pretty porcelain psychopath

things i like.

[hayaomiyazaki]

cecil beaton at home, reddish house

[clairereling]

[a-little-mongrel-called-bleep]

Remains of Dennis Nilsen’s last victim, Stephen Sinclair, wrapped in newspapers in a tea chest

[nemfrog]

[h4le-bopp]

The Erfurt School Shooting: Order of Events - On the evening prior to April 26th, Robert told his parents that his final English exam was delayed and he could therefore sleep longer.

- Robert had been expelled from school months prior, but had kept this a secret from his parents who believed he was into his final exams and would graduate soon.

- The morning of the shooting, he ate breakfast and played Quake III: Arena for a couple of minutes, before he left for school.

- His father hugged him and wished him luck at the test. Robert warded it off.

- He had left without a bag pack. A few minutes later he returned and told his parents that he had forgotten his pencil.

- His parents then left the flat in order to shop groceries.

- Roberts grandmother (who lived in the flat above) saw Robert leaving the flat again, a few minutes later. He was carrying a large duffle bag and was smoking a cigarette. Roberts grandmother was confused by this, because everyone in the family knew Robert as a non-smoker.

- Robert walked to his former school by feet. When he entered, he encountered janitor Uwe Pfotenhauer and asked him if headmistress Christiane Alt was present. Pfotenhauer told him: “The headmistress is here, but I doubt she will be able to speak to you right now”, since the school was preparing for the final exams. Robert replied “We will see”.

- He then went to the bathroom. There, he put a black balaclava over his head and armed himself with a Glock pistol and several rounds of ammunition. He also draped a Mossberg pumpgun over his back, even though it was malfunctioning. Additionally, he put earplugs (brand Lärmstop) into his ears and dropped the empty package into the toilet.  A Machete, a small knife, his wallet and rounds of ammunition were left in the bathroom.

- After leaving the bathroom, Robert straight headed for the administration office, walking past a group of sixth-graders. Several of them recalled seeing the black masked figure working the slide on his pistol.

- Robert then entered the office and killed the assistant school mistress and a secretary. The assistant school mistress was killed sitting at her desk with a shot into the head, fired close from above. The secretary was hit twice, one time into her heart.

- The school mistress Mrs. Alt was in her office (which was located right next to the administration) when she heard a loud bang coming from the administration office. When she wanted to look after the noise, she suddenly heard another popping sound and what she described as “terrible screaming” coming from the secretary. She then carefully peeked into the room and saw the two dead bodies.

- Robert had already left the administration office without trying to enter the headmistress’s office. His reasons for not doing so are unknown.

- He walked up the stairs to the first floor, where he saw a teacher being in the process of unlocking a door. Robert killed him with three shots.

- After killing two additional teachers (both murdered while being surrounded by numerous students who witnesses the murders), Robert entered the second floor.

- Students who witnessed the murders at the first floor already had fled upstairs and warned a teacher, who did not believe them. Upon encountering the teacher, Robert killed her with five shots.

- Another teacher was shot and killed while teaching French to an 8th grade.

- Robert also peeked in several classrooms. Some were empty, but in one case, he apparently mistook the teacher for a student, due her youthful look and left her unharmed.

- He proceeded to the third floor, entered a classroom and killed an additional teacher, before reloading his pistol for the first time. A trainee teacher also was killed in her classroom.

- Another teacher, who came out of her room to look for the noise, made the “wiper”-handsign towards Robert, which in Germany means “you’re nuts”. Robert aimed his pistol against her forehead and shot her.

- While looking into a classroom, a student who had sat besides Robert in the prior grade recognised him by his eyes. She later told this other students and a teacher.

- Robert killed a third teacher, standing in a group of students.

- He then went back to the second floor, where he killed another teacher.

- By this point, most of the classrooms were already locked and barricaded. As Robert tried to enter one of the classrooms and found it to be locked, he fired several rounds through the door. 15-year old student Ronny Möckel, who was standing in front of the door was it several times and died immediately. 14-year old student Susann Hartung was standing at the teachers desk and talking to her, when she was hit by a bullet. She fell to the floor and bled to death within a few minutes.

- Robert walked downstairs to the first floor, where for unknown reasons, he fired a single shot through the door of a bathroom. The bullet pierced into the backpack of a student without harming him.

- Robert proceeded walking downstairs to the ground floor and left the building.

- On the schoolyard, Robert encountered a teacher who was directing students out of the building. Upon seeing the perpetrator, the teacher started to scream in panic and ran towards a group of parked cars, where she dived in cover. Robert chased her and shot five bullets into the womans body, while she was laying on the ground, yelling for help.

- At this point, the first police car had arrived at the school. The police officers witnessed the schoolyard murder and fired a single shot in the direction of Robert. The bullet missed him and pierced into a road salt container.

- The police officer then dived into cover and therefore lost sight of Robert. As he peeked into the schoolyard again, he assumed Robert to be standing behind a tree, since he thought he was seeing his elbow sticking out.

- Robert however, had in fact returned into the school building. There, he walked through the floors in the direction of a window, lying parallel to the police men.

