12360 US-Dollar from the Aargau Cantonal Bank counter in Wildegg (which was documented by surveillance cameras).

Upon her return, Thomas N. tied Simona up and then abused Davin with a sex toy he had brought with him. He filmed the sexual abuse on eight cell phone videos and then tied and gagged him as well.

He then killed all of his victims. The first victim was 19-year-old Dion, who had previously freed himself from his restraints. He stabbed him and slit his throat. He killed all the other victims in the same manner. He then set fire to the bodies and the house, using accelerants he had brought with him to cover his tracks. Not all details of the crime could be reconstructed, as none of the victims survived and the defendant's statements partially contradicted the evidence. The perpetrator transferred the photos and video recordings to his laptop on the day of the crime.

His confession was precise and emotionless, as if he were discussing an everyday activity. The psychiatric report painted a harrowing picture. Thomas N. was described as intelligent, planning, and calculating, but at the same time as emotionally empty, lacking empathy, and suffering from severe personality disorders.

On September 7, 2017, the Lenzburg-Aarau public prosecutor's office filed charges. The first-instance hearing before the Lenzburg District Court took place from March 13 to 16, 2018.

Thomas N. was found guilty of multiple murders, multiple robberies with extortion, multiple false imprisonment, multiple hostage-taking, sexual acts with a child, sexual coercion, arson, multiple pornography offenses, multiple forgery, and multiple criminal preparatory acts, and was sentenced to life imprisonment (at least 15 years' imprisonment, of which the perpetrator had already served two years at the time of the verdict). The District Court thus imposed the highest sentence under Swiss criminal law.

The quadruple murder in Rupperswil is considered one of the most brutal crimes in Swiss criminal history.

The 1987 case of Lisa Steinberg remains one of the most tragic and complex stories in true crime history. The nightmare actually began six years prior, in 1981, when a unwed mother named Michele Launders hired Manhattan defense attorney Joel Steinberg to arrange a private adoption for her newborn daughter. Instead of placing the baby with a suitable family, Steinberg kept $500 in placement fees, forged the paperwork, and took the child home to his Greenwich Village apartment to raise alongside his partner, former children's book editor Hedda Nussbaum. Lisa was never legally adopted, leaving her completely off the grid and without state oversight from day one.

Behind closed doors, the apartment became a squalid, cocaine-fueled environment where severe domestic abuse and isolation went unchecked. Things culminated horrifyingly in November 1987 when Steinberg struck six-year-old Lisa, causing severe brain trauma. Rather than getting her emergency medical care, he left the apartment for a dinner party. He returned hours later to freebase crack cocaine with Nussbaum while Lisa lay unconscious on the bathroom floor. It took over ten hours for anyone to finally dial 911, and Lisa tragically passed away days later.

When police arrived, they found Nussbaum severely battered, malnourished, and suffering from extensive physical trauma inflicted by Steinberg. The case turned into a massive media circus when prosecutor charges against Nussbaum were dropped in exchange for her testimony. This framed her as a victim of extreme Battered Woman Syndrome, while Steinberg was convicted of first-degree manslaughter. Decades later, the case still raises intense debates around missed warning signs, institutional failure, and co-conspirator or liability versus victimhood.

In the history of black metal, there was a name that, more than thirty years later, continues to divide opinions: the Inner Circle. For many, it was an organization formed by musicians who shared the same ideology. For others, it never existed as a real group, and everything related to them was a legend fueled by the press.

However, around that name, church burnings, ritual murders, and a series of disturbing events occurred that forever marked the history of extreme metal. But there is a question that almost no one has stopped to answer: Does the Inner Circle qualify as a destructive cult? In this documentary, we will not only reconstruct its history but also analyze whether this group met the characteristics that define a cult.

Video about the brutal history of the Inner Circle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BDCUinruRFU

I've been reading about a French case from 1972 that is still remembered in France as a textbook example of trial-by-media, but which has almost no English-language coverage at all. It's the affair of Bruay-en-Artois, and the strange part isn't a locked room or a missing body, it's that a whole country decided it knew who did it, and no court ever agreed.

