O. J. Simpson

EARLY LIFE 

Orenthal James "O. J." Simpson was born July 9, 1947 in San Francisco, California.

Simpson in 1990

OJ Simpson's father was a well known drag queen in the San Francisco area, who died of aids in 1986.

FOOTBALL CAREER 

O. J. Simpson originally attained stardom as a running back at the collegiate and professional levels.

He played professionally in the NFL for 11 seasons, primarily with the Buffalo Bills from 1969 to 1977, but also for the San Francisco 49ers from 1978 to 1979.

In 1973 O. J. Simpson became the first player in NFL history to rush for more than 2,000 yards in a single season.

In 1975, People magazine described Simpson as "the first black athlete to become a bona fide lovable media superstar".

Simpson holds the record for the single season yards-per-game average, which stands at 143.1.

Simpson was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1983 and the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1985.

Simpson acquired the nickname "Juice" as a play on "O.J.", a common abbreviation for "orange juice".

ACTING CAREER 

After retiring from football, Simpson began new careers in acting and football broadcasting.

Simpson in 1990 visiting American troops during lead-up to the first Gulf War

Simpson played T.D. Parker in the television series 1st & Ten: The Championship from 1986 to 1991.

O.J. Simpson was at one stage going to be the Terminator, but was cut because the director couldn't imagine him as a ruthless killer.

In 1995 he won the Razzie Award for Worst Supporting Actor for his role in Naked Gun 33 1/3: The Final Insult.

MARRIAGE  

Simpson met Nicole Brown in 1977, while she was working as a waitress at the nightclub, The Daisy. Although still married to his first wife, Marguerite, Simpson began dating Brown. Simpson and Marguerite divorced in March 1979.

Simpson and Brown were married on February 2, 1985 and they had two children, Sydney and Justin.

Simpson, Nicole and Austen Feb 1986 at Honolulu Hawaii. Photo by Alan Light,

Simpson pleaded no contest to spousal abuse in 1989 and Brown filed for divorce on February 25, 1992, citing irreconcilable differences as the reason. The pair attempted to reconcile the following year.

LEGAL HISTORY

In 1993 on Seinfeld, Elaine wanted her boyfriend to change his name from a serial killer’s (Joel Rifkin) to something normal. Reading a football almanac, she suggests O.J.

Nicole Brown Simpson and her waiter friend Ron Goldman were found stabbed to death on June 12, 1994 outside Nicole's condominium in the Brentwood area of Los Angeles.

Simpson was a person of interest in their murders and on June 17 he became the object of a low-speed pursuit in a white Ford Bronco SUV; TV stations interrupted coverage of the 1994 NBA Finals to broadcast the incident live.

Domino's sold as many pizzas during OJ Simpson's car chase as it did on Superbowl Sunday that year.

He was tried for the murder of his wife and Ronald Goldman in 1994. The criminal court in Los Angeles, California found that Simpson was not guilty of those murders the following year.

When the prosecution had Simpson try on the leather glove whose wearer had committed the murder,  he struggled to pull the evidence comfortably over his hand. That led defense lawyer Johnnie Cochran to utter the iconic line, "If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit" — a turning point for the defense in the lengthy trial.

It is now believed that the reason OJ Simpson's gloves did not fit during his trial was because he stopped taking his arthritis medication two weeks before hand causing his hands to swell.

During OJ Simpson's verdict announcement trading on the New York Stock Exchange dropped 41% and that so much work stopped across the world to watch, an estimated $480 million was lost in productivity.

Russian President Boris Yeltsin's first words to President Bill Clinton upon meeting in 1995 were, "Do you think O.J. did it?"

In 1997, Simpson was found liable for their wrongful deaths in a civil trial brought by the two victims' families, but to date he has paid little of the $33.5 million judgment.

A man bought and melted down O.J. Simpson's Player of the Year trophy to make pins for people who donated to battered women's shelters.

Simpson gained further notoriety in late 2006 when he wrote a book titled If I Did It. The book, in which Simpson allegedly puts forth a "hypothetical" description of murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, was withdrawn by the publisher just before its release.

The book was later released by the Goldman family and renamed If I Did It: Confessions of the Killer, with the word "If" greatly reduced in size to make the title appear to read I Did It: Confessions of the Killer.

In September 2007, Simpson was arrested in Las Vegas and charged with the felonies of armed robbery and kidnapping. 

The Jury on the OJ Simpson trial were sequestered for 265 days. Additionally, it involved involved extreme isolation and constant supervision.

He was convicted on all counts and sentenced to 33 years imprisonment, with a minimum of nine years without parole.

Simpson served his sentence at the Lovelock Correctional Center in Lovelock, Nevada before being released from prison on October 1, 2017.

Simpson paid less than 1% of the $33.5 million civil judgment against him for the wrongful death of Ron Goldman.

Simpson died of prostate cancer on April 10, 2024, aged 76.

Serial killer

A serial killer is typically a person who murders three or more people, with the killings taking place over more than a month and including a cooling off period between them.

While most authorities, set a threshold of three murders when designating serial killers, the FBI  defines serial killing as "a series of two or more murders, committed as separate events, usually, but not always, by one offender acting alone".

One of the earliest known serial killers was Liu Pengli, a Chinese prince from mid-100 BC. He would go on expeditions with others, murdering people for sheer sport. He had over 100 confirmed victims. When he was uncovered, his uncle the emperor banished him instead of executing him.

French knight Gilles de Rais (c. September 1405 – October 26, 1440) was one of the earliest known serial killers, having engaged in a series of child murders, with victims possibly numbering in the hundreds. In his confession, Gilles mentioned the first assaults on children occurred between spring 1432 and spring 1433. The killings came to an end in 1440, when he was taken into custody upon an accusation brought against him by the Bishop of Nantes. At his trial, Gilles was condemned to death and hanged at Nantes.

