I love reading old crime stories so if it is OK, I will post some here, if not, someone tell me where they belong...
Times were tough for Alan Rogers in the spring of 1929. His wife, Olive, had died, and the mild, bespectacled insurance salesman suddenly found himself being both father and mother to his six children.
So it seemed as if an angel of mercy had swooped in when his wife's cousin - lounge singer Gladys May Parks - made an unbelievably kind offer.
Parks told Rogers she understood his chances of remarrying were between slim and nothing. No woman would be willing to take on a man saddled with such a brood.
To help him, Parks said she'd take the two youngest - Dorothy, 4, and Timmie, 18 months - off his hands while he searched for a new wife.
Her husband was a very wealthy man, she said, and she could spoil them with every luxury, the kind of life Rogers could never provide.
Reluctantly, on May 31, 1929, Rogers gave up his babies, expecting to see them again soon.
Months passed, but Parks refused to let Rogers visit or even speak to them. In July, with no warning, he went to her home in Camden, N.J., hoping to reason with her and see his kids. They were not there.
When Rogers returned a few days later, Parks was gone and neighbors said she had moved. They also told him the children were being badly treated, with frequent, vicious beatings.
Rogers kept looking, but the next, and only, contact came in August - a letter sent to him from the missing woman. In it, Parks upbraided him for hounding her and the children, and for telling neighbors all kinds of lies. After that he heard nothing more, until 2 1/2 months later. That's when Rogers finally got to see his children again, but they were a pile of bones.
Dorothy was the first to reemerge, when her skull caught the attention of an 11-year-old girl walking through a field, on Nov. 2, 1929.
Other bones were scattered nearby, Rogers read about the mystery child in the papers, and, fearing the worst, contacted police. Forensics confirmed it was Dorothy.
There was no sign of Parks or the boy, and police were preparing for a large-scale manhunt. They didn't have to bother - within a couple of days, Parks turned herself in.
"I hear you have been looking for me," she said as she strolled into the Newark police headquarters. She offered a story that she had last seen the children when she had handed them off to a lawyer in Atlantic City, who later committed suicide. She had no idea what had happened after that.She had taken Dorothy and Timmie to be pawns in a get-rich-quick scheme, in which she would tell wealthy men - former lovers - that these children were the result of their affairs.
When she heard that her cousin had died, she quickly contacted the grieving father. Rogers had told her that golden-haired Dorothy was "a lovable child with no bad habits..
Parks insisted she did nothing out of the ordinary, but neighbors told police the children received frequent beatings, so severe that they carried the bruises for days.
Others told police that Parks appeared to be starving them, and had two large bottles of iodine, which she threatened to feed to her wards if they didn't behave.
Even her father - George Parks - couldn't stand it. When she first took custody of the children, Parks had been living, not with a rich husband, but with her elderly dad. The elder Parks protested about how cruelly she was treating the children. One time, neighbors recalled, the old man came running down the stairs, bellowing that his daughter was going to poison them with iodine.
Parks promptly moved to a new address, taking the children with her.
But they continued to be trouble. It was during a lesson in good manners, she said, that Dorothy died. The girl was misbehaving, so Parks gave her a slap, knocking the child to the ground.
Figuring she was pretending to be hurt, Parks left her sprawled on the floor for a couple of hours. Later, she returned to discover the child was not faking injury. She was dead.
Parks stuffed the body into a suitcase and stored it in the apartment for a couple of days. Then she took it in a cab across town and rented a room in another boarding house, where she shoved the suitcase into a closet. It stayed there for about a week, until, in the dead of night, Parks dug a hole in the cellar floor and tossed the body in with a liberal dose of lye.
She was sorting laundry one evening when she heard Timmie scream. The boy had tumbled down the stairs, and was lying in a crumpled heap on the landing. "His little arm was bent clear around. His head was bleeding a little," she said. "I washed his head in the sink. Then I carried him to the kitchen, where I had a bed made up on the floor. He died there."http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ny_c...e_babies_.htmlInstead of calling for help, Parks stuffed his body into the same suitcase that had transported his sister. She buried the boy in a shallow grave in the woods near Absecon, and later found a new resting place for Dorothy, as well.
Police had no trouble finding the boy's bones. They were just where Parks said she left him. Like his sister, his bones had been scattered over a small area, although Parks denied having dismembered either child.
An angry mob of about 1,000 women followed along, screaming, "Lynch her," as Parks retraced her actions for detectives. When she reached the boy's grave, she fell to her knees, weeping, "Oh, I loved Timmie so much."
At her trial, Parks offered no fewer than six theories on what had happened to the children, and revived her story that they had met their deaths at the hands of a lawyer.
The defense hinted at insanity, bringing in a relative who said Parks had been prone to fits of violent temper since a bout with influenza when she was a teenager. Poor old Papa Parks came on the stand and recanted what he had told police earlier, which was that his daughter was abusing the children.
He said that his accusations came only after a grueling interrogation, in which he had been deprived of food for more than three days.
In the end, the jury discounted all her versions of events and found her guilty of manslaughter in the case of Dorothy, and murder in the second degree in the case of the boy. Parks' get-rich-quick blackmail attempt backfired badly. The judge sentenced her to 25 years' hard labor.
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Originally Posted by VXIII
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