Top 25 Crimes of the Century (Time magazine)

There's something about True Crime stories that has always interested me. idk, maybe i'm morbid, but even reading about murders has been fascinating.

This list is from 2002, but off the top of my head I can only think of two crimes (Madoff & the Belfast Northern Heist) in the last 8 years that would knock something of this list.

What other crimes belong on this type of countdown?



25) Patty Hearst
24) Son of Sam
23) John Wayne Gacy
22) Ted Bundy
21) Art Heist
20) Jeffrey Dahmer
19) O.J. Simpson
18) Barings Bank
17) The Unabomber
16) JonBenet Ramsey
15) Versace Killings
14) Mary Kay Letourneau
13) Columbine
12 ) Andrea Yates
11) The Scream


[B]10) THE TATE-LABIANCA MURDERS, 1969[/B]
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 bytch, 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...


[B]9) RICHARD SPECK, 1966[/B]
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...


[B]8) THE GREAT TRAIN ROBBERY, 1963[/B]
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...


[B]7) THE LANA TURNER AFFAIR, 1958[/B]
Lana Turner reigned as one of Hollywood's box-office 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...


[B]6) THE BRINKS JOB, 1950[/B]
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 firm. 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...


[B]5) THE BLACK DAHLIA, 1947[/B]
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...


[B]4) THE FATTY ARBUCKLE SCANDAL, 1920[/B]
When the world 1st 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 first film actor to be paid an annual salary of $1 million, an amazing sum in the silent film 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 testified in court because of a past record of extortion, racketeering and bigamy...


[B]3) THE FAKE APE-MAN, 1912[/B]
Eoanthropus dawsoni was the scientific 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 "first 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...


[B]2) STEALING THE MONA LISA, 1911[/B]
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...


[B]1) THE LINDBERGH KIDNAPPING[/B]
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 five years before, had become the first man to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean. The disappearance set off a media frenzy across the country. Not only was everyone desperate for the latest information about the baby snatching, but they also feared that the crime, if left unsolved, would set off an epidemic of kidnappings...

[URL="http://www.time.com/time/2007/crimes/"]http://www.time.com/time/2007/crimes/[/URL]

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where the hell is Al Capone?

Where the hell is that mexican serial killer that killed 60 people?

And where is the luftansa heist?

List is bull

[QUOTE=goldenryan][IMG]http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/8/8d/DBCoopermovieposter.jpg/120px-DBCoopermovieposter.jpg[/IMG][/QUOTE]
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Awesome. that's some james bond shyt! :roll:

Damn, never new that about #1, thats some messed up BS, man is capable of some sick shit.

Where is Colorado rape?

I can't believe the Lufthansa Heist isn't on there.

[QUOTE=DeuceWallaces]I can't believe the Lufthansa Heist isn't on there.[/QUOTE]


holy shyt, i didn't realize the blood bath that resulted from the robbery (13).


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Funniest part of that is the crime was flawless and not a single shot fired, but it resulted in a blood bath.