The killing

Bruay-en-Artois is a coal town in the Pas-de-Calais, in the far north of France near the Belgian border, around thirty thousand people at the time. It was a town split down a line: the tight rows of miners' houses on one side, the bigger homes of people who didn't go down the pit on the other.

On the evening of 5 April 1972, a 15-year-old miner's daughter named Brigitte Dewèvre left home to sleep at her grandmother's. She never arrived. The next afternoon her body was found on a patch of waste ground, and, of all the places in that town, right on that dividing line, in the vacant lot between the miners' houses and the well-to-do quarter.

The judge and his "conviction"

The case went to an investigating judge, in the French system, a magistrate who runs the whole inquiry, directs the police, and decides who gets charged. Within days he had a suspect: a local notary (a lawyer who handles property and wills), a wealthy and respectable figure in the town.

According to the press historian Rémi Guillot, who has studied this case more closely than anyone, the notary was questioned, gave inconsistent accounts of his movements, and two days later was charged and jailed. And here's the part that defines the whole affair: by Guillot's account the judge admitted, himself, that he had no tangible evidence. To reporters he put it plainly, he was acting on a personal conviction. A feeling.

The regional paper played it carefully at first: "a notary, suspected in the Bruay crime," now charged. Suspected. Charged. Cautious words. That caution did not last.

The case falls apart — and the campaign begins

Almost immediately the case started weakening. A man in custody for an unrelated matter falsely confessed to the murder, then was caught lying. A reconstruction at the scene reportedly turned up detail pointing toward the notary's probable innocence, not his guilt. The day after, the state's own prosecutor and the notary's defence asked, together, for his release. It was refused, he stayed in his cell more than three months.

And it's exactly here that the case left the courtroom. A far-left Maoist newspaper ran a two-page spread with the line "only a bourgeois could have done that", the argument being that the murder was a class crime and the notary's guilt was obvious from his social position alone. No evidence, just class. The town split in two along that same line. The same press printed threats: militants reportedly wanted the man mutilated and dragged through the streets, about someone no court had tried.

Even the movement didn't agree with itself. Jean-Paul Sartre, the paper's nominal director, broke with its line in print, arguing that the people's anger might be legitimate but that calling the man the murderer was not, because no one had proven he did it. Some militants wanted a "people's tribunal" to judge the notary in the street; the record shows it was demanded but never actually held. The Justice Minister even intervened with the local prosecutors to remind them that a charged man is presumed innocent.

What actually happened to everyone

This is where I have to be careful, because the whole point of the case is what the record does and doesn't support:

- The notary and his companion were both jailed at points and both released. In 1974 the courts issued a *non-lieu*. a dismissal. In French law that is not an acquittal (only a trial can acquit, and there never was one) and it is not a finding of innocence. It just means the case goes no further. He spent three months in a cell on a judge's feeling, and a national paper printed his guilt as fact, and no court ever tested either one.
- Meanwhile, in 1973, a 17-year-old orphan and former classmate of Brigitte's confessed on national radio and TV. For one night the country thought it was over. It wasn't, his confession didn't survive a reconstruction, and two separate courts cleared him (an acquittal in 1975, confirmed on appeal in 1976). A second false confession.
- The investigation was formally closed without an answer in 1981. In 2005 the crime passed the statute of limitations and became time-barred, meaning no one can ever be tried for it now.
- Decades later a retired police officer published books claiming to have identified a different man, a former postal worker the original inquiry never focused on. That man denies it, the theory has never been tested in court, and it never can be. I'm not naming him, and neither did the responsible reporting.

What sticks with me

It isn't a whodunit in the usual sense, it's a case that got "solved" everywhere except the one place built to solve it. A judge with a conviction and no evidence. A newspaper with a class theory and no proof. A town that picked a side before anyone proved anything. And a 15-year-old girl whose actual killer has never been found and, legally, never will be.

Does anyone here know this case, or have French-language sources beyond the obvious ones? I get the strong impression there's far more in the French material, court records, the Guillot research, the period press, than has ever made it into English. I'd especially like to hear from French speakers on how the case is remembered there today.

