Crimes of The Century - Top 25 - Time Magazine

11/25/2016
Top 25 Crimes of the Century - The Lindbergh Kidnapping - TIME
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by Howard Chua-Eoan
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On the 75th
anniversary of the
Lindbergh
kidnapping, TIME
looks back at the
notorious crimes of
the past hundred
years
Lindbergh
Kidnapping
Mona Lisa
Ape-Man
Fatty Arbuckle
The Black Dahlia
The Brinks Job
Lana Turner
The Great Train
Robbery
Richard Speck
Tate Murders
Patty Hearst
Son of Sam
John Wayne Gacy
Ted Bundy
Art Heist
Jeffrey Dahmer
O.J. Simpson
Barings Bank
The Unabomber
JonBenet Ramsey
Versace Killings
Mary Kay
Letourneau
Columbine
Andrea Yates
The Scream
GETTY; BETTMANN / CORBIS

THE LINDBERGH KIDNAPPING
On a winter's night 75 years ago, a child was stolen out of a
house in New Jersey. He was no ordinary infant but the
"Eaglet," the 20-month-old son of the aviator Charles
Lindbergh, America's great hero who, just ve years before,
had become the rst man to y solo across the Atlantic
Ocean. For the next two and a half months, America and
much of the world were riveted by daily updates and
speculation from the police search for baby Charles.
Suspicion spared no one -- not even the Lindberghs. In April,
news spread that a ransom had been paid but still no child
was recovered.
Finally, in May, a battered, mutilated little corpse was found
by the side of the road, not far from the Lindberghs' home.
Baby Charles had been bludgeoned to death not long after he
had been kidnapped. The resulting trial, sentencing and
execution of German carpenter and ex-convict Bruno Richard
Hauptmann for the crime would extend the infamy of the
case four more years. But the Lindbergh kidnapping had
become more than just a particularly heinous act. It had
become the Crime of the Century. Many other crimes have
earned the distinction -- but what makes an infamous event
deserving of the title Crime of the Century?
TIME has put together its list of notorious crimes that might
vie for that distinction. You may notice that there are no
political assassinations on the list. Nor mass suicides or
genocide. All of those are certainly terrible crimes and
possibly even graver sins. But there is a degree of conscious
orchestration to those acts. The Crime of the Century must
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Top 25 Crimes of the Century - The Lindbergh Kidnapping - TIME
strike at the most undened and thus most vulnerable part of

the soul: it must touch the messy unconscious, where all
kinds of emotions meld into each other. Pity and envy are
involved; desire and revulsion; fear and sometimes
schadenfreude. And while each person has his or her own
brew of emotions, we all recognize them. So our fascination
with the crime becomes a populist mania: an obsession with
the wreckage of the rich and famous, comeuppance for
hubris, a communal grasping for a moral to a sordid tale.
These horrible disruptions of ordinary life must be able to
function as a way to order our most frightening thoughts,
becoming cautions and lessons for the future.
Which of the 25 crimes we have selected will remain in the
popular, perhaps even the artistic, imagination in the years to
come? How will they be retold and with what kinds of
lessons and cautions in mind? Here's our selection. How do
you think they will fare?
From the Archive
Lindbergh Kidnapping
NEXT: Stealing the Mona Lisa
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Top 25 Crimes of the Century - Stealing the Mona Lisa - TIME
THE TOP 25
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by Howard Chua-Eoan
Next
E-Mail this
On the 75th
anniversary of the
Lindbergh
kidnapping, TIME
looks back at the
notorious crimes of
the past hundred
years
Lindbergh
Kidnapping
Mona Lisa
Ape-Man
Fatty Arbuckle
The Black Dahlia
The Brinks Job
Lana Turner
The Great Train
Robbery
Richard Speck
Tate Murders
Patty Hearst
Son of Sam
John Wayne Gacy
Ted Bundy
Art Heist
Jeffrey Dahmer
O.J. Simpson
Barings Bank
The Unabomber
JonBenet Ramsey
Versace Killings
Mary Kay
Letourneau
Columbine
Andrea Yates
The Scream
ROGER VIOLLET / GETTY

STEALING THE MONA LISA, 1911
She had been the chattel of French monarchs. Francois I
bought her. Louis XIV set her up in Versailles. Napoleon
moved her into his bedroom. She was Italian, created by
Leonardo da Vinci over four years' labor in Florence, but
France was her home and there she stayed for four centuries.
Then on Aug. 20, 1911, the space she occupied on the walls
of the Louvre was discovered bare. The theft shook France:
the country's borders were closed, administrators at the
museum were dismissed, enemies of traditional art were
suspected of evil intentions. (The avant-garde poet Guillaume
Apollinaire was arrested as a suspect; he implicated Pablo
Picasso. Both were eventually dropped as possible culprits).
As the months went by, the fears grew that the Mona Lisa
had been destroyed. Then the Louvre received word from the
Ufzi Gallery in Florence. The Italian ofcials said they had
arrested a man named Vincenzo Perugia, who had brought
the Mona Lisa to a local antiques dealer in order to sell it and
restore it to Italy. (Perugia, who had single-handedly stolen
the masterpiece, may or may not have been part of a plot to
inate the prices of forged Mona Lisas; he had lost contact
with his co-conspirators and decided to sell the original wood
panel painting himself.) On Jan. 4, 1914, the painting was
returned to the Louvre. Hailed as a patriot in Italy, Perugia,
while found guilty, served only a few months in jail.
Patriotism is also a refuge for art thieves.
NEXT: The Fake Ape-Man
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Top 25 Crimes of the Century - The Fake Ape-Man - TIME
THE TOP 25
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by Howard Chua-Eoan
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On the 75th
anniversary of the
Lindbergh
kidnapping, TIME
looks back at the
notorious crimes of
the past hundred
years
Lindbergh
Kidnapping
Mona Lisa
Ape-Man
Fatty Arbuckle
The Black Dahlia
The Brinks Job
Lana Turner
The Great Train
Robbery
Richard Speck
Tate Murders
Patty Hearst
Son of Sam
John Wayne Gacy
Ted Bundy
Art Heist
Jeffrey Dahmer
O.J. Simpson
Barings Bank
The Unabomber
JonBenet Ramsey
Versace Killings
Mary Kay
Letourneau
Columbine
Andrea Yates
The Scream
MAURICE AMBLER / PICTURE POST / GETTY