- He crossed two students in the hallway, without reacting to them.

- Outside, a second police car arrived. The two officers inside witnessed their colleague firing at the schoolyard and left their car to put over their bulletproof vests.

- While they were doing so, a window above them opened and four shots were fired at police officer Andreas Gorski. He was fatally hit in the neck and stomach.

- Robert then proceeded walking through the school building, apparently out of direction and focus.

- At the first floor, he encountered a group of construction workers, who had witnessed the prior events only by sounds. As they asked Robert if this was part of some kind of graduation prank, he removed his balaclava and replied: “I was once expelled from this school”.

- Also on the first floor, Robert bumped into his former teacher Rainer Heise.

- Having the balaclava partly removed, Roberts face was visible and Mr. Heise recognized his former student and asked “Robert! You?”

- Robert had hold his gun in the direction of Mr. Heise, but as the teacher realized there was no way to escape from him and told Robert “You can shoot me now, but you have to look me into the eyes” (the wording differs, regarding the Interview Mr. Heise gave. The part wit “you have to look me into the eyes” is not included in the official report, which simply notes Mr. Heises sentence as “You can shoot me now”.), Robert lowered the gun and replied “Mr. Heise, enough for today” (in some Interviews, Mr. Heise recalled Robert smiling while saying this. The smile is not noted in the official report.).

- Mr. Heise offered his student to have a talk and led him into a small room where students stored their art projects. After Robert had entered, Mr. Heise pushed him into the room, locked the door and ran away.

. Shortly after being locked into the room, Robert killed himself with a shot into he head.

[historicaltimes]

One of the first Egyptian women to wear a short dress early 1960s.

via reddit

Keep reading

[historicaltimes]

881. A snow blockade in southern Minnesota. On March 29, 1881, snowdrifts in Minnesota were higher than locomotives

via reddit

[truecrimerip]

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire

On March 25, 1911, the Triangle Shirtwaist Company factory in New York City burned, killing 145 workers. It is remembered as one of the most infamous incidents in American industrial history, as the deaths were largely preventable – most of the victims died as a result of neglected safety features and locked doors within the factory building. The tragedy brought widespread attention to the dangerous sweatshop conditions of factories, and led to the development of a series of laws and regulations that better protected the safety of workers.

The Triangle factory, owned by Max Blanck and Isaac Harris, was located in the top three floors of the Asch Building in Manhattan. It was a true sweatshop, employing young immigrant women who worked in a cramped space at lines of sewing machines. Nearly all the workers were teenaged girls who did not speak English, working 12 hours a day, every day.

There were four elevators with access to the factory floors, but only one was fully operational and the workers had to file down a long, narrow corridor in order to reach it. There were two stairways down to the street, but one was locked from the outside to prevent stealing and the other only opened inward. The fire escape was so narrow that it would have taken hours for all the workers to use it, even in the best of circumstances. The danger of fire in factories like the Triangle Shirtwaist was well-known, but high levels of corruption in both the garment industry and city government generally ensured that no useful precautions were taken to prevent fires.

Blanck and Harris already had a suspicious history of factory fires. The Triangle factory was twice scorched in 1902, while their Diamond Waist Company factory burned twice, in 1907 and in 1910. It seems that Blanck and Harris deliberately torched their workplaces before business hours in order to collect on the large fire-insurance policies they purchased, a not uncommon practice in the early 20th century. While this was not the cause of the 1911 fire, it contributed to the tragedy, as Blanck and Harris refused to install sprinkler systems and take other safety measures in case they needed to burn down their shops again.

Added to this delinquency were Blanck and Harris’ notorious anti-worker policies. Their employees were paid a mere $15 a week, despite working 12 hours every day. When the International Ladies Garment Workers Union led a strike in 1909 demanding higher pay and shorter and more predictable hours, Blanck and Harris’ company was one of the few manufacturers who resisted, hiring police as thugs to imprison the striking women, and paying off politicians to look the other way.

The Tragedy

On March 25, a Saturday afternoon, there were 600 workers at the factory when a fire began in a rag bin. The manager attempted to use the fire hose to extinguish it, but was unsuccessful, as the hose was rotted and its valve was rusted shut. As the fire grew, panic ensued. The young workers tried to exit the building by the elevator but it could hold only 12 people and the operator was able to make just four trips back and forth before it broke down amid the heat and flames. In a desperate attempt to escape the fire, the girls left behind waiting for the elevator plunged down the shaft to their deaths. The girls who fled via the stairwells also met awful demises–when they found a locked door at the bottom of the stairs, many were burned alive.

Those workers who were on floors above the fire, including the owners, escaped to the roof and then to adjoining buildings. As firefighters arrived, they witnessed a horrible scene. The girls who did not make it to the stairwells or the elevator were trapped by the fire inside the factory and began to jump from the windows to escape it. The bodies of the jumpers fell on the fire hoses, making it difficult to begin fighting the fire. Also, the firefighters ladders reached only seven floors high and the fire was on the eighth floor. In one case, a life net was unfurled to catch jumpers, but three girls jumped at the same time, ripping the net. The nets turned out to be mostly ineffectual.

