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In 1962, Queens County, New Yorker Armando Cossentino, 19, and his 36 year-old lover, Jean Difede, murdered her physician husband, Dr. Joseph Difede in order to collect on his $72,000 life insurance policy. They were arrested not long after and went on trial early that summer. Armando was sentenced to die in the electric chair […]

  On the morning of April 1, 1935, at 3:55 o’clock, Patrick Murray, a subway conductor on the Brooklyn-Manhattan Transit lines, arrived home from his night’s work. As soon as he entered the hallway of the two-story frame dwelling on Marine Avenue, Brooklyn, he noticed something unusual—the light in the hallway had not been extinguished. […]

This is what happens to people who have poor impulse control. John Wolker is a German, fifty-two years of age, and a carpenter by occupation. He is of medium height and rather lean in form. By his first wife he had two children, whom he boarded out in care of a sister prior to his […]

  On May 1, Mrs. Luetgert suddenly disappeared, but her husband was apparently unconcerned regarding her absence and advanced the theory that she had committed suicide because of his failure in business. On May 4, Deidrich Bicknesse, Mrs. Luetgert’s brother, called to see her, and Luetgert informed him that she had been missing for three […]

  Follow HistoricalCrimeDetective.com on Facebook The Zodiac Killer, whose serial murders terrorized northern California in the late ’60s, was a man named Earl Van Best Jr., according to a new book by Gary L. Stewart, who happens to be his biological son. Stewart’s The Most Dangerous Animal of All, as we reported Monday, is for […]

This is Rex Brinlee Jr. He was a Tahlequah, Oklahoma plumber and operator of a night club, called “The Library Club,” in 1971 when he was the chief suspect in the theft of a pick-up truck from a used car-lot. A witness in that case, Don Bolding, of Bristow, was set to testify against him. […]

. Today’s mug shot belongs to Tulsa bank robber Coney Coffey. Coffey robbed a bank in Tulsa in 1924 and was sentenced to 25 years in prison. While in prison, he contracted tuberculosis. He escaped twice in 1934 by tunneling underneath the tuberculosis wing of the Oklahoma State Penitentiary hospital with 7(?) other prisoners. During […]