The Palace of Depression (or Palace Depression) was a building made of junk that was located in Vineland, New Jersey, built by the eccentric George Daynor, a former Alaska gold miner who lost his fortune in the Wall Street Crash of 1929. This amusement was known as "The Strangest House in the World" and the "Home of Junk" and was built as a testament of willpower against the effects of The Great Depression. [1]
George Daynor claims that he was guided to New Jersey by an angel, who provided the design for the palace. Completed on Christmas Day 1932, the palace was built on 4 acres (16,000 m2) which cost him four dollars. Daynor said that his palace was "the greatest piece of originality ever brought about in the history of Man." He would charge 25 cents for a tour. [1]
Daynor was a publicity hog and claimed to be "the most photographed man in the world." After Peter Weinberger was kidnapped on 4 July 1956, [lower-alpha 1] Daynor called the FBI and falsely reported that the kidnappers had visited the palace. The FBI followed the false claim and Daynor was imprisoned for a year. [1]
The Palace of Depression was linked with another disappearance, that of William Ebeneezer Jones III, who went missing in 1962; the grounds of the Palace of Depression were dug up, but no body was ever found. [lower-alpha 2]
Daynor died a pauper in 1964 at a reported 104 years old. After Daynor's death, a fire destroyed the Palace of Depression and Vineland razed it in 1969.
As of 2001, a city restoration project to rebuild the Palace of Depression was in progress. Local companies and individuals were encouraged to volunteer materials and labor. Kevin Kirchner initially started the effort in 1998 and has led the restoration effort since its beginning. It took about three years just to obtain the permits and clear the wooded property before actual re-construction of The Palace began in 2001. As of 2017 much of the Palace building itself has been rebuilt and an adjacent Historical Center/Museum was also erected on the site. The project is scheduled to tentatively take another two years before opened to the public regularly. The Palace is currently open to the public for tours in limited capacity.
Vineland is a city and the most populous municipality in Cumberland County, within the U.S. state of New Jersey. Bridgeton and Vineland are the two principal cities of the Vineland-Bridgeton metropolitan statistical area, which encompasses those cities and all of Cumberland County for statistical purposes and which constitutes a part of the Delaware Valley. The MSA had a population of 156,898 as of the 2010 census. As of the 2020 United States census, the city's population was 60,780, its highest decennial count ever and an increase of 56 (+0.1%) from the 60,724 recorded at the 2010 census, which in turn reflected an increase of 4,453 (+7.9%) from the 56,271 counted in the 2000 census. The Census Bureau's Population Estimates Program calculated that the city's population was 60,491 in 2022, ranking the city the 639th-most-populous in the country.
Bruno Richard Hauptmann was a German-born carpenter who was convicted of the abduction and murder of Charles Augustus Lindbergh, Jr., the 20-month-old son of aviator Charles Lindbergh and his wife Anne Morrow Lindbergh. The Lindbergh kidnapping became known as "The Crime of the Century". Both Hauptmann and his wife, Anna Hauptmann, proclaimed his innocence to his death, when he was executed in 1936 by electric chair at the Trenton State Prison. Anna later sued the State of New Jersey, various former police officers, the Hearst newspapers that had published pre-trial articles insisting on Hauptmann's guilt, and former prosecutor David T. Wilentz.
On March 1, 1932, Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr., the 20-month-old son of colonel Charles Lindbergh and his wife Anne Morrow Lindbergh, was abducted from his crib in the upper floor of the Lindberghs' home, Highfields, in East Amwell, New Jersey, United States. On May 12, the child's corpse was discovered by a truck driver by the side of a nearby road.
Kate Barker, better known as Ma Barker, was the mother of several American criminals who ran the Barker–Karpis Gang during the "public enemy era" when the exploits of gangs of criminals in the Midwestern United States gripped the American people and press. She traveled with her sons during their criminal careers.
The runaway bride case concerns Jennifer Carol Wilbanks, an American woman who ran away from home on April 26, 2005, to avoid her wedding with John Mason, her fiancé, on April 30. Her disappearance from Duluth, Georgia, sparked a nationwide search and intensive media coverage, including media speculation that Mason had killed her. On April 29, Wilbanks called Mason from Albuquerque, New Mexico, and falsely claimed that she had been kidnapped and sexually assaulted by a Hispanic man and a white woman.
Etan Kalil Patz was an American boy who was six years old on May 25, 1979, when he disappeared on his way to his school bus stop in the SoHo neighborhood of Lower Manhattan. His disappearance helped launch the missing children movement, which included new legislation and new methods for tracking down missing children. Several years after he disappeared, Patz was one of the first children to be profiled on the "photo on a milk carton" campaigns of the early 1980s. In 1983, President Ronald Reagan designated May 25—the anniversary of Etan's disappearance—as National Missing Children's Day in the United States.
