The Los Angeles Police Department has apolo- gized to the family of Robert Kennedy and pulled from display items of clothing worn by the Senator the night he was shot in L.A. in 1968. The items—a tie, shirt, and jacket stained with blood—had been part of an exhibit hosted at the Palms Casino, and created for the 2010 California Homicide Investigators Assn. Conference.

The Kennedy family claims to have requested the return of Robert Kennedy’s effects more than ten years ago, to no avail, and called the LAPD’s official apology "insufficient." Department spokesmen claim to have been trying merely to put together a professional and educational display, not a “freakshow.” The exhibit does contain crime scene evidence rarely seen in public, including hundreds of photographs dating back as far one hundred years, but it also features sensational items such as the rope used to restrain Sharon Tate the night of her murder, and various O.J. Simpson artifacts.

Asked whether they would agree to the request made by the Kennedy family and return the items—a move that would comply with California state law regarding personal effects of murder victims—a spokeswoman for the L.A. County District Attorney’s office declined to answer in the affirmative about the potentially valuable collection, instead saying only that they were “looking into it.”

Photo of Lee Harvey Oswald on the cover of Life, published today 1964. Some people think this photo is fake. But Dartmouth College professor of computer science Hany Farid weighs in on this convincingly and his conclusion is the photo is legit. Great. Now maybe people can focus entirely on the laughable lone gunman theory. Just saying. 

Despite Shelton's takedown of two highly respected medical figures, there has been surprisingly little resistance to his assertions so far. Researchers of the 1700s usually obtained medical specimens from hospitals or morgues, and were known to employ graverobbers as well. But such specimens would have been diseased, aged, or physically damaged, whereas Hunter and Smellie would have needed young, physically fit subjects. According to Shelton, this prompted them to employ henchmen who most likely supplied bodies via “burking,” a technique named after serial killer William Burke, in which a person is slowly suffocated, thus leaving no damage to the cadaver and no detectable signs of foul play to alert police. Shelton's exhaustively researched study allegedly proves that no other method could have produced the steady stream of healthy mothers-to-be Hunter and Smellie desired. When interviewed about his claims by England’s Guardian newspaper, Shelton admitted they were shocking, but quoted Sherlock Holmes: “When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, is the truth.”     

It was today in 1947 that Elizabeth Short, aka The Black Dahlia, was found dead in Leimert Park in Los Angeles, sparking a massive investigation that ultimately came up empty. Short’s may be the most famous unsolved murder in Los Angeles history. It’s certainly one of the most grotesque. She had been beaten, mutilated in numerous vicious ways, cut in two, drained of blood, and arranged in an explicit, spread-legged pose. The killer is always thought of as a man. Safe assumption. The crime just screams hatred and fear of women. The poet Robert Burns wrote famously of man’s inhumanity to man, but he could have added that there seems to be a special type of inhumanity reserved for women. Dahlia material fills the web, so we don’t really need to add much more. But we’d have been remiss in not noting this day—after all, pulp would not be the same without poor Elizabeth Short. But her death serves another purpose besides literary inspiration, in our view—it reminds us that murder is the obscenity that trumps all others. 

Here’s a January 1965 True Detective with a report on the Boston stranglings that had occurred from June 1962 to January 1964. At the time of this issue, a suspect had not yet been taken into custody, and the Boston area was still in a state of shock. But two months later, police would arrest Albert De Salvo and charge him with the crimes. He was tried, convicted, and sentenced to life, but was killed in prison by another inmate. All along, many had doubts he was responsible for all the murders. The Boston victims ranged in age from 85 to 18—an unusually wide span. And the modi operandi were different in some of the killings. With the eventual advent of genetic analysis, finding the answers to lingering questions seemed possible, so in 2001, De Salvo and one of his victims were exhumed and subjected to DNA tests. The results revealed that foreign DNA found on the victim did not match De Salvo. Which means the Boston Strangler—or at least a man to whom some of the Strangler’s crimes were attributed—was very likely never caught. 

