Charles Rumbaugh’s minor notoriety as a killer and criminal only came after he committed the murder that put him on Texas death row. On April 4, 1975, Rumbaugh shot and killed an Amarillo jewelry store owner, fifty-eight-year-old Michael Fiorillo, during a robbery. When he was arrested the next day, he pulled a gun on the […]

  During the month of October 1974, Patrick Randel, an undercover narcotics agent with the Texas Department of Public Safety, was working a drug buy/sting operation against two underworld figures from Austin. With $850 in “buy money,” Randel agreed to purchase Quaaludes from the two men. On October 23, the three met in a room […]

Story by Jason Lucky Morrow Posted: December 9, 2015 On November 9, 1927, twenty-year-old Howard Hitchens of Georgetown, Delaware, was growing concerned for his uncle, Robert, whom he had not seen in several days. When he went to the man’s home in nearby Frankford, he found him “beaten to death in a blood splattered room,” […]

. On August 7, 1978, Harker Heights Police Officer Carl Levin located an arson suspect entering a vacant house in the small community located southeast of Killeen, Texas. When Officer Levin stopped the individual and asked for identification, the man pulled out a .25 caliber pistol and shot the thirty-one-year-old Levin in the head, killing […]

On Halloween night, 1974, Ronald O’Bryan took his eight-year-old-son, Timothy, and his daughter, trick-or-treating with some other neighborhood friends near their home in the Deer Park suburb of Houston. Since there was a light rain falling, they only collected candy in a two-block area for half-an-hour before returning home. As he went to bed, Ronald […]

During the late evening hours of October 4, 1919, a shepherd tending a flock east of Seligman, Arizona, discovered the smoldering, badly burned body of a man behind a small hill located one hundred feet from the transcontinental road known at the time as the National Old Trails Road. The following day, he reported the […]

During the early part of April, 1942, Donald Fearn, a twenty-three-year-old railway mechanic living in Pueblo, Colorado, sat in his tan colored Ford Sedan and watch night after night as a bevy of pretty young girls departed from a nursing class. Beautiful sixteen-year-old Alice Porter, a high school student taking night classes, caught his attention […]

  John Cooper 1912 During the winter of 1910, Walter Wimbish and John Cooper were working a gold mine claim near Pedro Creek, Alaska, when Wimbish suddenly disappeared in November. This did not raise any immediate alarms since miners during this era often moved about the frontier filing and exploring new claims. But after six […]

  Sunday, October 22, 1933, 8:30 p.m. Goldsboro, North Carolina Herbert Grice was in the middle of untying his shoes when he was stopped by the frantic barking of his dogs. They often barked at everything and anything they didn’t approve of, and Grice quickly dismissed their clamor as insignificant. But before he could get […]

Article by Thomas S. Duke, Celebrated Criminal Cases of America Alexander Crittenden was born in Lexington, Ky., on, January 14, 1816. Andrew Jackson was a close friend of his family, and it was through Jackson’s influence that Alexander was sent to West Point. He graduated from this military college with Sherman and remained in the […]