Cumberland County College was a public community college in Vineland and Millville in Cumberland County, New Jersey. It became the Cumberland Campus of Rowan College of South Jersey (RCSJ–Cumberland) on July 1, 2019, as part of a merger with Rowan College at Gloucester County. The historic merger is the first of its kind in New Jersey.
Frank A. Gulotta was a New York Supreme Court, Appellate Division judge, and a Nassau County district attorney.
Theodore L. Gunderson was a Federal Bureau of Investigation Special Agent In Charge and head of the Los Angeles FBI, an American author, and a conspiracy theorist. Some of his FBI case work included the Death of Marilyn Monroe and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy. He was the author of the best-selling book How to Locate Anyone Anywhere Without Leaving Home. In later life, he researched a number of topics, notably including satanic ritual abuse.
On 19 February 2008, nine-year-old Shannon Louise Matthews was reported missing in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, England. The search for her became a major missing person police operation which was compared to the disappearance of Madeleine McCann. Shannon was found alive and well on 14 March 2008 at a Batley Carr house belonging to 39-year-old Michael Donovan. Donovan was the uncle of Craig Meehan, the boyfriend of the kidnapped girl's mother, Karen Matthews.
Inspira Health is a charitable non-profit health care organization comprising three hospitals, two additional emergency rooms, and several multi-specialty health centers among other locations. These include urgent care, cancer treatment, imaging, rehabilitation and primary and specialty physician practices in Gloucester, Cumberland, Salem and Camden counties. Inspira Health has 1,328 medical staff members, 907 volunteers, and 5,782 employees. It is affiliated with the Jefferson Medical College, Rowan-Virtua School of Osteopathic Medicine, and Philadelphia College of Pharmacy, among others. In 2021 it was given a grade A by the Leapfrog patient safety organization.
A racial hoax occurs when a person falsely claims that a crime was committed by member of a specific race. The crime may be fictitious, or may be an actual crime.
Centerton is an unincorporated community located within Pittsgrove Township in Salem County, in the U.S. state of New Jersey. County Route 540 is a major road that travels through Centerton and passes Centerton Pond. Route 55 provides access to Centerton, via exit 45. Centerton is approximately 5 miles (8.0 km) west of Vineland in Cumberland County.
The Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting occurred on December 14, 2012, in Newtown, Connecticut. The perpetrator, Adam Lanza, fatally shot his mother before murdering 20 students and six staff members at Sandy Hook Elementary School, and later committed suicide. A number of fringe figures have promoted conspiracy theories that doubt or dispute what occurred at Sandy Hook. Various conspiracy theorists have claimed, for example, that the massacre was actually orchestrated by the U.S. government as part of an elaborate plot to promote stricter gun control laws.
Between 2002 and 2004, Ariel Castro abducted Michelle Knight, Amanda Berry, and Gina DeJesus from the roads of Cleveland, Ohio and later held them captive in his home at 2207 Seymour Avenue in the city's Tremont neighborhood. All three young women were imprisoned at Castro's home until 2013, when Berry successfully escaped with her six-year-old daughter, to whom she had given birth while captive, and contacted the police. Police rescued Knight and DeJesus, and arrested Castro hours later.
The New York divorce coercion gang was a Haredi Jewish group who kidnapped, and in some cases tortured, Jewish men in the New York metropolitan area to force them to grant their wives religious divorces (gittin). The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) broke up the group after conducting a sting operation against the gang in October 2013. The sting resulted in the prosecution of four men, three of whom were convicted in late 2015.
On June 9, 2017, Yingying Zhang, a visiting Chinese scholar at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, was abducted by Brendt Allen Christensen, a Champaign resident and former physics graduate student at the university. Christensen lured Zhang into his car at a bus stop on campus posing as a police officer with the promise of a ride after she missed a bus, but then took her to his apartment where he raped and murdered her while his wife was out of town for the weekend.
William Ebeneezer Jones Jr, also known as Billy Jones was three years old when he was last seen outside of his neighbor's house in Vineland, New Jersey around 11:45 a.m on December 17, 1962. His case is considered one of the oldest missing children under-five-years-old cases in New Jersey.
Peter Weinberger was a one-month-old infant who was kidnapped for ransom on July 4, 1956, in New York state. The case gained national notoriety due to the circumstances of the kidnapping and the victim's family, as unlike many ransom victims, Weinberger was not from a wealthy and prominent family, but from a suburban middle class family.