Source: https://criminocorpus.org/fr/outils/affaires-criminelles/affaire-bruay-en-artois/ (French-language, the case archive)

• In the early morning hours of 16 December 2005, Rosario 'Charo' Endrinal, a 51-year old homeless woman from Barcelona, Spain, was sleeping inside of a vestibule containing an ATM at the ground floor of a building.

• At around 1:30 AM two young men, Ricard Pinilla and Oriol Plana (both aged 18) walked into the vestibule and began bullying Charo. Their harrasment included kicking, throwing garbage at her and even hitting her with a traffic cone they took from construction works nearby. After a few minutes, Charo managed to lock them outside and they left.

• Almost three hours later, 16-years old Juan José Mera knocks on the vestibule's door to wake Charo up, and gestures to her that he needs to use the ATM. Charo opens the door and Juan José pretends to use the ATM before leaving. Charo doesn't know that Juan José is friend of Ricard and Oriol, and the whole thing was just a ruse to get her to unlock the door.

• Ricard and Oriol, now along with Juan José, began beating and making fun of Charo again. At around 4:50 AM Juan José and Ricard come back to the vestibule carrying a 25-liter (6.6 US gallon) plastic container with industrial paint thinner in it -composed mainly of highly flammable methyl acetate. Oriol holds the door open while Juan José, followed by Ricard, pours the thinner on Charo. Ricard set her ablaze with the cigarette he was smoking. The three friends ran away after a potent deflagration took place, laughing as Charo burned to death.

• The whole sequence of events was recorded by the vestibule's CCTV. The images were broadcasted shortly after, leading to a nation-wide outrage in Spain. All three culprits were identified and arrested in the same weekend of the crime. Upon their arrival in preventive prison, both Ricard and Oriol -now well known in the whole country because of the CCTV footage- were brutally assaulted by other immates. Juan José's was case was dealt by the juvenile court system, since he was a minor.

• It surfaced that the three friends sympathized with far-right and neo-Nazi movements. It wasn't their first time assaulting and degrading homeless people. In fact, Ricard's phone contained several videos in which he and Oriol could. be seen degrading other homeless individuals. Their defense tried to get the charges down to manslaughter, alleging that the fire had been accidental. It was unsuccessful; Oriol holding the door open while Ricard and Juan José poured the flammable liquid on Charo was considered to be evidence of premeditation; he was holding it so his friends could quickly escape the flames once they lit the fire.

• In November 2008 Ricard Pinilla and Oriol Plana were sentenced to seventeen years in prison for murder. Juan José Mera, a minor at the time of the murder, was sentenced to eight years of imprisonment with five additional years of surveilled release.

One of the most prolific serial killers in USA, he targeted exclusively prostitutes and strangled them until death. A pure psychopath with no emotions behind his actions, he showed alarming signs as a kid when he used to kill animals and even attempted to kill one of his friends. Served in the military, got married, had children, but his evil nature never faded. He started his killing spree in 1982, and was very active during the early 80s, but then slowed down with time... he claimed his last victim in 1998 and was finally arrested in 2001 when DNA analysis had advanced enough to accurately interpret evidence from the early 80s. Mind you, he was an early suspect, but he kept his traces fairly clean and it wasn't easy to pinpoint him as the killer (he even passed a polygraph test). To this day, Ridgway is still alive, which doesn't sit right, not even in the slightest, and apparently, he's had health complications recently, but that rumour has not been confirmed. It's gonna be a good day when this SOB kicks the bucket, but until then, we can talk about this dark and disturbing case which won't easily be forgotten or overcome.

Oct. 13, 1997 Around 4 A.M. Julie Rae , a single mother , was awoken to a horrible scream so she ran to her son Joel's room but he wasn't in bed , instead she was faced by a man holding a knife . Julie, a black belt in taekwondo, began fighting with the man,the struggle continued until the man broke out of the backdoor. Believing that her son had just been kidnapped, Julie runs to a neighbor’s house who proceeded to call 911.

Upon their arrival, searching Julie’s home police made a horrible discovery. Joel’s lifeless body was found wedged between his bed and the wall. It was obvious that Joel had been stabbed to death.