Within 18 minutes, it was all over. Forty-nine workers had burned to death or been suffocated by smoke, 36 were dead in the elevator shaft and 58 died from jumping to the sidewalks. With two more dying later from their injuries, a total of 145 people were killed by the fire. The workers union set up a march on April 5 on New York’s Fifth Avenue to protest the conditions that had led to the fire; it was attended by 80,000 people.

[peerintothepast]

A freed Jewish prisoner expresses his rage and beats down a German guard at the liberated Dachau Concentration Camp. An American soldier looks on and does not interfere. Germany, 1945 imgur.com

[hold-my-tec-9]

Hiroshima bombing

All the watches found in the ground zero were stopped at 8:15 am, the time of the explosion.

Within a certain distance from the site of explosion, the heat was so intense that practically everything was vaporised. The shadows of the parapets were imprinted on the road surface of the Yorozuyo Bridge, ½ of a mile south-southwest of the hypocenter. Besides, in Hiroshima, all that was left of some humans, sitting on stone benches near the centre of explosion, was their outlines.

Housewives and children were incinerated instantly or paralysed in their daily routines, their internal organs boiled and their bones charred into brittle charcoal.

Beneath the center of the explosion, temperatures were hot enough to melt concrete and steel. Within seconds, 75,000 people had been killed or fatally injured with 65% of the casualties nine years of age and younger.Radiation deaths were still occurring in large numbers in the following days. For no apparent reason their health began to fail. They lost appetite. Their hair fell out. Bluish spots appeared on their bodies. And then bleeding began from the ears, nose and mouth.

Doctors gave their patients Vitamin A injections. The results were horrible. The flesh started rotting from the hole caused by the injection of the needle. And in every case the victim died.

This photograph shows an eyeball of an A-bomb victim who got an atomic bomb cataract. There is opacity near the center of the eyeball.

[morbidology]

Lake Shawnee Amusement Park is quite possibly one of the most unfortunate and tragic amusement parks in the entire world. Now abandoned, it is located in Mercer County, West Virginia. Many years before Lake Shawnee Amusement Park was built, the land was the home to a Native American tribe until 1783, when the Clay family attempted to steal the land. Three Clay children, Bartley, Tabitha, and Ezekial, were killed by the Native American tribe, with one being burnt at the stake. To retaliate, the patriarch of the family, Mitchell Clay, murdered several of the Native Americans. Years later, during the 1920′s Conley T. Snidow purchased the land and Lake Shawnee Amusement Park was born. Now that’s not the end of tragedy for this spot of land. A total of six people were reported to have died in freak accidents at the park. One little girl was hit by a truck as she swung on the circle swing photographed above and a little boy drowned in the swimming pool. Following these accidents, the park closed for good and was left to rot and rust. However, the park doesn’t appear to be completely empty.. The owner has reported witnessing a ghostly little girl covered in blood, swinging on the abandoned circle swing; he also said that’s it’s not uncommon to hear and see the swings moving on their own.

[grunge-a]

[culturenlifestyle]

[tommycattt]

On March 20, 1913 in New Castle, Indiana, a 9-year-old girl named Catherine Winters left home wearing a red sweater and a straw hat, intending to sell sewing needles door to door for a church fundraiser. Catherine never made it home that day or any other for that matter. The disappearance remains unsolved. Some believe she was stolen by gypsies others believe Catherine may have walked in on her step mom’s affair, and that she killed her to keep her silent. @sixpenceee

[illyadarling]

[babytavsi]

[morbidology]

It was the 15th of February, 1998, and 19-year-old Amy Robinson was riding her bicycle to a grocery store in Arlington where she worked. Michael Wayne Hall and his friend, Robert Neville, approached the young woman in their car and asked if she wanted a ride. The two men worked at the grocery store with Amy so she recognised them. When she got into the car, they drove her to a rural field in Fort Worth. The two men got out of the car and walked into the field as Amy sat in the car listening to the radio. Born with a mental disability, Amy didn’t realise that something ominous was about to happen. It didn’t occur to her that being out in a field in the middle of the night with two men who were behaving very peculiar could be dangerous.

Michael and Robert asked Amy to get out of the car. As she stepped out, Michael shot her in the back of the leg with a pellet gun and attempted to shoot her with a crossbow. As Amy started to cry, the men burst into laughter. Robert went to the trunk of the car and retrieved his .22 calibre rifle and shot Amy in the chest while Michael shot her “three of four times” in the chest with his pellet gun. As she fell to the ground, crying in pain, Michael stood over her for about five to ten minutes. He just watched as the life drained out of her. Then, he shot her in the head, killing her. Days later, they returned to the scene and fired more shots into Amy’s body before stealing her keys and money.

When Michael and Robert were apprehended, they said they chose Amy because she trusted them and because they wanted to kill a minority. Amy was part Native Indian. They were apprehended after they bragged to several people about what they had done. When questioned, they laughed throughout the interview as they recollected what they had done. Their unremorseful behaviour sealed their death sentence. Robert Neville was executed on the 8th of February, 2006, and Michael Wayne Hall was executed on the 15th of February, 2011.