Hungarian noblewoman Countess Elizabeth Báthory (August 7, 1560 – August 21, 1614) was the most prolific female serial killer of all time. She tortured and killed over 650 people, believing the blood of young girls would maintain her youth. For a long time, she was protected by her high social status.

Copy of the lost 1585 original portrait of Elizabeth Báthory

The Bloody Benders, consisting of John Bender, his wife, Elvira Bender, son, John, Jr. and daughter, Kate were America’s first serial killer family. They are known to have killed 11 travelers between 1871 and 1873, luring each of them into their cabin in Cherryvale, Kansas. They disappeared before their crimes were discovered and were never seen again.

Herman Webster Mudgett, more commonly known as H. H. Holmes, was the first recognized serial killer in United States history.  Holmes built a whole hotel with secret rooms for murder and torture purposes, where more than 200 victims could have been  killed.

While Holmes confessed to 27 murders, only nine could be plausibly confirmed. Holmes, who sold the skeletons of his victims to medical science, was hanged at Moyamensing Prison in Philadelphia on May 7, 1896.

H. H. Holmes

Marcel Petiot was a French doctor, who was convicted of multiple murders after the discovery of the remains of 23 people in the basement of his home in Paris during World War II.

After his crimes were discovered, Marcel Petiot grew a beard and joined the police using the alias Captain Valeri. "Valeri" was assigned to find Petiot until someone recognized him, months later. On May 25, 1946, Petiot was beheaded, after a stay of a few days due to a problem in the release mechanism of the guillotine.

Petoit is suspected of the murder of around 60 victims during his lifetime, although the true number remains unknown.

Serial killer Carroll Cole was responsible for the deaths of at least 15 women and one boybetween 1947 and 1980. He killed his first victim at just 8 years of age, drowning a classmate in a lake. The death was thought to have been an accident until he confessed to it in an autobiography he wrote in prison. Cole was executed by lethal injection at Nevada State Prison on December 6, 1985. 

The crimes of murderer and bodysnatcher Edward Gein (August 27, 1906 – July 26, 1984), committed around his hometown of Plainfield, Wisconsin, gathered widespread notoriety after authorities discovered that he had exhumed corpses from local graveyards and fashioned trophies and keepsakes from their bones and skin. The movie characters Norman Bates (Psycho), Leatherface (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre) and Buffalo Bill (The Silence of the Lambs) were all based on Gein.

Ed Gein

Albert DeSalvo, known as the ‘Boston Strangler’, was jailed for life for sexual assault and armed robbery on January 18, 1967. He admitted murdering 13 women between 1962 and 1964, but was not charged due to a lack of evidence. DaSalvo was stabbed to death in prison in 1973. DNA testing later proved "with an unprecedented level of certainty" that he was behind the murder of the final victim, Mary Sullivan.

Mack Ray Edwards was a serial killer who worked for CalTrans. He’d kill his victims and then bury the bodies in places he would later help build highways over. In 1970 Edwards was caught and he confessed killed three children from 1953 to 1956, and three more in 1968 and 1969.  Not all his victims have been found, and many are very likely still under some of the California highways.

Ted Bundy (November 24, 1946 – January 24, 1989) was a law student who is believed to have killed at least 36 females, both adults and children, during the 1970s. The year the murders began, Bundy was the assistant director of the Seattle Crime Prevention Advisory Commission and during this period he wrote a pamphlet for women on rape prevention. Convicted in 1979 on several charges, including the murder of a 12-year-old girl, Bundy was sentenced to death. He was executed in Florida in 1989 after a string of unsuccessful appeals.

Ted Bundy

Serial killer Rodney Alcala (b August 23, 1943) is believed to have murdered up to 130 people. In the midst of his three-year killing spree in California between 1977 and 1979, Alcala was featured a contestant on The Dating Game, and was picked by the bachelorette. She never followed up on the date because she found him "creepy".

Peter Sutcliffe, also known as the Yorkshire Ripper, was sentenced to life imprisonment on May 22, 1981, having been found guilty of 13 counts of murder and seven counts of attempted murder. He was convicted of murdering 13 women and attempting to murder seven others between 1975 and 1980. His victims were all women, mostly prostitutes, who he attacked with a hammer and a knife. Sutcliffe claimed that he was on a mission from God to kill prostitutes, and he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. He was initially sentenced to 20 concurrent sentences of life imprisonment, but these were later converted to a whole life order,

Between 1974 and 1991, Dennis Lynn Rader, known as the BTK Killer or the BTK Strangler killed ten people in Sedgwick County, Kansas. ("BTK" stands for "Bind, Torture, Kill"). In 2004, Rader had sent a letter to the police on a floppy disk that was used to communicate with them. The authorities traced the metadata on the diskette to a computer at the Christ Lutheran Church in Park City, Kansas. This information, along with other clues from Rader's communications, eventually led to his arrest on February 16, 2005.

Joseph Christopher (July 26, 1955 – March 1, 1993) was an American serial killer who gained infamy for a series of murders in the early 1980s. He is believed to have killed at least twelve individuals and wounded numerous others. Christopher had tried to check himself into a psychiatric center just weeks before he began his murders. He died in prison from a rare form of male breast at the age of 37,

Aileen Wuornos was the first female serial killer in America. In 1992 she was charged with the shooting of five middle-aged men she met on highways by hitch hiking. Wuornos confessed to shooting seven men in self-defence and was eventually executed on October 9, 2002.

Aileen Wuornos

A nurse by profession, Beverly Allitt was convicted in 1993 of the murder of four children in her care and of the attempted murder of three others. Dubbed the UK's first female serial killer, she allegedly suffered from a medical condition termed 'Münchhausen's syndrome by proxy'.