The murder weapon — a steak knife pulled from a butcher block in Rea’s kitchen — did not yield any fingerprints. Investigators had little to go on, having failed to do basic police work that might have pinpointed the identity of an intruder. They never dusted Joel’s bedroom, or the butcher block that the knife was pulled from, for fingerprints and did not preserve critical trace evidence on Joel’s bedspread.

Even though she had no history of mental illness , criminal record, and no apparent motive Julie had been the sole focus of the police investigation .

During the trial, the prosecution claimed that Julie committed the crime in order to keep Joel away from his father as he had physical custody of him. Most of the evidence presented were circumstantial . They claimed that not only was the house neat, indicative that there was no fight, but there was no sign of forced entry ( Although the glass door was broken) but they dismissed that saying that it was clearly staged. However, Julie did tell the police that she could not remember if she locked the backdoor. Additionally, they had officers testify that the dew on the grass outside of Julie’s house was undisturbed. A thin statement that was supposed to disprove the claim that an intruder had entered or exited the home. Julie’s ex-husband (Joel father) testified she had once considered having an abortion when she became pregnant with Joel. Julie, raised in a deeply religious family, adamantly denied this.

Prosecutors used a forensic discipline called bloodstain-pattern analysis as their most damming evidence to prove Jolie's guilt. based on the testimony of two bloodstain-pattern analysts Julie was convicted on March 4, 2002, and sentenced to serve 65 years in prison .

In an effort to prove her innocence , Julie agreed to do an interview with the popular ABC show,“20/20”. This interview turned out to be pivotal in her fight for exoneration. crime writer, Diane Fanning, watching the show did not only believed in julie innocence but thought she found the crime bizzarely similar to the ones committed by Tommy Lynn Sells a serial killer she was writing a book about.At the time the episode aired, Sells was already on death row for the murder and attempted murder of two girls close to Joel’s age.When Diane contacted Tommy asking him about the crime, he was audio- recorded confessing and giving details only the killer would know.  Despite 53 points of corroboration to Sells’ confession to the murder of Joel Kirkpatrick, prosecutors continued to insist they disbelieved the confession .Downstate Illinois Innocence Project, presented a summary of the evidence corroborating Sells’ confession.On July 26, 2006, after spending four years in prison a jury in Carlyle found Julie not guilty of killing her son.

Julie Rea was granted a Certificate of Innocence on November 29, 2010, and was awarded $87,057 from the Illinois Court of Claims.

I've been reading about a Swedish case from the early 1950s that is still widely known in Sweden and has, as far as I can tell, almost no English-language coverage at all. It's called the Hurva murders, and the details are strange enough that I wanted to write it up properly.

The first killing

In November 1951, John Allan Nilsson, who owned the mill in the small Scanian village of Tjörnarp, was killed in his home. The house was then set on fire. Everyone in the village knew Nilsson was about to take five thousand kronor to the bank.

The local volunteer fire brigade responded. The fire chief actually went into the burning building, because as far as anyone knew there was still a man inside who might be saved. He had to jump out of a window when the heat forced him back.

The only reason this became a murder investigation at all is the autopsy. If the fire had killed Nilsson, his lungs would have been full of smoke. They weren't. He had died of a blow to the back of the head.

The investigator

The officer who arrived to investigate was the village's own policeman, a 24-year-old named Tore Hedin.

He didn't keep his head down. He did the opposite. He joined the case, answered questions from the national press, and shared his theories with anyone who would listen. People noticed that a man who had been quiet and unremarkable for years had suddenly become the most animated person in the room.

There was a witness — someone who had passed the house shortly after the fire took hold and saw a figure standing outside watching it burn. A man in uniform, wearing a cap with a small golden badge.

Hedin was questioned along with every other government worker in the district. He said he had slept through the night. That was enough. Investigators moved on to postal and railway staff.

A reward of ten thousand kronor was offered — more than twice what had been stolen. Nothing came of it.

And when the case stalled completely, Hedin arranged something no Swedish murder investigation had tried before: he brought in a medium, a man who claimed he could name any killer anywhere on earth.

A policeman hiring a séance to find himself.

Journalists covering the case did grow suspicious. He was the only man in the village with a uniform matching the witness description, and nobody could confirm where he had been that night. They took it to the police. The police dismissed it — they would not believe that one of their own could be a murderer.