THE FAKE APE-MAN, 1912
Eoanthropus dawsoni was the scientic name of this alleged
missing link, and it would have been an extremely early
example of a creature showing both human and apelike
qualities. At 375,000 years old, it put England in contention
for a cradle of humankind, being found in the Sussex town of
Piltdown. The "rst Englishman" he was proudly called when
the anthropologist Charles Dawson found him in 1911. For
decades, Piltdown Man was cited along with Neanderthal
man and Heidelberg man as an example of early hominid life
in Europe. Then in 1953, the fragments, including a jawbone,
were tested: they did not contain enough uorine to be the
age that Dawson claimed; worse, the jawbone was that of a
10-year-old orangutan, its teeth ground down to simulate age,
and a crude chemical wash applied to the bone to make it
appear ancient. No one knows who perpetrated the hoax:
Dawson had died in 1916. Very quickly, however, Piltdown
became a synonym for phony; and England's claim to
antiquity was cut short by several hundred thousand years.
NEXT: The Fatty Arbuckle Scandal
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Top 25 Crimes of the Century - The Fatty Arbuckle Scandal - TIME
THE TOP 25
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by Howard Chua-Eoan
Next
E-Mail this
On the 75th
anniversary of the
Lindbergh
kidnapping, TIME
looks back at the
notorious crimes of
the past hundred
years
Lindbergh
Kidnapping
Mona Lisa
Ape-Man
Fatty Arbuckle
The Black Dahlia
The Brinks Job
Lana Turner
The Great Train
Robbery
Richard Speck
Tate Murders
Patty Hearst
Son of Sam
John Wayne Gacy
Ted Bundy
Art Heist
Jeffrey Dahmer
O.J. Simpson
Barings Bank
The Unabomber
JonBenet Ramsey
Versace Killings
Mary Kay
Letourneau
Columbine
Andrea Yates
The Scream
HULTON / GETTY
THE FATTY ARBUCKLE SCANDAL, 1920
When the world rst read about the events of Sept. 3, 1920 in
the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco, the plotline appeared
to be tabloid-headline loud and clear: during a wild party, an
obese Hollywood comedy star takes advantage of a naive
young actress, puncturing her bladder during forced sex (with
a beer bottle!); she dies a painful death of peritonitis. The star
was Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle, perhaps the rst lm actor to
be paid an annual salary of $1 million, an amazing sum in the
silent lm industry. Insisting he had done nothing wrong,
Arbuckle nevertheless went through three trials, hounded by
newspapers and morality groups each time. His movies were
banned in both America and Britain. Some people even
called for him to be executed. But the woman who brought
the charges -- a friend of the dead starlet -- never testied in
court because of a past record of extortion, racketeering and
bigamy. Neither was the woman an eyewitness to the alleged
crime. Arbuckle's rst two trials thus ended in hung juries.
And the third acquitted him of all crimes. That jury even
issued him an apology. But his career was over. The media
pall over his reputation was impossible to overcome. The
public and much of Hollywood would never forgive him; all
his comeback attempts failed. Indeed, as a result of the
scandal, the White House established the Hays Ofce as the
movie industry's moral arbiter and censor. Arbuckle died in
1933, after falling into alcoholism and a lurid obscurity.
From the Archive:
Again, Arbuckle?
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Top 25 Crimes of the Century - The Black Dahlia - TIME
THE TOP 25
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by Howard Chua-Eoan
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On the 75th
anniversary of the
Lindbergh
kidnapping, TIME
looks back at the
notorious crimes of
the past hundred
years
Lindbergh
Kidnapping
Mona Lisa
Ape-Man
Fatty Arbuckle
The Black Dahlia
The Brinks Job
Lana Turner
The Great Train
Robbery
Richard Speck
Tate Murders
Patty Hearst
Son of Sam
John Wayne Gacy
Ted Bundy
Art Heist
Jeffrey Dahmer
O.J. Simpson
Barings Bank
The Unabomber
JonBenet Ramsey
Versace Killings
Mary Kay
Letourneau
Columbine
Andrea Yates
The Scream
GETTY
THE BLACK DAHLIA, 1947
Set in the post-war Los Angeles boom, the unsolved murder
of Elizabeth Short is a cautionary tale about big cities,
America's peripatetic population and the dangers of the new
vast urban landscapes of the nation. On Jan. 15, 1947, a
severely mutilated, naked body, sliced in half at the waist and
a grotesque grimace carved into her face, was found not far
from Hollywood. The corpse was that of 22-year-old Short,
who had moved to California to from the East Coast to
pursue an acting career but ended up serving tables.
Reporters gave her the nickname "Black Dahlia," perhaps
inspired by the recently released Blue Dahlia, a lm in the
Hollywood noir style about a ghter bomber accused of the
death of his faithless wife. (Short had been engaged to a
major in U.S. Air Force but he died in a plane crash in
August 1945.) The case generated a huge list of potential
suspects and possible motives, as well as urban legends about
the victim's sexual and moral proclivities. With its morbid air
of noir nostalgia, the Black Dahlia has also inspired a large
number of novels and movies over the years.
From the Archive:
Review: The Black Dahlia
NEXT: The Brinks Job
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Top 25 Crimes of the Century - The Brinks Job - TIME
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by Howard Chua-Eoan
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E-Mail this
On the 75th
anniversary of the
Lindbergh
kidnapping, TIME
looks back at the
notorious crimes of
the past hundred
years
Lindbergh
Kidnapping
Mona Lisa
Ape-Man
Fatty Arbuckle
The Black Dahlia
The Brinks Job
Lana Turner
The Great Train
Robbery
Richard Speck
Tate Murders
Patty Hearst
Son of Sam
John Wayne Gacy
Ted Bundy
Art Heist
Jeffrey Dahmer
O.J. Simpson
Barings Bank
The Unabomber
JonBenet Ramsey
Versace Killings
Mary Kay
Letourneau
Columbine
Andrea Yates
The Scream
CARL IWASAKI / TIME & LIFE PICTURES / GETTY