Serial killer Lonnie Franklin aka The Grim Sleeper attempted to assault a woman named Fredia Gibbs in 1993, who happened to be a world kickboxing champion. He failed.

Pakistani serial killer Javed Iqbal (1956 – October 8, 2001), was sentenced to death by being strangled in front of his victims' families, dismembered and then burned in a vat of acid, in the same way he killed over 100 teenage boys. He was found dead in his cell before the execution could be carried out.

British doctor Harold Shipman (AKA 'Doctor Death') was proven to have murdered at least 250 of his patients, but may have killed as many as 459 people, making one of the most prolific serial killers in recorded human history. Shipman died on January 13, 2004, one day prior to his 58th birthday, by hanging himself in his cell at Wakefield Prison.

The world's deadliest serial killer, Luis Cubillos, also known as La Bestia ("The Beast") (born January 25, 1957) admitted to the rape, torture and murder of 147 young boys in Colombia in 1999 and was sentenced to 835 years in prison. He is suspected to have murdered many more.

 Luis Cubillos by Government of Colombia

76% of all known serial killers in the 20th century were from the United States.

 Serial Killers are more likely to have suffered a head injury as a child than non-serial killers.

Less than one percent of murders in any given year are committed by serial killers.

Robber

In 1660 Claude Duval moved to England from France at the Restoration as a footman in the service of the Duke of Richmond. Taking soon to the road, he pursued a successful career as a robber, gaining a popular reputation, especially for his daring and gallantry towards the women he robbed.

Claude Duval painting by William Powell Frith

Duval was captured drunk, and hanged at Tyburn, London on January 21, 1670. Samuel Butler satirically commemorated his death in a Pindaric ode.

Jack Sheppard (March 4, 1702 – November 16, 1724) was a notorious English burglar, robber and thief of early 18th-century London. Sheppard was as renowned for his attempts to escape imprisonment as he was for his crimes. Ultimately, he was caught, convicted, and hanged at Tyburn, ending his brief criminal career after less than two years.

The character of Macheath in John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1728) was based on Sheppard, keeping him in the limelight for over 100 years.

Sheppard returned to the public consciousness around 1840, when William Harrison Ainsworth wrote a novel entitled Jack Sheppard. The popularity of his tale, and the fear that others would be drawn to emulate his behaviour, led the authorities to refuse to license any plays in London with "Jack Sheppard" in the title for forty years.

Sketch of 18th-century thief Jack Sheppard shortly before his execution in 1724.

The notorious English-born stagecoach robber Black Bart (b. 1829; d. after February 28, 1888), never cursed, never fired his weapon, didn't ride a horse, and left poems after his crimes.

Although there was a $5,000 reward for his capture, Charles 'Pretty Boy' Floyd was considered a hero in his area of Oklahoma. One reason for this was that he was renowned for destroying mortgage documents during robberies, freeing many from property debt. Also, whenever he returned there he would use some of the loot from his previous robberies to buy clothes and food for many of the poverty-stricken residents of the Cookson Hills, where he grew up.

Charles "Pretty Boy" Floyd died aged 30 in an Ohio cornfield on October 22, 1934 after being shot eight times by FBI agents.

Bank robber John Dillinger played professional baseball.

A woman aged 71 pleaded not guilty to armed robbery in Los Angeles in 1971, saying she had been driven mad by the Internal Revenue Service.

In Canada in 1997, a robber was charged for threatening to kill a raccoon if people didn't hand over their money.

Prisoner

HISTORY

The earliest evidence of the existence of a prisoner dates back to prehistoric graves in Lower Egypt from 10,000 years ago. This evidence suggests that people from Libya enslaved a San-like tribe.

In Britain Mary Carpenter, daughter of a Unitarian minister, was appalled by the way in which young people learnt criminal behaviour at an early age. In 1835 she founded the Working and Visiting society to focus on the needs of young offenders.

7-year-old Julie Ann Crumpling was sent to jail in 1870 for ‘stealing’ a pram to play dollies. She was Oxford Jail’s youngest prisoner, sentenced to hard labor for 7 days. The judge wanted to send her away for three months.

The first hunger strike in a British prison was begun by Inverness-born suffragette Miss Marion Wallace Dunlop on July 5, 1909. Dunlop kept it up for 91 hours, until she was released from Holloway Prison on grounds of ill-health.

Adolf Hitler’s Egyptian-born deputy Rudolf Hess made a solo flight to Scotland in the early days of World War II on a supposed peace mission. After the war, he was jailed at Spandau Prison in West Berlin, where from 1966 until his death in 1987 he was the sole prisoner. After his passing, the 600-cell jail was demolished.

Hess (left) and Joachim von Ribbentrop in the defendants' box at the Nuremberg Trials

On October 25, 1962 Nelson Mandela was convicted of high treason and sabotage and sentenced to life imprisonment on Robben Island. He was released from prison 27 years later.

Japanese war criminal Hitoshi Imamura, believing his 10-year prison sentence for war crimes was too lenient, built a replica of Sugamo Prison, where he had served time, in his garden. He lived there until his death in 1968. This self-imposed confinement was a form of personal penance for his role in the atrocities committed by his troops.

Bobby Sands was the leader of The Irish Hunger Strike in 1981, in which Irish republican prisoners protested against the removal of Special Category Status. Bobby Sands was elected Member of Parliament during the strike as an Anti H-Block candidate, gaining it huge media interest from around the world. The strike ended after ten prisoners had starved themselves to death—including Sands on May 5, 1981, his funeral was attended by 100,000 people.

The longest ever prison sentence was 141,078 years, given on July 27, 1989 to a Thai woman, Chamoy Thipyaso, who defrauded over 16,000 people, including the Thai royal family, out of over $200 million. However, the Thai law of the time specified that convicts of fraud could not serve more than twenty years in prison, and she was released after only eight.