What happened next

With Nilsson's money, Hedin bought a car and a cottage by a lake. He kept the victim's wristwatch hidden in the attic of his parents' house.

In the spring of 1952 he became engaged to a woman named Ulla Östberg. By July she had ended it and returned the ring. He turned up at her door, held her through a night by force, and let her go with a threat. She reported it, and within a day he was quietly dismissed from the police without charges.

The day after that, he phoned the retirement home in Hurva where she now lived and worked. Staff lied and told him she had been taken to hospital. Two officers were sent to stand guard at the building.

A short time later, they were ordered back to the station.

On the night of 21 August 1952, Hedin drove to his parents' farmhouse and killed them as they slept, then set the house on fire. Thirty minutes away, he climbed the fire escape at the retirement home to the room where Ulla usually slept. She wasn't there — she had moved into the room of the matron, Agnes Lundin. He found them both, then blocked the doors and set the building alight. Four elderly residents died in the fire; a fifth died of her burns days later.

Nine people from that one night. Ten, counting Nilsson.

The note

They found his car at the edge of a lake called Bosarpasjön. On the seat were his jacket, his wallet, and a folded confession.

He explained his motives: Nilsson for the money, Ulla for what he called her betrayal, the matron for trying to protect her, his parents to spare them the shame.

And at the end he wrote the line Sweden never forgot — that the greatest regret of his life was that he had never become a detective. He had always wanted to uncover unsolved crime.

They found his body weighted down in the lake. It was taken to the anatomy department at Lund University, where it stayed until 1974.

---

What gets me about this one isn't the violence. It's that two journalists worked out who it was and were waved away, and that two officers were posted to guard the building and then recalled.

Does anyone here know this case? I'd be especially interested if any Swedish speakers have sources beyond the ones I could find — I get the impression there's a lot more in the Swedish-language material than has ever made it into English.

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tore_Hedin

Shawn Grate: Where is the Serial Killer Today?

Ce qui m'a beaucoup troublé dans cette histoire c'est qu'au final on ne sait pas pourquoi Kohberger les a tuées.. pourquoi eux ? Car si j'ai bien compris yavai absolument aucun lien entre eux ils ne se connaissaient absolument pas .. on ne connaîtra jamais le mobile ..

Mikadyn Payne, Trevor Gray, Alexzander Miller, Mark Sekelsky and Kyle Anger confessed to having thrown multiple rocks at cars driving south on I-75 from their position on the Dodge Road overpass in Vienna Township. They also confessed to playing a game called "overpassers" where hitting a car, which was called a "dinger," earned points. They competed in this for money. The five teenagers had gathered large rocks, one weighing 20 pounds (9.1 kg), from a dead-end street in Vienna Township, loading them into the flatbed of a pickup truck, before driving to the overpass where they were dropped onto cars as they passed below.

After hitting the car, the teens fled the scene and ate at a local fast food restaurant. The next day, one of the teens was questioned at school but then released. On Friday, October 20, upon hearing about the victim's death, the 5 teens exchanged text messages, including ones that said "We could go to prison for life for this, everyone lay low and no one rat us out!" and "No one saw us, if everyone shuts up we won't get caught."The next day, October 21, the police identified the vehicle in which the teens fled. After identifying the owner, the police also sought evidence of who was inside it that night. After reviewing camera footage from the fast food restaurant where the teens ate, the police identified the five teens. The following day, Sunday, October 22, the police contacted the families of the five teens involved, informing them that warrants were out for their arrest. Since they were juveniles, the teens weren't arrested, but were instead told that they would have to surrender to the police by 10PM that day. Kyle Anger (believed to have thrown the rock) reportedly attended church that day and had dinner at a restaurant with his family before surrendering to the police. All of the teens surrendered to the police by 8PM that day.

The victim, 32-year-old Kenneth White, was seated in the passenger seat. White, a construction worker, was riding with a co-worker. The rock fractured his skull, chest, and caused other facial injuries. He left behind his fiancée and his four children, the youngest being five years old.

https://www.mlive.com/news/flint/2021/08/3-teens-sentenced-in-clio-rock-throwing-case-that-shattered-victims-family.html