True Crime On This Day January 16th

January 16th

On January 16th in true crime, mob murder, house invasion shooting, cold case solved with beer mug, murder, and assassination.

1978

In Odessa, Texas, in the early hours of the morning, 69-year-old delivery man Hubert Dean was found unconscious outside his home.

He had been the apparent victim of a robbery and later died in hospital of his injuries. As a delivery man, he was known to have held a substantial amount of cash on him but there was no cash on him when he was found and it was likely to have been the motive for the attack.

Dean died of his injuries shortly after, leaving no witness to the murder. As of 2022, the murder remains unsolved.

1979

In New York, Italian-American Colombo crime family member Thomas ‘Tommy’ Genovese was murdered. He was a distant relative of Genovese crime family founder Vito Genovese.

Two days after the death of Colombo member Lawrence Carrozza, Thomas was shot dead and stuffed into the trunk of his car. He had recently been released from a federal prison.

Thomas was known to have been part of a group that kidnapped mob members and held them for ransom.

1980

In Castle Rock, Colorado, the body of 21-year-old Helene Pruszynski was found in a field on Daniels Park Road. She had been raped and stabbed to death just hours earlier by an unidentified attacker.

She had been returning home from her internship at a radio station when she was abducted from a bus stop nearby.

The case went cold for almost 40 years until December 2019, when Douglas County Sheriff’s detectives arrested James Curtis Clanton in Florida.

A few days before his arrest, detectives watched him in a bar and worked with the bar attendant to get hold of the empty beer mug. DNA from it matched the suspect in the Pruszynski murder.

They had previously used new genealogy tracking to finger him as the suspect.

Clanton, who was 22-years-old at the time, lived near the scene of the crime and had previously been charged with rape in 1975.  Clanton was recently charged with Pruszynski’s murder.

1981

In County Tyron, Northern Ireland, civil rights leader and former politician, Bernadette Devlin and her husband were shot multiple times in their own home in front of their children.

Members from the Ulster Freedom Fighters had stormed the house, despite the residence being protected by the British Army. Devlin was shot nine times but remarkably went on to survive the attack.

Her husband also survived, as did their children. The three attackers were caught by the army patrol and subsequently jailed for the shooting.

1982

In Paris, France, 61-year-old mastermind of the French Connection drug network, Marcel Francisci, was assassinated.

An alleged member of the Corsican Mafia, he had developed a business empire that included casinos in multiple European countries, including the United Kingdom. As he approached his car in the parking lot of the building where he lived, an unidentified gunman shot him dead.

Though he was considered by some to be a revered Corsican Mafia Godfather, there were many who hold him in high esteem, remembering his part in the creation of Corsican roads, schools, and hospitals. His murder has never been solved.

1983

In Dallas, Texas, 27-year-old police officer John R. Pasco was shot dead by Mexican native Ramon Montoya Facundo while attempting to arrest him.

Pasco was on patrol when he noticed Facundo walking down the street and carrying a weapon. He attempted to relieve Facundo of his weapon but was shot in the head during the struggle, only to die of his wounds six hours later.

Facundo was arrested less than one hour after the attack and subsequently sentenced to death. Despite a plea from Mexico and the Vatican, Facundo was executed by lethal injection in Texas on March 25^th 1993.

His execution caused controversy in Mexico as he was the first Mexican to have been executed in Texas at that point for 51 years.

Check out the Mega List of True Crime Podcasts