Two brothers from a set of triplets fooled a Russian prison in 1992 when one brother named Roman swapped places with the other called Rusian to give him a brief taste of freedom. Rather than returning, Rusian ran off with his brother's girlfriend, leaving Roman to serve the rest of his twin's sentence. It took years for the authorities to realize they had been duped.

The first death row inmate exonerated by DNA evidence was wrongly convicted child murderer Kirk Bloodsworth in 1993. Ten years later, Bloodsworth discovered the actual killer had been incarcerated just one cell block beneath him.

In 1995 Terry Nichols conspired with Timothy McVeigh in the planning and preparation of the Oklahoma City bombing. He was convicted in 2004 of 161 counts of first degree murder, first-degree arson; and conspiracy. Nichols was sentenced to 161 consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole setting a Guinness World Record for most consecutive life sentences ever given to a single individual. He is incarcerated at ADX Florence, a super maximum security prison near Florence, Colorado.

Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber), Ramzi Yousef (the 1993 World Trade Center bomber), and Timothy McVeigh (the Oklahoma City bomber), all became friends in Florence, Colorado Federal Supermax prison, and would regularly discuss religion and politics to pass time. Their friendship lasted until McVeigh's execution in 2001.

In 2004, American lifestyle guru Martha Stewart was sentenced to five months in jail after an insider trading scandal. She compared herself to Nelson Mandela, saying: "Many, many good people have gone to prison."

Martha Stewart says she passed time in jail making ceramics and jam out of the crab apples.

Iwao Hakamada is a Japanese former professional boxer who was sentenced to death on September 11, 1968 for a mass murder two years prior. It was suspected that he was falsely charged, however, and he was never executed as a result. On March 10, 2011, Guinness World Records certified Hakamada as the world's longest-held death row inmate.

Lawrence McKinney of Tennessee was 22 in 1977 when he was wrongly accused of rape. He was sent to prison the next year and spent 31 years in jail. In 2016, McKinney was paid $75 in compensation for being wrongly imprisoned but couldn't even cash that paltry sum for three months because he had no ID.

In March 2014, Hakamada was granted a retrial and an immediate release when the Shizuoka District Court found there was reason to believe evidence against him had been falsified.

After spending the best part of 60 years in prison, mob boss John Franzese was finally released in 2017 at the age of 100, at the time he was the oldest inmate in the US and the only centenarian in prison.

FUN PRISONER FACTS

Men outnumber women in US prisons by about 25:1.

In China the extremely wealthy can avoid prison terms by hiring body doubles. They hire "substitute criminals" to stand-in for them and serve out their prison sentences.

In Austria, Belgium, Germany and Mexico, attempting to escape from prison in itself is not a crime because the desire to escape their law considers it human nature to want to escape. No extra time is added to an escapee's sentence provided they did not break any other laws in order to escape.  However, in Mexico it's still legal for officers to shoot prisoners trying to escape.

Prisoners in France do not wear uniforms and are instead provided with regular civilian clothing. Use of prison uniforms was abolished in 1983.

In Norway, all prisoners have the internet in their cells.

35% of Saudi women in prison are there because no male relative will collect them.

An increasing number of elderly Japanese people are committing small crimes so they can live in prison for free. In 2019 People aged 65+ made up more than a quarter of the prison population in Japan.

The U.S. has 5% of the world's population and 25% of the world's incarcerated population.

Prison

HISTORY 

Imprisonment as a penalty was used initially by the Ancient Greeks for those who could not afford to pay their fines. The prison in Ancient Athens was known as the desmoterion ("place of chains").

The Romans were among the first to use prisons as a form of punishment, rather than simply for detention. One of the most notable Roman prisons was the Mamertine Prison, established around 640 B.C. by Ancus Marcius,

A 13th century prison just south of the Thames in London was known as The Clink. Although situated in Surrey the liberty was exempt from the jurisdiction of the county's high sheriff and was under the jurisdiction of the Bishop of Winchester.

The Clink was notorious for its brutal punishments. Prison inmates could be crushed under weights, burned with boiling oil or forced to stand in cold water until their feet rotted. The Bishop of Winchester earned good money from desperate prisoners who made payments to church coffers in order to buy their freedom.

Prison in 17th century Britain was indescribably harsh. Prisoners were shackled, sometimes hand and foot, and slept on bare stone and filthy straw in total darkness, 24 hours a day with no sanitation. They were regularly beaten, and if they were released they had to pay for their accommodation during their time in prison.

Until the late 18th century criminals were commonly sentenced to death, mutilation or transportation rather than imprisonment, so the growth of criminal prisons as opposed to places of detention for those awaiting trial was a late development.

William Hogarth A Rake's Progress prison scene 1732-33

The Non-conformist High Sheriff of Bedfordshire, John Howard, was shocked by the prison conditions throughout the UK, so he published in 1777 The State of the Prisons, a book which attracted attention and helps push reform forward.

The State of the Prisons was instrumental in obtaining the passage through Parliament of two penal reform acts that improve sanitary conditions and health care in prison.

The Prison Act of 1778 established in the UK the principle of separate confinement combined with work in an attempt at reform (it was eventually carried out when Pentonville prison was built in 1842).

After visiting a prison, Howard had to ride alone on a horseback as the prisons made his clothes smell too offensive to allow him to use a public carriage.

King George III's son Prince George was given land from his estates to build a prison for captives from the Napoleonic Wars. In 1806 this became known as Dartmoor Prison and its nearest town, Princetown was named after him.