THE BRINKS JOB, 1950
A gang of 11 men set out on a meticulous 18-month quest to
rob the Brinks headquarters in Boston, the home-base of the
legendary private security rm. The planning and practice
had a military intensity to them; the attention to detail -including the close approximation of the uniform of the
Brinks' guards -- was near genius. It all came off without a
hitch: the perfect crime of the century. And the haul was
astonishing: more than $1.2 million in cash and $1.5 million
in checks and securities, the biggest heist at that time in
American history. But while the plan was perfect, the
participants proved to be all too human. Even as the
authorities spent years trying to gure out who was behind
the "great Brinks robbery," the 11 were falling out among
themselves. Eventually, someone associated with the mob
allegedly hired a hit man to kill Joseph "Specs" O'Keefe, a
gangmember who had been grousing that he had been
cheated of his proper share of the robbery. At that point,
O'Keefe -- wounded in the attempted rub-out -- decided to
talk to the FBI. By 1957, most of the gang had been
sentenced to life in prison, except for O'Keefe who got four
years. None would account for the bulk of the stolen funds.
To this day, no one has found the money.
From the Archive:
The Big Payoff
NEXT: The Lana Turner Affair
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Top 25 Crimes of the Century - The Lana Turner Affair - TIME
THE TOP 25
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by Howard Chua-Eoan
Next
E-Mail this
On the 75th
anniversary of the
Lindbergh
kidnapping, TIME
looks back at the
notorious crimes of
the past hundred
years
Lindbergh
Kidnapping
Mona Lisa
Ape-Man
Fatty Arbuckle
The Black Dahlia
The Brinks Job
Lana Turner
The Great Train
Robbery
Richard Speck
Tate Murders
Patty Hearst
Son of Sam
John Wayne Gacy
Ted Bundy
Art Heist
Jeffrey Dahmer
O.J. Simpson
Barings Bank
The Unabomber
JonBenet Ramsey
Versace Killings
Mary Kay
Letourneau
Columbine
Andrea Yates
The Scream
LOS ANGELES TIMES / AP

THE LANA TURNER AFFAIR, 1958
Lana Turner reigned as one of Hollywood's box-ofce queens
for more than two decades. Real life was much trampier. Her
father, a miner in Idaho, was murdered after winning a craps
game. She loved to hang out with men of ill repute and would
eventually marry seven times. One marriage, to the actor Lex
Barker, would end in 1957 after she accused him of
molesting her daughter by a previous marriage, Cheryl
Crane. True to her failings, she began a torrid and tumultuous
affair with Johnny Stompanato, a man suspected of mob ties.
When she tried to break it off, he grew violent. And on the
night of April 4, 1958, Stompanato and Turner engaged in a
ferocious argument at her Beverly Hills home, so violent in
fact that 14-year old Cheryl ran for a knife and ended up
stabbing Stompanato to death. The papers loved the story and
the coroner's inquest was one of the most sensational legal
hearings Hollywood has ever seen. Turner's tale on the stand
was riveting: a wayward mother in distress and the faithful
daughter who comes to her rescue. "I walked toward the
bedroom door," Turner testied. "He was right behind me.
And I opened it and my daughter came in. I swear it was so
fast, I truthfully thought she had hit him in the stomach ... I
never saw a blade." A Stompanato friend's outburst in court
implied that it was Lana who wielded the knife, but the
coroner declared the whole thing justiable homicide.
Turner's career ourished into the 1980s.
From the Archive:
The Bad and the Beautiful
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Top 25 Crimes of the Century - The Great Train Robbery - TIME
THE TOP 25
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by Howard Chua-Eoan
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On the 75th
anniversary of the
Lindbergh
kidnapping, TIME
looks back at the
notorious crimes of
the past hundred
years
Lindbergh
Kidnapping
Mona Lisa
Ape-Man
Fatty Arbuckle
The Black Dahlia
The Brinks Job
Lana Turner
The Great Train
Robbery
Richard Speck
Tate Murders
Patty Hearst
Son of Sam
John Wayne Gacy
Ted Bundy
Art Heist
Jeffrey Dahmer
O.J. Simpson
Barings Bank
The Unabomber
JonBenet Ramsey
Versace Killings
Mary Kay
Letourneau
Columbine
Andrea Yates
The Scream
DENNIS OULDS / CENTRAL PRESS / GETTY

THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY, 1963
The 15 thieves who held up the Royal Mail train between
Glasgow and London on Aug. 8, 1963 netted 120 bags
packed with the equivalent of $7 million and were were
treated like folk heroes by the press and public. Although the
operation took all of 15 minutes, the caper was not as smooth
as people remember it. It wasn't non-violent, for one thing
(the driver of the train was conked in the head and never fully
recovered from the trauma); nor was it as carefully executed
(the thieves left ngerprints everywhere). The case has lived
on in memory because of the further adventures of one of its
minor players, Ronnie Biggs, whose escape from prison and
long years of eluding justice were constant fodder for the
British tabs. Readers were fascinated that a small-time hood
could end up being part of the biggest heist in British history
and be the only one to get away with it all. Biggs eventually
gave himself up in 2001, returning voluntarily from Brazil to
serve the 28 years remaining in his sentence. Despite pleas
for leniency, Biggs, now 77, remains incarcerated and in
failing health.
From the Archive:
The Cheddington Caper
NEXT: Richard Speck
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Top 25 Crimes of the Century - Richard Speck - TIME
THE TOP 25
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by Howard Chua-Eoan
Next
E-Mail this
On the 75th
anniversary of the
Lindbergh
kidnapping, TIME
looks back at the
notorious crimes of
the past hundred
years
Lindbergh
Kidnapping
Mona Lisa
Ape-Man
Fatty Arbuckle
The Black Dahlia
The Brinks Job
Lana Turner
The Great Train
Robbery
Richard Speck
Tate Murders
Patty Hearst
Son of Sam
John Wayne Gacy
Ted Bundy
Art Heist
Jeffrey Dahmer
O.J. Simpson
Barings Bank
The Unabomber
JonBenet Ramsey
Versace Killings
Mary Kay
Letourneau
Columbine
Andrea Yates
The Scream
ART SHAY / TIME & LIFE PICTURES / GETTY

