He was a self-styled teenage rebel. He dreamed of becoming rich through crime. In 1958 he set off on the outlaw trail with his schoolgirl lover, 14-year-old Caril Fugate. In his wake he left 11 motiveless murders.
Hitler and his Nazi party dominated Germany for only 12 years. But during that short period they not only brought about a World War in which tens of millions of troops and civilians died, but were responsible for a cold-blooded policy of mass extermination directed against the Jews and other racial groups which the Nazis considered subhuman in which many more millions were slaughtered. When the Nazis had finally been defeated, the victorious alliance against them took the unprecedented step of putting their surviving leaders on trial at Nuremberg for 'Crimes against Humanity'.
Mahatma Gandhi was revered as the father of modern India, whose campaign of non-violent rebellion finally persuaded the British to pull out of the 'Jewel' of their empire. His murder on 20th January 1948 by right-wing fanatics was a severe blow to hopes of avoiding inter-communal violence, as were the assassinations of his successors as leaders of India, Indira and Rajiv Gandhi.
On 4th April 1962 James Hanratty was hanged for an apparently motiveless shooting of two lovers on the A6 main road near London. But much of the evidence had been circumstantial, and pointed equally well towards another name, Peter Alphon. When he confessed during an interview that he had carried out the murder many people were amazed that no charges were ever brought and controversy still rages as to whether Hanratty was wrongly executed.
Dennis Andrew Nilsen was a Scottish serial killer and necrophiliac who murdered at least twelve young men and boys between 1978 and 1983 in London, England.
The Ku Klux Klan a hate organizations that employed terror in pursuit of their white supremacist agenda. One group was founded after the Civil War and lasted until the 1870s. The other began in 1915 and has continued to the present.
