actus reus

One of the many victims of wrongful execution was Timothy Evans, a Welshman imprisoned and hanged for murdering his pregnant wife and daughter at their lodging in Notting Hill, London.

The real murderer was his landlord, John Christie. John, who was a compulsive liar and con-artist, would perform illegal abortions for profit. He soon became aroused by his unconscious patients and would strangle them to death. Just two of his victims were Beryl Evans and her baby daughter, Geraldine. Finding out she was pregnant yet again, Beryl and Timothy decided to let John perform an abortion. The procedure happened while lorry driver Timothy was at work, and when he returned home, John Christie told him bluntly that his wife had died under anaesthesia, but couldn’t explain how his baby daughter had suffocated to death. In shock, Timothy Evans was arrested a few days later after neighbours reported that his wife was missing. In reality, both mother and child were buried in the garden shed. The judge gave the innocent man the death penalty, and he was controversially hanged in 1950.

Tyler Hadley (17) Bludgeoned his parents on July 18th 2011 and then threw a house party while his parents laid lifeless in the master bedroom.

Hadley committed the murder a little before 5pm that day. He hid his parents phones so they couldn’t call the police and took some ecstasy because he didn’t think he could follow through while he was sober.

Once the drugs had kicked in Hadley grabbed a claw hammer from the garage and stood behind his mom Mary Jo Hadley, while she was on the computer.

He thought about it for about 5 minutes before whacking his mother in the head with the hammer. His mother screamed “Why?” as he bludgeoned her.

Blake Hadley, Tyler’s father ran downstairs when he heard his wife scream, he then realized his wife had been killed by their own son. He locked eyes with Tyler and asked “why?”

To which Tyler responded “Why the F*ck not?” and proceeded to hit his father with the sharp end of the hammer until he stopped moving.

Hadley then dragged the bodys into the master bedroom and threw all incriminating evidence in with them. He covered the bodies in pillowcases, books, pictures, bloody towels and just about anything he could find.

It took Hadley about 3 hours to clean up the crime scene, However he couldn’t get everything, during the party Hadley was letting his friends use the computer to search for songs to play on youtube. 

They noticed a brown liquid all over the keyboard but thought it was beer or coke.

It was Mary Jo Hadley’s blood.

Hardley invited people over through facebook, nearly 100 people showed.

Michael Mandell, Tyler’s best friend was the first person Hadley told about the murders.

Mandell told police the following.

“He said Mike, I killed my parents, and I said no you didn’t Tyler. What are you talking about? And he said Mike, look at the driveway, all the cars are there, my parents aren’t in Orlando. I killed my parents.”

Hadley showed him a bloody footprint and Mandell told him “I want to see them dead, if you really did it. I don’t believe you.”

Tyler then took Mandell to the master bedroom, Mandell opened the door to see Blake Hadleys leg against the door.

Mandell stayed at the party and took a photo with Tyler, he said “I knew it was going to be the last time I ever saw him.”

Mandell ended up notifying the police shortly after leaving that night.

“You get fuck all from people, dogs are better, they give you devotion. They give their lives for you.” - Ian Brady

“Ted Bundy wasn’t a Charles Manson type person. He was the guy next door. He was the guy you’d meet up at the University of Utah and have coffee with, and be intrigued by him. And at that moment I realized how so many girls went with him, and that scared me.” - reporter Barbara Grossman

Some odd quotes about Ted Bundy

“His siblings were never turned off by the notoriety that visited our house after the arrests. He was still their hero.” - Eleanor Louise Cowell, Bundy’s mother.

“Ted was the best damned Christmas tree lights salesman I’ve ever seen!” - High school friend and colleague.

“People in the depths of despondency would call and say they were killing themselves and Ted would would talk them out of suicide.”- Julie Thumb, author.

Serial killer Dennis Nilsen was often dubbed “The Kindly Killer” by the British media due to his meek nature. When he wasn’t trawling gay bars for his next victim, Nilsen spent his days with his only companion; a Border Collie cross named Bleep.

On 23 August, 1937, new mother, Dorothy Lucas, was out shopping in Chicago with her three-month-old daughter, Diane. In a brief lapse of character, Dorothy left Diane in her pram outside the grocery store as she quickly paid for something. When Dorothy came back, Diane was gone.

Miraculously, Diane was discovered 23 hours later, completely unharmed. Police had received an anonymous call from somebody who said where Diane could be found. A couple of days later, the Lucas family received an anonymous letter from somebody who described themselves as a 28-year-old woman. She confessed that her husband and daughter had both recently died and when she saw Diane alone outside the shop, her heart broke.