RICHARD SPECK, 1966
It sounds like a recurring nightmare: an armed male intruder
breaks into a women's dorm and with a gun and a butcher's
knife, binds and gags all the residents. Then one by one, he
kills them cruelly and with great brutality. All of that
happened in Chicago on the night of July 14, 1966, in a
dormitory that housed eight nurses who worked at the South
Chicago Community Hospital. The perpetrator was Richard
Speck, then 24, a drifter born in Illinois, raised in Texas,
wandering from petty crime to petty crime and bar to bar. At
the age of 19, he had the words "Born to Raise Hell" tattooed
on his arm. His victims were all eulogized as saints, people
who had committed their lives to helping others. He would be
positively identied by one of his intended targets, Corazon
Amurao, who survived the attack by hiding under a bed.
Speck knew there were eight women in the dorm; he did not
know that a friend was also staying over that night. So
Amurao survived as the guest was led to slaughter. The jury
found Speck guilty after a mere 49 minutes of deliberation
and he was sentenced to the electric chair. In 1972, however,
the U.S. Supreme Court declared the death sentence
unconstitutional. Resentenced to hundreds of years in prison,
Speck died in 1991. No one claimed his body, which was
cremated and the ashes scattered to the wind.
From the Archive:
One by One
NEXT: The Tate-LaBianca Murders
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Top 25 Crimes of the Century - The Tate-LaBianca Murders - TIME
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by Howard Chua-Eoan
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E-Mail this
On the 75th
anniversary of the
Lindbergh
kidnapping, TIME
looks back at the
notorious crimes of
the past hundred
years
Lindbergh
Kidnapping
Mona Lisa
Ape-Man
Fatty Arbuckle
The Black Dahlia
The Brinks Job
Lana Turner
The Great Train
Robbery
Richard Speck
Tate Murders
Patty Hearst
Son of Sam
John Wayne Gacy
Ted Bundy
Art Heist
Jeffrey Dahmer
O.J. Simpson
Barings Bank
The Unabomber
JonBenet Ramsey
Versace Killings
Mary Kay
Letourneau
Columbine
Andrea Yates
The Scream
SAHM DOHERTY / TIME & LIFE PICTURES / GETTY

THE TATE-LABIANCA MURDERS, 1969
On Aug. 9 and 10, 1969, two sets of grisly murders took
place in Los Angeles. On the 9th, a gang of four people
brutally killed the actress Sharon Tate, who was married to
director Roman Polanski and eight and a half months
pregnant, four of Tate's friends and the son of her gardener.
Tate begged for the life of her unborn child but was told by
one of the female assailants, "Look bitch, I don't care about
you. I don't care if you are having a baby. You are going to
die and I don't feel a thing about it." Tate's blood was used to
write the word PIG on the home's front door. The next day
supermarket executive Leno LaBianca and his wife were
killed in a similar fashion, a fork used to carve the word
WAR on his belly left sticking out of his corpse. This time,
the leader of the gang took part in the slaughter. Authorities
would take nearly ve months to track down Charles Manson
and his so-called Family. And when they did, America
discovered a terrifying mix of a libertine counter-culture and
stupefying mind-control. Manson sent out his mostly female
agents like the Furies of Greek mythology, to take down
those whom he saw as his enemies. His trial ended in 1971
with a death sentence which was vacated by the U.S.
Supreme Court's declaration of the penalty's
unconstitutionality. He is up for parole this year but is
unlikely to receive it.
From the Archive:
The Demon of Death Valley
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Top 25 Crimes of the Century - The Patty Hearst Kidnapping - TIME
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by Howard Chua-Eoan
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E-Mail this
On the 75th
anniversary of the
Lindbergh
kidnapping, TIME
looks back at the
notorious crimes of
the past hundred
years
Lindbergh
Kidnapping
Mona Lisa
Ape-Man
Fatty Arbuckle
The Black Dahlia
The Brinks Job
Lana Turner
The Great Train
Robbery
Richard Speck
Tate Murders
Patty Hearst
Son of Sam
John Wayne Gacy
Ted Bundy
Art Heist
Jeffrey Dahmer
O.J. Simpson
Barings Bank
The Unabomber
JonBenet Ramsey
Versace Killings
Mary Kay
Letourneau
Columbine
Andrea Yates
The Scream
UPI / BETTMANN / CORBIS

THE PATTY HEARST KIDNAPPING, 1974
Her family is a storied one, albeit the kind of stories that
involved yellow journalism, character assassination, political
manipulation and gossip mongering. Who knew that Patricia
Hearst, granddaughter of newspaper magnate William
Randolph Hearst, the inspiration for Orson Well's biting lm
Citizen Kane, would herself become the central character of
one of the biggest news stories of the turbulent 1970s? It was
shocking enough on Feb. 4, 1974 when the 19-year-old
heiress was kidnapped by a ratty band of Bay Area urban
revolutionaries, the Symbionese National Liberation Army,
who demanded as ransom that her father feed all the hungry
in California. But then, just over two months later, she was
seen on camera assisting them in a bank robbery. Soon
enough, the kidnap victim had an arrest warrant of her own.
It would be nearly a year and a half before she was captured.
Despite the defense's strategy of brainwashing, her twomonth trial in 1976 led to a seven-year sentence. It was later
commuted by then-President Jimmy Carter and she served
only 22 months. Bill Clinton granted her a full pardon on the
day he left ofce. Nowadays, Hearst is a socialite, not a
guerrilla, though she appears in a number of director John
Waters' subversive, sly and crude comedies.
From the Archive:
The Ordeal of a Political Prisoner
The Hearst Nightmare
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Top 25 Crimes of the Century - The Son of Sam - TIME
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On the 75th
anniversary of the
Lindbergh
kidnapping, TIME
looks back at the
notorious crimes of
the past hundred
years
Lindbergh
Kidnapping
Mona Lisa
Ape-Man
Fatty Arbuckle
The Black Dahlia
The Brinks Job
Lana Turner
The Great Train
Robbery
Richard Speck
Tate Murders
Patty Hearst
Son of Sam
John Wayne Gacy
Ted Bundy
Art Heist
Jeffrey Dahmer
O.J. Simpson
Barings Bank
The Unabomber
JonBenet Ramsey
Versace Killings
Mary Kay
Letourneau
Columbine
Andrea Yates
The Scream
UPI / BETTMANN / CORBIS

