Word: ransomes
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...again, even with no greater reward than letters of recommendation from his general. It took him more than five years to get there. On the voyage they were captured by Algerian pirates, and Cervantes' prized letters got him the uncomfortable honor of being held for an impossibly high ransom. Back in Spain he found various ways of nearly starving, loved a slut who left him, married a slattern whom he gladly left. As a middle-aged tax collector for Philip's insatiable treasury Cervantes might have ended his weary days. But he fell foul of his superiors...
Scarcely a day went by at Flemington without both the prosecution and the defense being pestered by the mentally infirm. Hag after hag claimed she knew the secret of how the kidnaper perpetrated his crime. Copies of the ransom notes were made to substantiate each individual's "confession." Yet what right have picnic parties to break up solemn proceedings? Why should the insane get away with contempt of court? Executions are officially witnessed, yet barred to the public. Why should murder trials be open to the public--when the "public" which swarms to the kill is mainly lunatics and monomaniacs...
...expert witness" for Hauptmann was John M. Trendley, 67, of East St. Louis, Ill. Expert Trendley said that his opinion as a handwriting expert had been used in 400 cases. Stressing the dissimilarities between Hauptmann's handwriting and the 14 ransom notes, rather than the similarities which had been pointed out by the State's eight experts, Mr. Trendley declared positively that Hauptmann did not write the notes. On crossexamination, Expert Trendley admitted that his "400 cases" included a number of "curbstone opinions" which he had later reversed. It was revealed later that his vocation between trials...
...result to the State of Hauptmann's cross-examination was that the defendant admitted writing "boad" in a notebook for boat, a misspelling which occurs in one of the ransom notes, and confessed to two German crimes: Holding up two women and breaking & entering the home of the Mayor of Rackwitz...
...Their brains, said the chief of the Federal Division of Investigation, were in the head of plump, thin-lipped, shrewish "Ma" Barker. Outstanding among their feats of killing, bank robbery and kidnapping was the abduction of Edward G. Bremer, St. Paul banker, for whom they collected $200,000 ransom (TIME...