Dartmoor Prison in Princetown. By Nilfanion Wikipedia

In 1813 the Quaker Elizabeth Fry visited Newgate Prison in London to see what she could do for its female convicts. The sight of the women herded together in filthy conditions, with their children clinging to their mothers and watching as they hang from the gallows stunned her. She devoted the rest of her life to campaigning against the appalling conditions in prisons.

In 1828, Eastern State Penitentiary opened with a ground breaking agenda to rehabilitate prisoners. Prisoners had a cell each, and were comforted with central heating and flush toilets, something which even the White House didn't have at that time.

One of the most brutal prisons in the US was Angola, Louisiana, which was run like a plantation. In the 1930s, hardened prisoners broke down upon learning of their sentence there. At one point, 10% of Angola prisoners were stabbed.

A borstal was a corrective institution introduced in 1902 as an alternative to prison for young offenders (aged 15–20). The name derives from the first of the kind, at Borstal in Kent.

The borstal corrective institutions were used throughout the United Kingdom and the Commonwealth. However. the Criminal Justice Act 1982 officially abolished the borstal system in the UK, introducing detention centers, which were subsequently renamed young offender institutions.

In India, such young offender corrective institutions are  known as borstal schools. As of 31 December 2014, there were 20 functioning borstal schools in India, with a combined total capacity of 2,108 inmates.

The first US federal penitentiary building was completed at Leavenworth, Kansas in 1906. Prior to its construction, federal prisoners were held at state prisons.

United States Penitentiary, Leavenworth. By Americasroof  Wikipedia

Alcatraz was the first US Federal prison to offer hot showers to inmates – on the logic that they'd get used to the hot water and wouldn't be able to handle the freezing swim off the island when attempting to escape.

During the reign of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, there was a prison camp, named S-21 that had a death rate of 99.96%. S-21 was directed by a former mathematics teacher who ordered "living autopsies," had prisoners' blood completely drained for use in hospitals, and used a "baby-smashing tree" to kill children.

La Catedral was a prison overlooking the city of Medellín, in Colombia. The prison was built to specifications ordered by drug lord Pablo Escobar, under a 1991 agreement with the Colombian government in which Escobar would surrender to authorities and serve a maximum term of five years, and the Colombian government would not extradite him to the United State. The prison featured a soccer field, a giant doll house, a bar, a jacuzzi and a waterfall.

FUN PRISON FACTS

The U.S. prison population surpassed 1 million for the first time in 1994. The number of incarcerated people in the United States has been growing rapidly for decades, and it reached an all-time high of 2.2 million in 2020. This represents a 500% increase since 1970.

World map showing number of prisoners per 100,000 citizens, by country

Prisons in Brazil offer their inmates the chance to reduce their prison sentence by four days (up to a maximum of 48 days per year) for every book they read and write a report on.

The phrase "To send someone up the river," meaning to imprison, originally referred to SingSing Prison, on the Hudson River, 30 miles north of New York City.

The Muhanga Prison in Rwanda has been described as "the worst prison in the world"—it has a capacity of 500, but houses 7,000 people.

Thailand used to have a prison built in the late 1800s called "Khuk Khi Kai," or "Chicken poop prison." The first floor of the prison contained Thai rebels of Chanthaburi who rebelled against the French occupation, and the second floor was a large chicken coop. The grated floor ensured that prisoners were constantly subjected to chicken poop.

The world's smallest prison was designed for two people and is located on Sark Island, in the Channel Islands between Great Britain and France. It was built in 1856 and the first prisoner was a maid who stole a handkerchief from a woman in the family where she worked. She spent three days there, 

The country with the smallest prison population is San Marino, a tiny state on the Italian peninsula—It has just one jail with six cells.

The Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield, Ohio, the abandoned prison where The Shawshank Redemption was filmed, was purchased for $1 and converted into a tourist attraction that nets $16 million annually.

In 2001, Brazil’s Dutra Ladeira prison became the first jail to run a pizza delivery service.

Pirate

FAMOUS PIRATES

Jeanne de Clisson (1300-1359) was a Breton privateer who harried French ships after her husband Olivier de Clisson IV was beheaded. Enraged by Oliver's execution, she swore retribution against the French King, Philip VI. Jeanne sold the de Clisson estates and outfitted three warships, which she painted black with red sails. For 13 years, the ships of this Black Fleet patrolled the English Channel hunting down French ships.

Not many survived an encounter with "The Lioness of Brittany" and her fellow pirates. A few intentionally released prisoners spoke to the French king of Jeanne de Clisson's rage against their crews who received no mercy. According to some reports, Jeanne personally decapitated all prisoners of noble birth with an axe, before throwing their bodies into the sea.

Famed Frisian rebel leader and pirate Pier Gerlofs Donia (ca. 1480–1520) could behead multiple people with a single blow from his 7-ft (2.15 m) sword.

The pirate Hayreddin "Red beard" Barbarossa (1478-1546) was exiled from so many countries that he ended up starting his own country (Regency of Algiers) with the blessing of The Ottoman Empire.

The 16th-century Irish pirate Gráinne Mhaol was said to be so fiery that she once defended her ship from invaders a day after giving birth.

The great age of Caribbean piracy began in 1522 when French corsair Jean Fleury captured two Spanish ships on their way back to Spain from the New World, plundering more than $30 million worth of Aztec gold.

Captain Morgan was a real pirate, who made a name for himself looting Spanish settlements. Henry Morgan sacked and burned the city of Panama in 1671 – the second most important city in the Spanish New World at the time.

When Henry Morgan died, an amnesty was declared so pirates and privateers could come and pay their respects without fear of arrest. He was also given a state funeral in Port Royal, and buried with a 22-gun salute.

Notorious pirate William Kidd was hanged twice on May 23, 1701 (the rope having snapped the first time) and his body gibbeted in the Thames for three tides as a warning to would-be buccaneers. The stolen booty on his ship allegedly included jewels worth £30,000 — around £10 million ($15 million) today.

