The South County car bomber was a person (or persons) who terrorized south St. Louis County, Missouri, with a series of fatal car bombings in 1977. [1]
Two people – Shirley Marie Flynn and Robert Curtis Jackson – were killed in bombings on October 18, 1977, and November 3, 1977, respectively. [2] A third victim, Ronald Sterghos, escaped injury in an earlier attack on October 7, 1977. [2] [3]
The bombings ceased after that and were never solved, despite an extensive effort by police. [2] The bombings have been described as random, [1] and some investigators believed that they were the work of a deranged individual. [1] Some authorities have, however, noted similarities between the St. Louis County bombings and a car bombing on March 7, 1978, in Paducah, Kentucky, in which William Ohlhausen, who had been Shirley Flynn's boyfriend, was seriously injured. [3]
St. Louis is an independent city in the U.S. state of Missouri. It is located near the confluence of the Mississippi and the Missouri rivers. In 2020, the city proper had a population of 301,578, while its metropolitan area, which extends into Illinois, had an estimated population of over 2.8 million. It is the largest metropolitan area in Missouri and the second-largest in Illinois. The city's combined statistical area is the 20th-largest in the United States.
St. Louis County is located in eastern Missouri. It is bounded by the City of St. Louis and the Mississippi River to the east, the Missouri River to the north, and the Meramec River to the south. At the 2020 census, the total population was 1,004,125, making it the most populous county in Missouri. Its county seat is Clayton. The county is included in the St. Louis, MO–IL metropolitan statistical area.
Busch Memorial Stadium was a multi-purpose sports facility in St. Louis, Missouri, that operated for 40 years, from 1966 through 2005. Built as Civic Center Busch Memorial Stadium, its official name was shortened to Busch Stadium in January 1982.
MetroLink is a light rail system that serves the Greater St. Louis area. Operated by Metro Transit in a shared fare system with MetroBus, the two-line, 38-station system runs from St. Louis Lambert International Airport and Shrewsbury in Missouri to Scott Air Force Base in Illinois. Intermediate destinations include downtown Clayton, Forest Park, and downtown St. Louis. It is the only U.S. light rail system to cross state lines.
The East St. Louis massacre was a series of violent attacks on African Americans by white Americans in East St. Louis, Illinois, between late May and early July of 1917. These attacks also displaced 6,000 African Americans and led to the destruction of approximately $400,000 worth of property. They occurred in East St. Louis, an industrial city on the east bank of the Mississippi River, directly opposite the city of St. Louis, Missouri. The July 1917 episode in particular was marked by white-led violence throughout the city. The multi-day rioting has been described as the "worst case of labor-related violence in 20th-century American history", and among the worst racial riots in U.S. history.
This is a list of the National Register of Historic Places listings in St. Louis County, Missouri.
KQQZ was a commercial AM radio station that was licensed to serve Fairview Heights, Illinois, on 1190kHz, and broadcast from 1968 to 2020.
The Veiled Prophet Parade and Ball was a yearly cult ceremony in St. Louis, Missouri, over which a mythical figure called the Veiled Prophet presided. The first events were in 1878 and were organized and funded by the Veiled Prophet Organization, an all-male secret society founded in 1878 by a highly select group of the city’s business and governmental leaders. In 2021, the parade was replaced in response to criticisms about corruption and racism.
On August 9, 2014, 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot and killed by police officer Darren Wilson in Ferguson, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis.
The Ferguson unrest was a series of protests and riots which began in Ferguson, Missouri on August 10, 2014, the day after the fatal shooting of Michael Brown by FPD officer Darren Wilson. The unrest sparked a vigorous debate in the United States about the relationship between law enforcement officers and Black Americans, the militarization of police, and the use-of-force law in Missouri and nationwide. Continuing activism expanded the issues by including modern-day debtors prisons, for-profit policing, and school segregation.
The St. Louis Jane Doe is an unidentified girl who was found murdered in the basement of an abandoned apartment building on February 28, 1983 in St. Louis, Missouri. She has also been nicknamed "Hope", "Precious Hope", and the "Little Jane Doe." The victim was estimated to be between eight and eleven when she was murdered and is believed to have been killed via strangulation. She was raped and decapitated. The brutality of the crime has led to national attention.
The shooting of Antonio Martin occurred on December 23, 2014, in Berkeley, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis. Martin, an 18-year-old black male, was fatally shot by a white Berkeley police officer when Martin pulled a gun on him. The shooting sparked protests in the St. Louis area and other cities in the U.S. The shooting elicited comparison to the earlier shooting death of Michael Brown two miles away in Ferguson, Missouri.
Wharlest Jackson was an American civil rights activist who was murdered by a car bomb, with evidence of involvement by a white supremacy organization; it has been an unsolved murder since the 1960s. Jackson served as treasurer of the Natchez, Mississippi branch of the NAACP until his assassination by a car bomb, which was placed on the frame of his truck under the driver-side seat. The bomb exploded at approximate 8 p.m. on February 27, 1967. The explosion occurred when he switched on his turn signal on his way home. The explosion caused serious damage to Wharlest's lower torso and he died at the scene. The scene of his death was six blocks away from the site where he was employed, at Armstrong Rubber and Tire Company.
On the evening of November 18, 1987, police went to the mobile home of Russell Keith Dardeen, 29, and his family outside Ina, Illinois, United States, after he had failed to show up for work that day. There, they found the bodies of his wife and son, both brutally beaten. Ruby Elaine Dardeen, 30, who had been pregnant with the couple's daughter, had been beaten so badly she had gone into labor, and the killer or killers had also beaten the newborn to death.
The Milwaukee Police Department bombing was a November 24, 1917, bomb attack that killed nine members of local law enforcement and a civilian in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The perpetrators were never caught but are suspected to be an anarchist terrorist cell operating in the United States in the early 20th century. The target was initially an evangelical church in the Third Ward and only killed the police officers when the bomb was taken to the police station by a concerned civilian. The bombing remained the most fatal single event in national law enforcement history for over 80 years until the September 11 attacks.
Pamela Marie Hupp is an American murderer serving a life sentence in Missouri's Chillicothe Correctional Center for the 2016 shooting of Louis Gumpenberger in her home in O'Fallon, Missouri. Hupp's claim that she had shot Gumpenberger in self-defense after he pursued her into her home wielding a knife was not accepted by law enforcement. She ultimately entered an Alford plea before charges of first-degree murder and armed criminal action could go to trial.
Winford LaVern Stokes Jr. was an American criminal and serial killer. He murdered three people, for which he was sentenced to death and subsequently executed in 1990.
Anthony Joe LaRette Jr. was an American serial killer and rapist. Convicted of one murder in St. Charles, Missouri in 1980, he later confessed to thirty-one murders in eleven states dating back to the late 1960s, fifteen of which were closed based on information provided by him. Sentenced to death for his sole conviction, LaRette was executed in 1995.