THE SON OF SAM, 1977
New York seemed to be going to hell in the summer of 1977.
Already in perpetual scal crisis the city was plunged into a
25-hour blackout on July 13 that saw massive looting and
arson. And the Son of Sam killer was still out there after
more than a year, waiting to kill again, sending his perverse
missives to the police and to New York Daily News
columnist Jimmy Breslin. The killer had called himself the
Son of Sam in his letters, which spoke of Papa Sam as a
drinker of blood and master of Satanic mayhem. And on July
31, the Son of Sam struck again, shooting a young woman,
who was killed, and her male companion, who would be
blinded. But it would be the last attack. A witness on the
night of that shooting saw a man in the neighborhood remove
a parking ticket from a Ford Galaxie. The police tracked their
records and found 24-year-old David Berkowitz, a dweeby,
pudgy employee of the U.S. Postal Service. Trained as a
sharpshooter with the M16 rie in the U.S. Army, he had
used a .44 pistol in all the shootings, killing six and
wounding seven. Who was Sam? Sam, said Berkowitz, was a
cantankerous former neighbor. But Berkowitz said he was the
devil and that he transmitted his orders through the infernal
and incessant barkings of his dog, Harvey.
From the Archive:
"Sam Told Me to Do It"
NEXT: John Wayne Gacy
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On the 75th
anniversary of the
Lindbergh
kidnapping, TIME
looks back at the
notorious crimes of
the past hundred
years
Lindbergh
Kidnapping
Mona Lisa
Ape-Man
Fatty Arbuckle
The Black Dahlia
The Brinks Job
Lana Turner
The Great Train
Robbery
Richard Speck
Tate Murders
Patty Hearst
Son of Sam
John Wayne Gacy
Ted Bundy
Art Heist
Jeffrey Dahmer
O.J. Simpson
Barings Bank
The Unabomber
JonBenet Ramsey
Versace Killings
Mary Kay
Letourneau
Columbine
Andrea Yates
The Scream
TIM BOYLE / DES PLAINES POLICE DEPARTMENT /

GETTY
JOHN WAYNE GACY, 1978
The warning signs were there: the arrest for sodomy with a
minor; another sexual offense with a child; the strange smell,
like dead things, in his house. But John Wayne Gacy was also
an upstanding citizen: he helped out the neighbors, he was
the chaplain of the Jaycees, he dressed up as roly-poly Pogo
the Clown to entertain children. But when police came asking
questions in December 1978, Gacy started confessing. And
so the cops looked in the house's 40-ft. crawl space, beneath
the garage and under the house. They found the bodies and
remains of 28 young men and boys; Gacy said there were
four others that he had thrown into the river. By the end of
the year, police had practically torn the house down in their
search. There was no question that Gacy would be found
guilty; and a jury took barely an hour to come to that
decision. He was sentenced to death, under new guidelines
that would make sure the penalty was not "cruel and unusual"
and therefore within constitutional bounds. But Gacy's
execution by lethal injection in 1994 would reopen that
question; instead of a ve-minute procedure, the process took
18 and Gacy was clearly struggling as he perished. The
critics asked: Was this cruel and unusual? His victims'
families were unanimous: so was Gacy.
From the Archive:
"I Do Horrible, Rotten Things"
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On the 75th
anniversary of the
Lindbergh
kidnapping, TIME
looks back at the
notorious crimes of
the past hundred
years
Lindbergh
Kidnapping
Mona Lisa
Ape-Man
Fatty Arbuckle
The Black Dahlia
The Brinks Job
Lana Turner
The Great Train
Robbery
Richard Speck
Tate Murders
Patty Hearst
Son of Sam
John Wayne Gacy
Ted Bundy
Art Heist
Jeffrey Dahmer
O.J. Simpson
Barings Bank
The Unabomber
JonBenet Ramsey
Versace Killings
Mary Kay
Letourneau
Columbine
Andrea Yates
The Scream
BILL FRAKES / TIME & LIFE PICTURES / GETTY

TED BUNDY, 1978
The devil knows when to look attractive. And Ted Bundy
was handsome and cultured and charming. Until he was
strangling and mutilating his victims, displaying their loppedoff heads in his apartment and sleeping with their corpses
until putrefaction made it unbearable. Then he was simply
the devil. By 1989, when he was executed in the electric
chair in Florida at the age of 43, he had confessed to just
about 30 murders but there could have been at least four
more. He was an insatiable killer. One theory has him killing
as early as the age of 14, but Bundy -- who chose to divulge
many of his secrets as he tried to bargain for more time
before execution -- never confessed to that incident. As a law
student, Bundy had been arrested on a kidnapping charge in
1975 and was awaiting trial for murder in December 1977
when he escaped. From January to February of 1978, he went
on a spree of killing and rape. Among his victims was a 12year-old girl. Finally brought to trial, he acted as his own
defense lawyer in a mesmerizing televised legal proceeding.
And despite the horror of his acts, he proposed marriage to
and wed a former coworker from behind bars. He also
received thousands of letters from female fans. At the end,
though, his appeals were exhausted and his attempts to
manipulate the system became tiresome. His wife divorced
him and took custody of their child. Somewhere out there is a
young woman who may not know that her father was the
devil.
From the Archive:
The Case of the Chi Omega Killer
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On the 75th
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Lindbergh
kidnapping, TIME
looks back at the
notorious crimes of
the past hundred
years
Lindbergh
Kidnapping
Mona Lisa
Ape-Man
Fatty Arbuckle
The Black Dahlia
The Brinks Job
Lana Turner
The Great Train
Robbery
Richard Speck
Tate Murders
Patty Hearst
Son of Sam
John Wayne Gacy
Ted Bundy
Art Heist
Jeffrey Dahmer
O.J. Simpson
Barings Bank
The Unabomber
JonBenet Ramsey
Versace Killings
Mary Kay
Letourneau
Columbine
Andrea Yates
The Scream
BROOKS KRAFT / CORBIS

AMERICA'S BIGGEST ART HEIST, 1990
Isabella Stewart Gardner was an heiress and the wife of a rich
man. And so she went shopping, buying an eclectic but
extravagant collection of artwork on sprees through Europe
in the early 20th century. Among her treasures were a
Vermeer ("The Concert") and a Rembrandt ("Storm on the
Sea of Galilee"), two certied masterpieces. When she died
in 1924, Gardner stipulated that the small but exquisite
museum in Boston she had built to house her treasures should
have nothing new added to it; nor should any of the art be
repositioned. Both rules were violated on March 18, 1990,
when two men dressed as Boston cops waltzed into the
museum after 1 a.m., tied up the guards, shut off the alarm
system and took off with the Vermeer, the Rembrandt and
several less valuable pieces. The police at one point
estimated the value of the stolen goods at $300 million. It is
still listed as the biggest American art robbery on the FBI's
website. That's because nothing has been recovered. In the 17
years since the theft, there may have been one tantalizing
glimpse of the Rembrandt when unknown men brought a
Boston Herald reporter to a warehouse where he saw what he
believed was the "Sea of Galilee." But otherwise, the fear is
that the thieves grabbed what they could, sometimes crudely,
and may now not know what to do with their haul. The
Vermeer, one of only 32 known works by the artist in
existence, may be worth at least $70 million, and so
beautifully famous that it is unsellable on the open market.
So the greatest art heist in American history may have been a
botch, a tragedy so terrible that the thieves may have to
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Top 25 Crimes of the Century - America's Biggest Art Heist - TIME
destroy the very treasures they stole in order to conceal their