Captain Kidd in New York Harbor, ca. 1920 painting by Jean Leon Gerome Ferris

Edward Teach was born in Bristol in 1680. Known for his luxuriant beard, he was nicknamed Blackbeard. His flagship was known as Queen Anne's Revenge.

Blackbeard weaved hemp in his hair and beard and set fire to it to frighten enemies.

After notorious acts of piracy along the American coast, Blackbeard was killed in a sea battle off the coast of North Carolina with a boarding party led by Royal Navy Lieutenant Robert Maynard on November 22, 1718. His head was mounted on the bowsprit of the ship that defeated him.

Capture of the Pirate, Blackbeard, 1718, Jean Leon Gerome Ferris, painted in 1920

The pirate Henry Every became the richest pirate in the world after raiding on September 7, 1695 the 25-ship convoy of Grand Mughal vessels which were making the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. Among them was a treasure laden ship belonging to the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb. Every stole £600,000 in precious metals and jewels, equivalent to £89.6 million today.

The world’s first worldwide manhunt was called to locate Every. A combined bounty of £1,000—an immense sum at the time—was offered by the Privy Council and the East India Company for his capture, but he was never found.

"Black Sam" Bellamy (1689-1717) is considered the most successful western pirate even, plundering an estimated $120 million in his career.

The youngest pirate ever was John King, who became a pirate when "Black Sam” captured a passenger ship, the Bonetta, in 1716 and John begged to join the crew. He was between 8 and 11 years old.

The most successful pirate captain of the Golden Age of Piracy, Bartholomew "Black Bart" Roberts (May 17, 1682 – February 10, 1722), had very strict rules on his ship, prohibiting all lights and drinking after eight in the evening. There was also a complete ban on gambling. If a crew member got hurt, he received a pension proportionate to his injury.

Black Bart believed the Irish to be some of the worst people to have on your crew due to them being highly mutinous. As a result, many people who Bart tried to force into piracy would often fake an Irish accent so they could get out of it.

Bartholomew Roberts at Ouidah with his ship 

Mary Read from England (1685–1721), also known as Mark Read and Anne Bonny from Ireland (unknown, possibly 1697 – unknown, possibly April 1782) were two of the most famed female pirates of all time. They discovered each others' real genders (both were disguising themselves as men) when Bonny told Read that she was attracted to her, causing Read to reveal herself as a female as well.

A pirate named Zheng Yi Sao was active in the South China Sea from 1801 to 110, eventually rising to lead a pirate confederacy. When she retired in 1810, she had 24 ships and 1433 pirates under her personal command. Zheng Yi Sao later served as a privateer and retired to run a casino, dying at 68.

When Louisiana governor William Claiborne offered in 1813 a $500 bounty for pirate Jean Lafitte, Lafitte offered $5,000 for the capture of the governor.

The most successful pirate of all time was a Chinese prostitute called Ching Shih (1775-1844). She commanded over 1,800 ships and around 20,000-40,000 other pirates. She fought off the Chinese, British, and Portuguese navies—and was never captured. Ching Shih was one of the few pirates to actually retire.

Ching Shih

The first Governor of the Bahamas was a former pirate named Woodes Rogers (ca. 1679 – July 15, 1732).

Australia's only recorded pirate is Black Jack Anderson, an African-American sealer who operated in the Recherche Archipelago off the south coast of Western Australia. From 1826, he robbed ships, killed local Indigenous men and kidnapped their women. He is thought to have been murdered by his crew sometime in the mid 1840s.

When a North Korean cargo vessel MV Dai Hong Dan was attacked by Somali pirates on October 29, 2007, an American destroyer, USS James E. Williams, came to their aid. In the aftermath of the incident, the North Korean press released an unprecedented positive statement, expressing gratitude to the United States for their help,

Dai Hong Dan

FUN PIRATE FACTS

The earliest documented instances of piracy were in the 14th century BC, when the Sea Peoples, a group of ocean raiders, attacked the ships of the Aegean and Mediterranean civilization

A "buccaneer" raided Spanish colonies and ships along the American coast in the 17th century, while a "pirate" is any seafaring criminal.

Centuries ago many pirates pierced their ears and wore earrings because they believed it improved their vision.

Pirates wore eye patches to have one eye adjusted for the top deck and the other already adjusted for the darkness when going below deck.

The black pirate flag known as the "Jolly Roger" was originally a bright red French "surrender-or-die" banner known as the "Jolie Rouge."

The traditional "Jolly Roger" of piracy.

In the 1700s, a pirate ship with a black flag meant that if a vessel surrendered its goods, the pirates were willing to spare its crew. However, a red flag,meant "no quarter given", meaning that no mercy would be shown, and no life would be spared.

Pirates often stocked a variety of flags and usually flew false flags, only raising the Jolly Roger when they had their prey vessels within firing range.

There's a pirate museum in St. Augustine, Florida, that displays not only one of two authentic Jolly Roger flags known to exist, but also the only known treasure chest that actually belonged to a pirate.

Pirates assessed another ship by looking at its jib—a sail on the boat’s forwardmost mast—hence the phrase "I like the cut of your jib."

Pirates spent their loot as soon as they got it, on account of their short lives—there are only a few documented cases of buried treasure.

The word "piracy" has been used for copyright breaking since 1700.

Until 1830 pirates were hanged in England at Execution Dock in Wapping as "enemies of all mankind".

The actor Robert Newton is best remembered for his portrayal of Long John Silver in the 1950 film adaptation of Treasure Island, the film that became the standard for screen portrayals of historical pirates. Hailing from the West Country, his exaggeration of his West Country accent is credited with popularizing the stereotypical "pirate voice." Newton was the first actor to employ the phrase "Arrrrh, matey!"

