politics, which is anything but chivalrous. The decay of the Old South is aggressively apparent.
The latest best examples of Southern Gothic are all 20 years or more old. Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil comes to mind. John Berendt's true-crime saga is set in Savannah, Georgia, which may be the South's most Gothic locale after the capital, New Orleans, with its famously Goth Anne Rice and suicidal John Kennedy Toole. The novels of Harry Crews are rife with this Southern grotesque, especially his 1978 autobiography, A Childhood. Our dear Faulkner passed on and abdicated his throne to Cormac McCarthy, whose novels Child of God and Suttree are as Southern Gothic as they come. McCarthy left the South in the late 1970s, took his grotesquery out west, but he spawned a new strain of Gothic described as Grit-Lit or Rough South. A strong cast of writers – admittedly, a heavily white-male cast – have revived the dark Southern novel, whether telling stories of a less gussied-up Old South or delving right into the New South's rural wastelands and trailer parks, meth labs and pot fields, roadside honkytonks and gnarled forests. You won't find old money or plantation servants in the contemporary stuff of Larry Brown, Daniel Woodrell, Ron Rash, Tom Franklin, Brad Watson and William Gay, but there is a haunted darkness akin to the Gothic. In particular, Gay's story The Paperhanger is prime modern Gothic with a power akin to O'Connor's A Good Man is Hard to Find as an expression of bone-chilling, plain-clothes Southern evil.
For my money, no one better evokes the South I know in all its strangeness, both casual and shocking, and all its stupidity and love, than Barry Hannah. He's the godfather of a deviant strain of Southern weird. No other contemporary writer has so formidably ripped down the façade of Southern pretensions with such artful glee. His influence looms over a vital brand of Southern grotesque comedy practiced by such noteworthy writers as Lewis Nordan, George Singleton, Mark Richard and Jack Pendarvis. The style reaches sublime peaks in the hilarious Dog of the South and Masters of Atlantis by Charles Portis, a writer who, like Hannah, continues to influence a new generation of writers. These writers take the perversity, humor and outrageousness of Southern Gothic and shape it into something alive and fantastic which speaks to the current situation of the South.
A writer working at peak performance who might best personify this new Gothic is Padgett Powell. His novels are deeply experimental while maintaining a Southern sense of conversational storytelling, even as he parodies it. His novel You & Me eavesdrops on the porch-bound repartee between two outlandish loud-mouths. Ditto his oddly compelling The Interrogative Mood, a novel composed in an inquisitive litany. But one of his most unsung and brilliant works tackles the stereotypes of Southern literature head-on – Mrs. Hollingsworth's Men, recently and mercifully restored to print as Hologram by Open Road Media. In a creative panoply, Powell gives us a mild Southern housewife who sits down to make a grocery list, which unfurls in a brilliant tirade of grievances and absurdist vignettes that resurrect Confederate icons against a hallucinatory background of upended Southern stereotypes. It's a tricky, rollicking existential exercise, but a brilliant exorcism of tired Southern tropes.
I was recently asked how to write Gothic, so it's with a little guilt – how Southern! – that I ramble on about the genre, which does little but define and limit what we read and write. And I wonder if Gothic is an old-world idea, just a word tied arbitrarily to this style of irony that Southern writers wield to express the contradictions we see in a society that keeps fumbling along, shackled with bad memories and dog-like devotion to an elusive idyll. Whatever you call it, it's the way we see it down here, the thing that excites us on this quiet, frayed corner of America.www.huffingtonpost.com/jamie-kornegay/the-evolution-of-southern-gothic_b_6987510.htmlSource: Jamie Kornegay, April 2, 2015.
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Post by Joanna on Apr 6, 2015 23:09:36 GMT -5
UFO Hotspots in the USCalifornia-based tech firm FindTheBest has compiled a map showing UFO sightings per capita across the United States. Operating on the assumption that absolutely none of these is, in fact, of alien origin, what does this map actually tell us?
As reported in the Huffington Post, the researchers created the map by pulling information from more than 61,000 reports, whittling it down to almost 39,000. After determining latitude and longitude pairs, the people at FindTheBest were able to determine the number of UFO sightings reported in each county. They then cross-reference that data with the American Community Survey population estimates to create the per capita number. There are two interactive versions of the map, one showing UFO sightings per capita, and one that just shows the sightings hit count.
Of course, what the map doesn't show are the deliberate hoaxes, or UFO "sightings" that aren't reported. As FindTheBest's Lane Allison said: “What we learned through our research is that, in fact, most UFO sightings aren't actually reported, and between 98-99 percent of those that are reported can be explained by natural phenomena, whether by shooting stars or even a flock of birds. So we wanted to give more of a per capita [per person] number, which is why we created the per capita statistics.”
Looking at the map, one immediately wonders why the West has so many sightings. Is it cultural? Are the Western regions more prone to UFO-like natural phenomena?Source: George Dvorsky, io9, April 6, 2015.
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Post by Joanna on Apr 4, 2015 1:34:13 GMT -5
Dating Site for Those Who Believe in GhostsHave you ever been on Tinder, swiping left over and over, and thinking "This would be so much better if I knew which guys here believed in ghosts”? Well, now the answer to life's biggest question has been solved. Enter “Supernatural Dating Society,” an online dating site just for those who are interested in the otherworldly. According to the website, the society was created for singles who "would like nothing more than to meet other people with whom they can discuss their thoughts, beliefs and experiences without compromise."
SDS isn't limited to ghost-hunters – anyone with a bizarre interest is welcome, whether it's aliens, haunted houses, ESP, astrology, curses, vampires, spirit healing, mind-reading, etc., etc. According to a Cosmopolitan interview with creator The Amazing Kreskin (a renowned mentalist, and yes, that is his name), the way the dating site works is simple: You just fill out a form detailing your areas of supernatural interest or describing something otherworldly that you experienced and anyone with a similar enthusiasm can contact you. If rehashing stories of alien encounters over a few martinis leads to love, then so be it.
It might seem like an odd form of matchmaking, but Kreskin insists he started the site after fielding tons of inquiries about dating between ghost enthusiasts. "Most people I talked to would like to meet people that they could join and visit places that seem like they're haunted," he told Cosmo. "The other area, which is gigantic, is the UFO area."
It sounds like a match made in heaven. Oh, and if your true romantic fantasy lies in meeting the ghost of your dreams, fear not– they're allowed to use the site, too.
Check it out: www.amazingkreskinsupernaturaldatingsociety.com/ Source: Seoja Rankin, Eonline, March 26, 2015.
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