True Crime On This Day March 21st

March 21st

On March 21st in true crime, assassinations, cold case murders, racist lynching, macabre discoveries, and a bizarre fainting epidemic.

1978

Serial killer, Yves ‘Apache’ Trudeau assassinated the president of the Montreal Chapter of the Outlaws, Gilles Cadorette.

He killed him with a bomb planted in Cadorette’s car. Trudeau would go on to murder a total of 43 people.

1979

In Dundee, Scotland, the nude body of 18-year-old part-time prostitute Carol Lannen was discovered in Templeton Woods.

She had been raped and strangled to death. She had last been seen getting into a red car in Dundee city centre the evening before.

Detectives in the case later linked her case to the death of another young female in 1980. As of 2022, the murder remains unsolved.

1980

In Sicily, Italy, Sicilian-American mobster and boss of the Philadelphia crime family, Angelo Bruno, was assassinated.

He had been sitting in his car in front of his home when an unidentified assassin crept up behind him and shot him at point blank range in the back of the head with a shotgun.

It was suspected that the assassination was ordered by Bruno’s advisor, Antonio Caponigro. A few weeks later, Caponigro’s body was found in the trunk of a car.

The governing body of the American Mafia, known as The Commission, had ordered Caponigro’s death because he had killed Bruno without permission.

Bruno’s death caused a mob war in Philadelphia that claimed at least 20 lives in the years that followed.

1981

In Mobile, Alabama, 19-year-old black man Michael Donald was kidnapped and murdered by two members of the United Klans of America (UKA).

James Llewelyn Knowles and Henry F. Hayes chose Donald at random purely based on the colour of his skin. They forced him into their car at gunpoint and drove to the woods at Mobile Bay.

When Donald tried to escape, he was beaten with wooden branches before being hung from a tree branch. Hays then slit his throat to make sure he was dead. They left the body hanging in the trees where it was found the next morning.

It took over two years for the FBI to arrest Knowles and Hayes. Their motive was to kill a black man because a mistrial had been declared in the trial of a black criminal defendant, unrelated to Donald.

Knowles received life in prison and Hays was sentenced to death. Hays was executed in the electric chair on June 6^th 1997.

Donald’s mother later sued the Klan organisation and won a $7million (USD) verdict, which virtually bankrupted the UKA.

1982

In Boone County, Kentucky, the decomposing remains of an unidentified white female between the ages of 25 to 45-years-old were discovered floating on the Ohio River.

She has never been identified due to having no dental records available. A partial fingerprint was taken from the body but was too poor quality to use.

She has a single piercing in each earlobe and a 2.5inch scar on her left big toe. Investigators have long suspected foul play. Her case remains unsolved.

1983

In West Bank, the 1983 West Bank fainting epidemic began and carried on until April. Large numbers of female Palestinians complained of fainting and dizziness.

Many were teenage girls, with a small number of female Israeli soldiers in multiple West Bank towns. Over the course of the epidemic, at least 943 people had been hospitalised.

Palestinian leaders accused Israeli settlers and officials of using biological warfare in West Bank schools to drive Arabs out of the area. However, the truth was far more bizarre.

On March 31^st, the Permanent Representative to the UN from Iraq asked the United Nations Security Council to look into the possibility that almost 1,000 Palestinian schoolgirls were being poisoned.

Less than a week later, the Security Council formally requested the Secretary General of the UN to conduct an independent investigation of the poisoning.

A large investigation discovered no organic cause of the fainting and believed mass hysteria to be the most likely cause of the epidemic.

Their findings were backed up by the International Red Cross and the World Health Organisation. Later in April, a team of US medical researchers concluded the fainting outbreaks were caused by mass psychological illness which was labelled as anxiety.

Some senior Israeli Government Officials later claimed that the fainting epidemic was a grand deception to harm the image of Israel.

Check out the Mega List of True Crime Podcasts