However, John Barrymore was the first Long John to use "arrr!" to mean "yes" back in 1934.

Newton and Linda Darnell in Blackbeard the Pirate (1952).

International Talk Like a Pirate Day is celebrated on September 19 each year as the day when everyone in the world should talk like a pirate. An observer of this holiday should greet friends not with "Hello, everyone!" but with "Ahoy, maties!" or "Ahoy, me hearties!" The day was born in 1995, when John Baur (Ol' Chumbucket) and Mark Summers (Cap'n Slappy), of Albany, Oregon were  playing racquetball. One of them reacted to an injury with an outburst of "Aaarrr!", and the idea was born.

There is little evidence that pirates ever made their enemies walk the plank.

Japanese sushi chain CEO majorly contributed to a drop in piracy off the Somalian coast by providing the pirates with training as tuna fishermen.

Somali Pirates at one point had an investment firm. You could invest in the Somali Pirates, and receive a cut of their loot if their plunder was successful.  A 22 year old 'investor' made $75,000 in 38 days after joining the 'company' - after getting a share of ransom money.

Here is a list of songs about pirates. 

Lee Harvey Oswald

Lee Harvey Oswald was born in New Orleans on October 18, 1939, two months after his father died.

At age 17 in October 1956, Oswald joined the U.S. Marines, as had his brother Robert. Oswald received a hardship discharge (for mother's health) in 1959 to quit the Marines, but defected to the Soviet Union for nearly three years.

Lee Harvey Oswald. Photo taken in Minsk. Commission Exhibit No. 2892

When Lee Harvey Oswald arrived in Moscow, he said to the interpreter about his communist beliefs and intention to obtain the nationality of the USSR. For his twentieth birthday, two days after Oswald's arrival, this interpreter gives him a copy of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Idiot.

Having married Marina, the daughter of a Soviet security official, Oswald defected back to the U.S. with her and their daughter, in June 1962.

After a sniper assassinated John F. Kennedy on November 22, 1963, Oswald was arrested for the murder of police officer J. D. Tippit who had been shot on a Dallas street shortly after the president was killed.

He quickly became the prime suspect in the murder of President Kennedy, but denied shooting anyone. Oswald claimed he was a "patsy" as he'd lived in the Soviet Union.

Oswald being led from the Texas Theatre following his arrest

The FBI was investigating Marina Oswald at the time as a possible Soviet spy.

On November 24, 1963, Oswald was fatally shot by nightclub owner Jack Ruby, while being moved from police headquarters to the county jail.

Due to a lack of family and friends in attendance at his funeral, the pallbearer's of Lee Harvey Oswald's casket were reporters.

In 1964, the Warren Commission concluded that Oswald acted alone in killing Kennedy, a conclusion reached previously by the FBI and Dallas Police.

Marina Oswald Porter, the Soviet-American widow of Lee Harvey Oswald, is still alive and living in Texas. She still believes that he was innocent of the assassination.

Lee Harvey Oswald still owes an overdue book – The Shark and the Sardines by Juan José Arévalo – to Dallas public library.

Titus Oates

Titus Oates was born at Oakham in Rutland, England on September 15, 1649.

His father Samuel was a minister who moved between the Church of England and the Baptists; he became a Baptist during the Puritan Revolution, rejoining the established church at the Restoration and was rector of All Saints' Church at Hastings (1666–74). By the late 1670s, he had once more reverted to the Baptist doctrine.

On May 29, 1670 Titus Oates was ordained as a Church of England priest. He was vicar of the parish of Bobbing in Kent, 1673–74, and then curate to his father at All Saints, Hastings.

On Ash Wednesday in 1677 Oates was received into the Catholic Church. He became involved with the Jesuit houses of St Omer in France and the Royal English College at Valladolid in Spain. When he returned to London, Oates explained that he had pretended to become a Catholic to learn about the secrets of the Jesuits and that, before leaving, he had heard about a planned Jesuit meeting in London.

Titus Oates

In 1678 Oates and English divine Israel Tonge wrote a lengthy manuscript that fabricated a "Popish Plot" in which Charles II was to be killed.. Oates succeeded in persuading the Privy Council that the Jesuits and various Catholic nobles were supposedly planning on assassinating the English king. As a consequence at least 15 innocent "conspirators" were executed and Oates himself was given an apartment in Whitehall and an annual allowance of £1,200.from the state for his services.

During the hysteria engendered by the "Popish Plot," Baron George "Judge" Jeffreys earned himself a notorious reputation for his relentless prosecution of the supposed Roman Catholic conspirators.
By 1681, Oates' crime has been uncovered and he was sentenced to life imprisonment incorporating an annual pillory and flogging in the public stocks.

Engraving of a pilloried Titus Oates

In 1689, upon the accession of the Protestant William of Orange and Mary, Oates was pardoned and granted a pension of £260 a year, but his reputation did not recover.

Oates married in 1693 and became a Baptist, but in 1701, he was expelled from the Baptists "as a disorderly person and hypocrite".

Oates died on July 13, 1705, by then an obscure and largely forgotten figure.

Source Wikipedia

Murder

An Ancient Roman punishment for the crime of parricide (the killing of a parent) was to severely scourge the criminal, sew them into a stout leather bag with a dog, a snake, a rooster, and a monkey, then throw the bag into the river.

French knight Gilles de Rais, one of the earliest known serial killers, was taken into custody in 1440 upon an accusation brought against him by the Bishop of Nantes.

When James Hamilton shot and killed James Stewart, 1st Earl of Moray, regent for the infant King James VI of Scotland in 1570. it was the first recorded assassination using a firearm.

James Stewart, Earl of Moray, illegitimate 

America's first murderer, John Billington, came over on the Mayflower, got into a fight with another colonist, and shot him with a musket.