Dian Fossey was a American conservationist, passionate about the survival of the endangered Mountain Gorilla. In 1966, she moved out to a remote camp in Rwanda to study a group of Gorillas whom she had formed a close bond with.

Strongly against poaching, Fossey became a victim of mobbing from locals, who were upset at the huge impact she had on raising awareness on the barbaric practice. In 1985, Dian Fossey was discovered dead in bed by her assistant. She had been bludgeoned to death, and had a deep machete wound that nearly split her face in two.

“People,” she says with that inimitable Karla view, “are always going to interpret what I do as bad. They’ll pick out one bad thing from a sea of good and I’ll be judged on that." 

At approximately 7PM on 12 August, 1985, 8-year-old Equilla Hodrick ran from her home in the Bronx, New York. She was playing in her front garden when an ice cream truck passed by. She asked her mother if she could get one to which her mother told her no because she had given her money earlier in the day. Nevertheless, Equilla took off after the ice cream truck. As it vanished around the corner, Equilla vanished after it, never to be seen again.

“I couldn’t run after her because I was pregnant, but I figured that she was just going down the block and would be back,“ said her mother. When Equilla never returned, her mother called the police. Sniffer dogs were able to pick up her scent and led police to Webster Avenue, by the train tracks of the Metro-North line. It wasn’t an easy feat to get permission to search the train tracks. Metro-North bureaucracy were concerned more about the inconvenience of their commuters than the life of a little girl.

The disappearance of Equilla, an Africa American, garnered little to no media attention. Compare it to the disappearance of Etan Patz or Adam Walsh, both white boys who disappeared several years before Equilla. Their faces were plastered all over posters and milk cartons countrywide. Everybody knew of their disappearance. However, Equilla’s disappearance barely even made the local newspapers. As a matter of fact, after the train tracks were eventually searched, local newspapers published articles about how police had held up the commuters, making them late for dinner.

Sarah Gonzales-McLinn is a girl from Kansas who killed her 52-year old ex-boss and sugar daddy Harold Sasko, back in 2014, at the age of 19. 

 Following the homicide, she was immediately slandered as a “gold-digger” and “psychopath” by the media and police; while Sasko was turned into a martyred saint. 

 After killing her former manager, Sarah wrote “FREEDOM” on the wall in his blood. 

 In her youth, she was abused and raped several times; leading to stays in mental institutions. With nowhere to go, Harold, her ex-boss from CiCi’s Pizza, approached the underage Sarah to live with him.

 He had a history of preying on his young female employees, and was described as a “wolf in sheep’s clothing.”

 Reluctantly, Sarah moved in with the older man. At first he encouraged her to call him “dad.” But soon, she was forced to have sex with him to avoid homelessness.

 He pressured her to get butt implants and a nose job, and then told her she could not leave until she paid him back- or he would sue her and make her life miserable.

 He called her his “own personal Barbie doll.”

 Unable to tolerate the situation any longer, she planned to murder Harold. A few days before, she texted her sister:

“I’m starting to realize I don’t want the dream everyone wants for me. I don’t want the American dream. I want real freedom, and I know how to get it and I have to give up a lot. I feel like a caged animal.”

On January 14, 2014, she drugged Harold and slit his throat while he was passed out. This nearly decapitated him.

 A detective afterwards said Sarah told him that “she said she wanted to see someone die… she wanted to see what it felt like to kill someone.”

 Following the murder, Sarah escaped in Harold’s car and drove to Florida. She got tattooed, stayed with a pastor and lived on the lam from authorities. She was captured 11 days later as she slept in the car with a loaded gun next to her.

 The media pushed the narrative that they were “roommates,” and her trial was botched, with no mention was made of Harold being a sexual abuser. She was sentenced to a Hard 50 penalty - a life sentence, with a chance of parole only after 50 years.  

 Sarah killed the man who sexually abused in her a pathetic bid for freedom, but doomed herself in doing so. 

 It was misguided, but she had killed out of pure desperation. She killed the authority figure who had sexually abused and confined her to a life of financial and mental slavery.

 As of 2020, Kansas Department of Corrections lists her earliest possible release date as Feb. 1, 2064.

 The American prison system is harsh and unforgiving; merciless towards those who need justice the most.

Photograph of serial rapist and murderer Paul Bernardo in 1993. He was known as the Scarborough Rapist during his sexual assault spree, and later became known as the ‘Schoolgirl Killer’ when he murdered three teenage girls. His later murders involved his wife Karla Homolka, who helped Bernardo incapacitate his victims with drugs and alcohol, engaged in sexual assault of the victims, and filmed the process. One of the victims was Tammy Homolka, her younger sister.