Contract killing is a form of murder or assassination in which one party hires another party to kill a targeted person or people. It involves an agreement which includes some form of compensation, monetary or otherwise. It is an illegal agreement. Either party may be a person, group, or organization. Contract killing has been associated with organized crime, government conspiracies, dictatorships, and vendettas. For example, in the United States, the Italian- and Jewish-American organized crime gang Murder, Inc. committed hundreds of murders on behalf of the National Crime Syndicate during the 1930s and '40s.
Louis Buchalter, known as Louis Lepke or Lepke Buchalter, was a Jewish-American organized crime figure and head of the Mafia hit squad Murder, Inc., during the 1930s. Buchalter was one of the premier labor union racketeers in New York City during that era.
San Quentin Rehabilitation Center (SQ), formerly known as San Quentin State Prison, is a California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation state prison for men, located north of San Francisco in the unincorporated place of San Quentin in Marin County.
Matricide is the act of killing one's own mother.
Uxoricide is the killing of one's own wife. It can refer to the act itself or the person who carries it out. It can also be used in the context of the killing of one's own girlfriend. Conversely, the killing of a husband or boyfriend is called mariticide.
The Osage Indian murders were a series of murders of Osage in Osage County, Oklahoma, during the 1910s–1930s. Newspapers described the increasing number of unsolved murders and deaths among young adults as the "Reign of Terror". Most took place from 1921 to 1926. Some sixty or more wealthy, full-blood Osage persons were reported killed from 1918 to 1931. Newer investigations indicate that other suspicious deaths during this time could have been misreported or covered-up murders, including those of individuals who were heirs to future fortunes. Further research has shown that the death toll may have been in the hundreds.
Roger Caleb Rogerson was an Australian detective sergeant in the New South Wales Police Force and a convicted murderer. During his career, Rogerson received at least thirteen awards for bravery, outstanding policemanship and devotion to duty, before being implicated in two killings, bribery, assault and drug dealing, and then being dismissed from the force in 1986.
This is a timeline of major crimes in Australia.
Following the historic Lindbergh kidnapping, the United States Congress passed a federal kidnapping statute—known as the Federal Kidnapping Act, 18 U.S.C. § 1201(a)(1) —which was intended to let federal authorities step in and pursue kidnappers once they had crossed state lines with their victim. The act was first proposed in December 1931 by Missouri Senator Roscoe Conkling Patterson, who pointed to several recent kidnappings in the Missouri area in calling for a federal solution. Initial resistance to Patterson's proposal was based on concerns over funding and state's rights. Consideration of the law was revived following the kidnapping of Howard Woolverton in late January 1932. Woolverton's kidnapping featured prominently in several newspaper series researched and prepared in the weeks following his abduction, and were quite possibly inspired by it. Two such projects, by Bruce Catton of the Newspaper Enterprise Association and Fred Pasley of the Daily News of New York City, were ready for publication within a day or two of the Lindbergh kidnapping. Both series, which ran in papers across North America, described kidnapping as an existential threat to American life, a singular, growing crime wave in which no one was safe.
This is a list of notable overturned convictions in the United States.
It is possible to convict someone of murder without the purported victim's body in evidence. However, cases of this type have historically been hard to prove, often forcing the prosecution to rely on circumstantial evidence, and in England there was for centuries a mistaken view that in the absence of a body a killer could not be tried for murder. Developments in forensic science in recent decades have made it more likely that a murder conviction can be obtained even if a body has not been found.
Michael Hubert Hughes is a convicted American serial killer on death row in San Quentin. Hughes was initially sentenced to life without parole for the murders of four women and girls in California. Later, he was convicted of committing three further murders of women, linked to the crimes via DNA profiling. At the second trial, he was sentenced to the death penalty.
Glen Edward Rogers, is an American convicted serial killer. He was also convicted of related crimes in Florida and California, such as armed robbery, grand theft auto, and arson.
Roger Reece Kibbe was an American serial killer and rapist known as the "I-5 Strangler". Kibbe found all but one of his victims on freeways around Sacramento, California. In 1991, he was sentenced to 25 years to life imprisonment for the death of Darcie Frackenpohl.
Hailey Owens was a 10-year-old girl from Springfield, Missouri, who was abducted, sexually assaulted and murdered by 45-year-old Craig Wood on February 18, 2014. The killing caught attention nationally. Thousands of people attended a candlelight vigil for Hailey on February 23, 2014. A neighborhood park was later dedicated to her called Hailey's Playground. Her family and friends also advocated for improvements to the state's AMBER Alert system, ultimately leading to the 2019 passage of HAILEY'S Law, which empowers law enforcement officers to issue alerts more quickly and to include a URL with each AMBER alert.
On the night of September 6, 2018, 26-year-old accountant Botham Jean was murdered in Dallas, Texas by off-duty Dallas Police Department patrol officer Amber Guyger, who entered Jean's apartment and fatally shot him. Guyger, who said that she had entered Jean's apartment believing it was her own and believed Jean to be a burglar, was initially charged with manslaughter. The absence of a murder charge led to protests and accusations of racial bias because Jean—an unarmed black man—was killed in his own home by a white off-duty officer who had apparently disregarded police protocols. On November 30, 2018, Guyger was indicted on a charge of murder. On October 1, 2019, she was found guilty of murder, and was sentenced to ten years' imprisonment the following day. The ruling was upheld on appeal in 2021.
On June 28, 2015, 46-year-old Teresa Sievers was murdered at her home in Bonita Springs, Florida. Two men bludgeoned her to death with a hammer, striking her seventeen times. Police arrested Curtis Wayne Wright Jr. and Jimmy Ray Rodgers, both from Missouri, for the crime. In December 2015, Teresa's husband, Mark Sievers, was arrested and accused of masterminding the murder. The motive was life insurance money and the fear that Teresa would take their children away. All three men were found guilty. Wright received a twenty-five-year sentence, Rodgers was sentenced to life in prison, and Mark Sievers was sentenced to death.
Harold David Haulman III is an American serial killer. Originally convicted for the murder of a fellow countryman in Germany in 1999, he was paroled and returned to the United States, where he murdered at least three women in Michigan and Pennsylvania from 2005 to 2020.