William Burke and William Hare carried out a series of infamous murders in Edinburgh in the 1820s, with the aim of supplying bodies for anatomist Dr Robert Knox too dissect. Hare turned king's evidence, and died a beggar in London in the 1860s; Burke was hanged, and in his confession, Burke exonerated Knox from all knowledge of his crimes. The incident caused the Anatomy Act (1832) to be passed, which regulated the supply of bodies to medical schools.

 Burke's execution in the Lawnmarket from a contemporary print

In one of the most sensational murder trials in US history, Lizzie Borden was accused of killing her wealthy father and hated step-mother with an axe on August 4, 1892. She claimed to have been outside in the barn at the time of the murder, and despite a wealth of circumstantial evidence Borden was acquitted of the double murder. She lived out her life in Fall River, and was buried alongside her father and step-mother.

The case is immortalised in the rhyme:

Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her mother forty whacks;
And when she saw what she had done; she gave her father forty one.

In actuality, the police accused Borden of giving her father 10 whacks and her stepmother 19.

Lizzie Borden during the trial,

Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb were wealthy students at the University of Chicago. In 1924 they were sentenced to life plus 99 years after strangling a boy for no reason other than to prove they could commit the perfect murder undetected. Their story was the basis of Alfred Hitchcock's 1948 movie Rope.

Loeb was killed in prison by a fellow inmate who had claimed Loeb tried to seduce him. One waggish reporter wrote he ‘ended his sentence with a proposition’.

In the 1940s, "The Lipstick Killer", William Heirens was convicted of killing 6-year-old Suzanne Degnan, Frances Brown and Josephine Ross. Heirens got his nickname because he wrote, "For heaven's sake, catch me before I kill more. I cannot control myself," on Brown's wall in lipstick.

Jack Gilbert Graham killed 44 people aboard United Airlines Flight 629 near Longmont, Colorado using a dynamite time bomb on November 1, 1955. Graham planted the bomb in his mother's suitcase, who was killed along with 43 other people, in an apparent move to claim life insurance money. After arresting Graham federal agents learned that it was not in fact a federal crime to blow up an airplane. Colorado instead charged the man for the single murder of his mother.

The first live televised murder was on November 24, 1963, when Jack Ruby killed President John Kennedy's assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald while millions of viewers watched.

Ruby about to shoot Oswald who is being escorted by Dallas police detectives 

Ted Bundy was a law student who is believed to have killed at least 36 females, both adults and children, over a number of years. Convicted in 1979 on several charges, including the murder of a 12-year-old girl, he was sentenced to death. Bundy was executed in Florida in 1989 after a string of unsuccessful appeals.

Blondie's Debbie Harry thinks she once got into a car driven by Bundy. She recalled to Q magazine June 2011: "It was in the early '70s in New York and I was trying to catch a cab and there weren't any. This guy in a car was circling and circling and I got in. Silly me. You know when something doesn't feel right? It didn't feel right and it didn't smell right. This guy really needed to take care of his hygiene. The car was a mess and he had sawn the door handles off on the inside. Anyway, I got the window open and opened the door and got out. It was only much later on reading about him in the newspapers where they gave the modus operandi of his killings that the hair on the back of my neck stood up. I believe it was him."

Bundy in police custody on July 27, 1978

Researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore reported in 1989 that the leading cause of injury-related deaths of U.S. children under one year old was homicide.

Prostitute Aileen Wuornos was the first female serial killer in America. In 1992 she was charged with the shooting of seven middle-aged men at point blank range. She confessed to shooting her victims, but claimed that they had either raped or attempted to rape her while she was working as a prostitute, and that all of the homicides were committed in self-defense. Woornous was convicted and sentenced to death for six of the murders. She was eventually executed by lethal injection on October 9. 2002.

Aileen Wuornos

The 2002 Washington D.C. sniper shootings were part of a plan by John Allen Muhammad to kill his former wife. By the time he was caught, he had killed 17 random people, so she’d look like just one more random victim.

Polish writer, Krystian Bala, wrote a fictional novel in 2003 where he detailed a murder much similar to the one he'd committed three years previously. This novel played a huge part in solving that murder and he was later sentenced to jail for 25 years.

The murder of a woman just because of her gender is called femicide. Guatemala became the first country to recognize it as a crime in 2008.

November 25, 2012 was the first day since 1960 that there was no reported murder or manslaughter in New York City.

Chart of murders in the NYC area by year

Glenna Duram shot Martin Duram five times in May 2015 before turning the gun on herself in a failed suicide attempt. Their African Grey parrot, Bud, who was the sole witness began repeating what's thought to have been their last conversation, including the words: "Don't shoot!" Ms Duram was found guilty of first-degree murder after eight hours of deliberation by Newaygo County jury in Michigan. The parrot wasn't used in court proceedings, though this possibility was initially considered by the prosecutor.

In 2020, murders in the United States spiked more than 27 percent — the largest percentage increase in at least six decades.

East St. Louis has a higher murder rate than Honduras, the country with the highest murder rate in the world.

Brazil has nearly 60,000 murders a year, more than the US, Canada, Australia, all of Europe, China, and many Asian countries combined.

More than two-thirds of homicide victims in the UK are killed by partners, ex-partners or other family members.

Worldwide, males commit 95% of all homicides and make up 79% of all homicide victims.

If you're murdered in America, there's a 1 in 3 chance that the police won't identify your killer.

Less than one percent of murders in any given year are committed by serial killers.

The phrase "murdered in cold blood" doesn't refer to someone being cruel. It refers to the killer having had time to think over the crime and still do it in a calculated way. As opposed to doing it in the "heat of passion", their blood had time to cool before they committed the crime.