guilt.
From the Archive:
A Boston Theft Reects
The Great Art Caper
NEXT: Jeffrey Dahmer
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On the 75th
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Lindbergh
kidnapping, TIME
looks back at the
notorious crimes of
the past hundred
years
Lindbergh
Kidnapping
Mona Lisa
Ape-Man
Fatty Arbuckle
The Black Dahlia
The Brinks Job
Lana Turner
The Great Train
Robbery
Richard Speck
Tate Murders
Patty Hearst
Son of Sam
John Wayne Gacy
Ted Bundy
Art Heist
Jeffrey Dahmer
O.J. Simpson
Barings Bank
The Unabomber
JonBenet Ramsey
Versace Killings
Mary Kay
Letourneau
Columbine
Andrea Yates
The Scream
MILWAUKEE JOURNAL / SIPA

JEFFREY DAHMER, 1991
His surname is now synonymous with "monster." Yet at least
17 times, Jeffrey Dahmer was able to get young men and
boys to come home with him. In one incident, on the night of
May 27, 1991 in Milwaukee, a 14-year-old managed to
escape and wandered into the streets with Dahmer in pursuit.
When the cops started asking questions, Dahmer was able to
convince the police that it was merely a lovers' quarrel. The
police conclusion: "Intoxicated Asian, naked male. Was
returned to his sober boyfriend." Like the dozen before him
and four after, the young man was eventually strangled and
dismembered. Dahmer kept his skull as a souvenir. He stored
parts of his victims in vats. He ate them. Dahmer's crimes
raised several inchoate fears and revulsions: cannibalism,
sexuality, class and race -- most of his victims were poor,
African-American, Asian or Latino, while Dahmer was
white. After his arrest on July 22, 1991, Dahmer was
sentenced to nearly a thousand years in jail. He was killed by
an inmate in November 1994.
From the Archive:
Little Flat of Horrors
NEXT: The O.J. Simpson Case
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On the 75th
anniversary of the
Lindbergh
kidnapping, TIME
looks back at the
notorious crimes of
the past hundred
years
Lindbergh
Kidnapping
Mona Lisa
Ape-Man
Fatty Arbuckle
The Black Dahlia
The Brinks Job
Lana Turner
The Great Train
Robbery
Richard Speck
Tate Murders
Patty Hearst
Son of Sam
John Wayne Gacy
Ted Bundy
Art Heist
Jeffrey Dahmer
O.J. Simpson
Barings Bank
The Unabomber
JonBenet Ramsey
Versace Killings
Mary Kay
Letourneau
Columbine
Andrea Yates
The Scream
AFP / CORBIS
THE O.J. SIMPSON CASE, 1994
So ingrained are the details of the saga in living memory that
it is, perhaps, pointless to summarize them. The impression is
of a hydra-headed debauch: it was a classic Hollywood
celebrity legal melodrama; a race-relations story; a marriagegone-acrid; a foray into detective work and into genetics; a
primer on the jury system; proof of the overwhelming prots
to be made from tabloid TV; a domestic tragedy with feuding
families; a comedy of errors with irritating consequences. If
the Crime of the Century has to be a congeries of issues and
emotions, then this is the contemporary champion. Indeed, it
was done twice because much of the public needed an
alternative ending: the rst jury acquitting; the second jury
nding civil wrong. And the saga is relived again and again
whenever Simpson decides it is time to get more attention (as
he did at the end of 2006 with a proposed but unpublished
book that speculated on what he might have done if he were
indeed the murderer). The only tragic thing is that no one has
seen prison for the horrendous murder of Nicole Brown and
Ron Goldman on the night of June 12, 1994.
From the Archive:
The End of a Run
Making the Case
NEXT: The Collapse of Barings Bank
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On the 75th
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Lindbergh
kidnapping, TIME
looks back at the
notorious crimes of
the past hundred
years
Lindbergh
Kidnapping
Mona Lisa
Ape-Man
Fatty Arbuckle
The Black Dahlia
The Brinks Job
Lana Turner
The Great Train
Robbery
Richard Speck
Tate Murders
Patty Hearst
Son of Sam
John Wayne Gacy
Ted Bundy
Art Heist
Jeffrey Dahmer
O.J. Simpson
Barings Bank
The Unabomber
JonBenet Ramsey
Versace Killings
Mary Kay
Letourneau
Columbine
Andrea Yates
The Scream
ROSLAN RAHMAN / AFP / GETTY

THE COLLAPSE OF BARINGS BANK, 1995
Barings was the oldest investment bank in Britain, listing
among its clients the Queen herself. Indeed, the bank's
pedigree was so distinguished that it did not have a logo, it
had a crest. And yet, in order to survive in the late 20th
century, Barings called on young, not necessarily upper-class
go-getters who knew how to work the new instruments of
global nance like derivatives. Among these hungry young
climbers was Nick Leeson, the son of a council estates
plasterer. Starting in Barings' back ofce, he proved himself
adept at understanding the derivatives market and soon found
himself stationed in Singapore, betting on market shifts
around the world. At one point, his speculations accounted
for 10% of Barings prots. He was a star. But he also knew
how to manipulate the internal system and created a secret
Barings account whose losses the bank automatically
covered. He started risking huge amounts of money on the
Nikkei, betting that the Japanese stock market would go up.
Instead it went crashing down with a gigantic earthquake in
Kobe on Jan. 17, 1995. Leeson's losses mounted quickly until
he realized they would swamp not only him but all of
Barings. And indeed it did. They came to more than $1
billion, an amount the bank could not cover. It collapsed that
March and was bought by the Dutch nancial company ING
for one British pound. Leeson ed but was extradited to
Singapore where he served six and a half years for fraud. He
is now the manager of a soccer team in Scotland.
From the Archive:
Going for Broke
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On the 75th
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Lindbergh
kidnapping, TIME
looks back at the
notorious crimes of
the past hundred
years
Lindbergh
Kidnapping
Mona Lisa
Ape-Man
Fatty Arbuckle
The Black Dahlia
The Brinks Job
Lana Turner
The Great Train
Robbery
Richard Speck
Tate Murders
Patty Hearst
Son of Sam
John Wayne Gacy
Ted Bundy
Art Heist
Jeffrey Dahmer
O.J. Simpson
Barings Bank
The Unabomber
JonBenet Ramsey
Versace Killings
Mary Kay
Letourneau
Columbine
Andrea Yates
The Scream
ROGERS AND CLARK CO. / AFP / GETTY