In this January 1965 issue of The Lowdown, editors take up the cudgel for convicted murderer Dr. Sam Sheppard, who was serving a life sentence for the bludgeoning murder of his wife, Marilyn. Dr. Sheppard claimed that, during the early morning hours of July 4, 1954, he was in his home sleeping on a downstairs daybed, when he awoke to his wife’s screams. He ran to her aid and was attacked by a “bushy-haired man” and knocked out. When he came to he chased the man outside, fought him again, and was again knocked out. When he awoke once more, the intruder was gone and his wife was dead, having been severely beaten and apparently sexually assaulted. Police searched for the bushy-haired suspect, but eventually decided their perp was the good doctor himself. At a trial later that year a jury agreed, and Sheppard was sent up for life.

So you must be wondering why police focused on Sheppard in the first place. It wasn’t just because he was the husband, and his marriage was unhappy. Police investigators are very much like statisticians. Certain types of cases share certain traits, and the more traits a particular case shares with a certain category of cases, the more probable a certain conclusion begins to seem. An example: a home invader will nearly always immobilize the gravest threat first, meaning the man of the house; but in a staged domestic murder the man nearly always, somehow, is overlooked by the intruder, leading to a heroic rescue attempt that fails and results in injuries that are, somehow, never life-threatening. Another example: in a staged domestic murder the man will often remove clothing from the victim to imply that the motive was sexual assault by an intruder; but the rape is never consummated, for obvious reasons.

Photo of the aftermath of a gangland hit on Edwin Harmening, who was a crooked Chicago cop, and “Dynamite” Joe Brooks, who was a member of the Ralph Sheldon Gang, which was a main liquor supplier to Al Capone. You’ll notice the killers shot their victims in the face. Standard practice for mob assassins. Harmening and Brooks were rubbed out today in 1925.     

Mignonette Eberhart was an acclaimed mid-century crime writer who was the first to create a female sleuth, which she did in her book The Patient in Room 18. This was a year before Agatha Christie created her immortal sleuth Jane Marple in Murder at the Vicarage. Eberhart soon veered away from pure whodunits and into romance-mysteries that usually centered on good women involved with bad men. The tagline of 1940’s The Hangman’s Whip—“Death is quicker than divorce”—gets that idea across succinctly. It was in these writings that Eberhart flourished, becoming internationally known and highly paid. She authored fifty-nine books, six of which were adapted to film, along with three of her short stories, and in 1971 she earned the Mystery Writers of America Grand Master Award. Eberhart died in 1996, but she changed the romance genre and entertained millions while doing it. Her books—including The Hangman’s Whip—remain widely available.      

Police in Peru have arrested members of a gang that allegedly killed peasants in order to remove the fat from their bodies and sell it abroad in anti-wrinkle cream. Three suspects under arrest have already admitted to five killings, but Peruvian police think the macabre practice may date back for decades. At a press conference yesterday, authorities displayed two bottles of the fat, which forensic tests had confirmed were of human composition. Police described how gang members killed victims, beheaded them and hollowed out their bodies, then suspended them over candles while the heat liquefied the fat. The announcement was met with some skepticism abroad, however in a world where people pay small fortunes for esoterica such as powdered tiger penises and monkey gall bladders, the possibility of a black market in human fat—and the $60,000 per gallon price tag gang members claim the substance fetched—cannot be easily discounted. The region where the gang operated, a remote area in the high Andes known as Huanuco, has had sixty people go missing this year alone. And while Huanuco is also frequented by Shining Path drug traffickers, the gang members were able to lead police directly to a site where a fat extraction had taken place (above). For now, Peruvian authorities have begun to shift their efforts toward finding out who might be buying the fat, and in which countries it might be distributed and sold. Meanwhile, other members of the gang, including the alleged leader, remain at large.