THE UNABOMBER, 1996
Ted Kaczynski killed three people and wounded 22 with his
mailbombs, but it could have been much worse. He managed
to sneak a bomb onto American Airlines Flight 444 from
Chicago to Washington D.C. It exploded but only caused a
small re. Otherwise, a Boeing 747 passenger jet might have
fallen out of the sky on Nov. 15, 1979. As it is, the mad
genius, whom investigators tagged as the University and
Airline Bomber, would terrorize the country for nearly two
decades. From his cabin in the woods in Montana, the
reclusive mathematician would send out bomb after bomb,
and letter after letter haranguing victims who had survived
his attacks and taunting the media. No one was able to gure
out who he was. And then, in 1995, in a blast of egotistical
rage, he sent out a 35,000-word manifesto against technology
and industrialization, which the Washington Post and the
New York Times published in order to prevent the
Unabomber from carrying out his threat to blow up a plane
over Los Angeles. Someone recognized his ideas in that
manifesto. It was his brother, David. And so, the brutal chess
game between bomber and government came to an end as a
family drama between two brothers, very much alike and yet
different enough for one to give the other up for the public
good.
From the Archive:
Tracking Down the Unabomber
A Tale of Two Brothers
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On the 75th
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Lindbergh
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looks back at the
notorious crimes of
the past hundred
years
Lindbergh
Kidnapping
Mona Lisa
Ape-Man
Fatty Arbuckle
The Black Dahlia
The Brinks Job
Lana Turner
The Great Train
Robbery
Richard Speck
Tate Murders
Patty Hearst
Son of Sam
John Wayne Gacy
Ted Bundy
Art Heist
Jeffrey Dahmer
O.J. Simpson
Barings Bank
The Unabomber
JonBenet Ramsey
Versace Killings
Mary Kay
Letourneau
Columbine
Andrea Yates
The Scream
KARL GEHRING / LIAISON / CORBIS

THE MURDER OF JONBENET RAMSEY, 1996
Two corollary developments distinguish this terrible
unsolved killing of a beautiful six-year-old girl in Boulder,
Colo. The rst was the suddenly widespread revelation of the
existence of children's beauty pageants -- in which JonBenet
was entered time and again by her former beauty queen
mother, Patsy. Public fascination and repulsion over the
makeup, costumes and prepubescent swimsuit competitions
at times overshadowed the crime of child murder itself. The
second development was the tenacity with which observers
and large segments of the public held on to suspicions that
JonBenet's wealthy family had something to do with her
death. The murder was discovered the day after Christmas
1996 and to this day no credible suspect has been arrested,
despite the high-prole false confession of teacher John Mark
Karr. In the meantime, Patsy Ramsey has died of cancer. But
those who view her with suspicion have not relented.
From the Archive:
Who Killed this Child?
Playing at Pageants
NEXT: Andrew Cunanan
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On the 75th
anniversary of the
Lindbergh
kidnapping, TIME
looks back at the
notorious crimes of
the past hundred
years
Lindbergh
Kidnapping
Mona Lisa
Ape-Man
Fatty Arbuckle
The Black Dahlia
The Brinks Job
Lana Turner
The Great Train
Robbery
Richard Speck
Tate Murders
Patty Hearst
Son of Sam
John Wayne Gacy
Ted Bundy
Art Heist
Jeffrey Dahmer
O.J. Simpson
Barings Bank
The Unabomber
JonBenet Ramsey
Versace Killings
Mary Kay
Letourneau
Columbine
Andrea Yates
The Scream
CORBIS
THE VERSACE KILLING SPREE, 1997
Dismissed by his mother as a "high class male prostitute" and
defended by his father as an "altar boy," Andrew Cunanan is
indelibly cast in popular memory as the drug-using gay spree
killer with AIDS, even though no one is certain what drugs
he was on, if any, during his murderous three month rampage
in 1997 or even if he had been properly tested for HIV before
or after his death. Starting out in California, he would kill
ve people in all: two former lovers, both in Minnesota; a
rich man in Chicago from whom he stole a Lexus; a cemetery
caretaker in New Jersey, from whom he took a pick-up truck,
fearing that police were on to the Lexus; and, most
infamously, he killed the glitzy fashion designer Gianni
Versace in Miami. Cunanan, 27, nally killed himself in an
unoccupied houseboat not two miles away from the scene of
his last crime. From what is known of him, he liked to
embellish his biography, loved to spend money he did not
have and learned to deal drugs. He was fueled by envy,
obsessed with status and fame. That, combined with the
realization that his looks were failing -- and thus his
marketability to rich gay men -- may have led to a panic. But
only Cunanan knew for certain what his motives were. The
high life can produce very low forms of existence.
From the Archive:
Tagged for Murder
Dead Men Tell No Tales
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On the 75th
anniversary of the
Lindbergh
kidnapping, TIME
looks back at the
notorious crimes of
the past hundred
years
Lindbergh
Kidnapping
Mona Lisa
Ape-Man
Fatty Arbuckle
The Black Dahlia
The Brinks Job
Lana Turner
The Great Train
Robbery
Richard Speck
Tate Murders
Patty Hearst
Son of Sam
John Wayne Gacy
Ted Bundy
Art Heist
Jeffrey Dahmer
O.J. Simpson
Barings Bank
The Unabomber
JonBenet Ramsey
Versace Killings
Mary Kay
Letourneau
Columbine
Andrea Yates
The Scream
REUTERS / CORBIS
MARY KAY LETOURNEAU'S FORBIDDEN LOVE,
1998
What happens to a woman when she nds the man of her
dreams, only he is a child? And if the woman is his teacher?
American parents cringed at the story of Mary Kay
Letourneau, who rst met Vili Fualaau when she was his
teacher in second grade. He did not start irting with her until
he was in sixth. She started to have sex with him the next
year, when he was 13. Already the mother of four from a
marriage that was disintegrating, she would bear the
teenager's daughter, but not before she ended up in prison on
rape and molestation charges. She would then violate the
rules for the suspension of her sentence by seeing him again - and becoming pregnant again. Letourneau's beauty and
struggles with manic depression made her illicit affair the
fodder of tabloids and women's magazines around the world.
But there was something touching, if maddening, about her
refusal to renounce her love for the boy at the cost of her
freedom. In 1998, after giving birth to her second child with
Fualaau, she began serving a seven-year prison sentence.
Released on parole in August 2004, she quickly married her
young lover, who by then had turned 21.
From the Archive:
A Matter of Hearts
NEXT: Columbine Massacre
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On the 75th
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Lindbergh
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looks back at the
notorious crimes of
the past hundred
years
Lindbergh
Kidnapping
Mona Lisa
Ape-Man
Fatty Arbuckle
The Black Dahlia
The Brinks Job
Lana Turner
The Great Train
Robbery
Richard Speck
Tate Murders
Patty Hearst
Son of Sam
John Wayne Gacy
Ted Bundy
Art Heist
Jeffrey Dahmer
O.J. Simpson
Barings Bank
The Unabomber
JonBenet Ramsey
Versace Killings
Mary Kay
Letourneau
Columbine
Andrea Yates
The Scream
REUTERS / CORBIS
COLUMBINE MASSACRE, 1999
School shootings were already a problem before April 20,
1999. Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris knew that theirs had to
stand out. So they planned to make every previous incident
look podunk, and they videotaped their boast so the world
would know what they had set out to do. And so they turned
Columbine High School into an abattoir: murdering 12
schoolmates and a teacher, wounding 24 other people and
then, nally, killing themselves in a drama seen live on
television. It was not quite the 250 they had hoped to kill, but
it was enough to make the incident the worst school shooting
in American history. This sudden eruption of violence in the
middle of one of the most solidly upper middle class
communities in America set off months of soul searching.
Parents and school ofcials discussed the prevalence of
violent music and video games; a similar concern arose over
school sociology -- bullies, outsiders and teen goth culture.
Parents asked: what are the warning signs that our children
are turning out to be their own enemies? On their tapes,
Klebold and Harris talk about anger management but not the
expected kind. Rather, they were learning to ratchet up their
anger and yet keep it secret from everyone else -- until the
day they had to turn it on full blast.
From the Archive:
In Sorrow and Disbelief
The Columbine Tapes
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On the 75th
anniversary of the
Lindbergh
kidnapping, TIME
looks back at the
notorious crimes of
the past hundred
years
Lindbergh
Kidnapping
Mona Lisa
Ape-Man
Fatty Arbuckle
The Black Dahlia
The Brinks Job
Lana Turner
The Great Train
Robbery
Richard Speck
Tate Murders
Patty Hearst
Son of Sam
John Wayne Gacy
Ted Bundy
Art Heist
Jeffrey Dahmer
O.J. Simpson
Barings Bank
The Unabomber
JonBenet Ramsey
Versace Killings
Mary Kay
Letourneau
Columbine
Andrea Yates
The Scream
PAM FRANCIS / GETTY

THE SAD SAGA OF ANDREA YATES, 2001
The prosecution in the trial of Andrea Yates argued that she
may have drowned her four young sons and infant daughter
in the family bathtub as a kind of symbolic revenge for the
emptiness of her life with their father, Randy. However, as
shocking as the June 20, 2001 drownings were, much of the
speculation was over Yates' mental condition. Did the fact
that she had ve children, each spaced about two years apart,
have anything to do with mental illness, brought on perhaps
by repetitive post-partum depression? And what of her
conservative Christian husband and the home-schooling of
the children? How much time did the young mother have to
herself? Absent from Yates was the viciousness of Susan
Smith, who had locked her two young sons in a car on Oct.
25, 1994, let them slide into a lake, all in order to be free to
run off with a wealthy lover. Instead, the focus was the
insidiousness of mental illness. Yates confessed to the
murders and would undergo two trials. The rst rejected
insanity as a defense and sent her to prison for life. An appeal
gave her a second trial in which she was found not guilty by
reason of insanity. She has since been committed to a mental
health facility. Her husband has remarried.
From the Archive:The Yates Odyssey
NEXT: The Theft of The Scream
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On the 75th
anniversary of the
Lindbergh
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looks back at the
notorious crimes of
the past hundred
years
Lindbergh
Kidnapping
Mona Lisa
Ape-Man
Fatty Arbuckle
The Black Dahlia
The Brinks Job
Lana Turner
The Great Train
Robbery
Richard Speck
Tate Murders
Patty Hearst
Son of Sam
John Wayne Gacy
Ted Bundy
Art Heist
Jeffrey Dahmer
O.J. Simpson
Barings Bank
The Unabomber
JonBenet Ramsey
Versace Killings
Mary Kay
Letourneau
Columbine
Andrea Yates
The Scream
SCANPIX / AP
THE THEFT OF "THE SCREAM," 2006
Perhaps no crime carried as much symbolic freight in the
new millennium as the theft of Edvard Munch's painting
"The Scream" from the museum bearing his name in Oslo,
Norway, on Aug. 22, 2004. Munch had been a target before.
Another version of "The Scream" had been stolen just before
the Winter Olympics of 1994 in Lillehammer but had been
recovered. This time, the theft was brazen. Armed men
walked into the museum and carted off Munch's archetypal
image of contemporary anxiety along with a ghostly
masterwork, "Madonna." The two paintings were virtually
ripped off the walls. As much as a theft of art, it was an
assault on the collective psyche of the world since "The
Scream," as angst-ridden as it is, had become a beloved
symbol of nervousness, the communal expression of notbeing-able-to-take-it-anymore. In time, culprits were brought
to ground and sent to prison. As people, they seem not to be
interesting so much as unforgivable. One theory is that the
entire caper was planned to distract police resources from the
investigation of a bank robbery and fatal shooting of a guard.
In any case, the thieves did not care for the masterpieces they
so roughtly stole. "The Scream," which was painted on
cardboard not canvas, has suffered irreparable water damage
and aking due to exposure to extremes of temperature.
"Madonna" too had a tear on its surface and had to be
restored.
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11/25/2016

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