6

A Killer's Perfect Alibi Is Foiled By The Bugs On His Car

Vincent Brothers was a bad man. Not Shaft bad, but "commit mass murder on your own family and then smugly lie about it in court" bad. In July of 2003, the elementary school vice principal flew from California to Ohio to supposedly visit his brother, but in reality, the trip was his planned alibi. Once he landed in Columbus, he rented a car, drove back to Bakersfield, CA, and waited for his wife to come home with his three children and his mother-in-law. He then shot and/or stabbed all of them to death, including his six-week-old son. Once he finished staging a break-in at the house, he drove the rental car back to Ohio and enjoyed the rest of his trip like nothing happened.

via murderpedia He's now single and ready to mingle, ladies.

5

Robbers Intimidate Store Clerk With Photo Of Her Home, Cops Use It To Track Down Where They Printed It

When Ben Affleck directed and starred in the crime thriller The Town, he wasn't trying to make a "how to" video on robberies -- but damn if that didn't stop people from using it as one anyway.

Imagine this, but with uglier people.

4

Murderer Scratches Tree With His Truck, Detectives Use The Tree's DNA To Convict Him

In 1992, the body of single mother Denise Johnson was found strangled in a remote area of Arizona. We've all seen crime shows, so we know what investigators look for in these cases, but none of that was present this time: No semen, saliva, or foreign hair was found on her body, or anywhere around it. Whoever did this may have been a degenerate killer, but he was also a lot tidier than all of our college roommates.

The one clue the cops found at the murder scene? A beeper.

FilmRise This is what that looks like, for those of you who aren't unspeakably old.

The owner of the beeper, truck driver Mark Bogan, said he picked up Denise Johnson hitchhiking and they had consensual truck sex. While basking in the glow of the act of pure love they'd just shared, Bogan claims, Johnson tried to snatch his wallet and beeper and managed to run away with the latter. While the story sounded sketchy for various reasons (foremost among them being Bogan's unfuckable face), the cops had nothing to disprove it. They couldn't place Bogan, or anyone else except Johnson, at the murder scene.

What they could place was a shitload of trees. While going over the scene, the case's detective looked at one of those trees and noticed a scrape on a branch. Just a small scrape, nothing special:

FilmRise The sort of thing only a detective or a weeping stoner would notice.

The detective took a photo of the scrape and some beans from the tree, because worst case scenario, hey, free beans. As it turned out, the same type of beans had been found in the bed of Bogan's truck ... which didn't mean shit, unfortunately. There's trees like that all over Arizona. To prove that Bogan's truck brushed against that exact tree, the cops would need, like, a molecular geneticist who specialized in plants or something. So, they got exactly that.

FilmRise They grew him in a lab.

3

Kidnapping Victim Finds His Captors By Recalling Every Single Detail He Heard While Blindfolded

Besides being the owner of the most amazing nickname of the 1930s, George "Machine Gun Kelly" Barnes was an infamous gangster who would do anything to make a buck. That "anything" included kidnapping one of Oklahoma's wealthiest men, Charles F. Urschel, for a $200,000 ransom.

Dallas Morning News A conservative sum, considering Urschel was made of oil.

Kelly's gang, consummate professionals that they were, took every precaution to make sure they wouldn't get caught. They kept Urschel blindfolded at all times, and even filled his ears with cotton and put tape over them at certain points. Then, they forced his family to go through an elaborate series of steps to deliver the money, including placing a fake ad for a farm in a newspaper, sitting on the back of a train to Kansas City taken at 10:10 pm, and checking into a hotel as "E. E. Kincaid of Little Rock, Arkansas." Urschel's family was probably expecting a simple ransom note, not a freaking RPG strategy guide.

Everything went without a hitch. The ransom was paid, and once the gangsters verified that the money was legit, they dropped Urschel off outside a nearby city. Kelly and his wife/accomplice then left the state and dyed their hair ... which, honestly, seems like overkill at this point.

via Gorilla Convict Above: mild-mannered businessman John "Automatic Rifle Kelsey" Burns.

2

A 40-Year-Old Fingerprint Exposes A Beloved Archbishop As A Nazi War Criminal

Valerian Trifa was the Archbishop of the Romanian Orthodox Church in the United States, a much beloved father figure, a respected gentleman, and an all-around great role model. Oh, except for that whole pesky thing about being in the Iron Guard in World War II and inciting riots that killed scores of Jewish people in Romania.

Romania Libera "Let he who hasn't incited riots that killed scores of Jewish people in Romania cast the first stone."

Trifa had lied about his past to gain U.S. citizenship and had lived his double-life for over 40 years. Once charges started swirling around him about what a steaming pile of shit he had been, he vehemently denied them, and his followers believed him. It was his word against ... well, most of his alleged victims were dead, so not many people's, actually. The West German government provided postcards that Trifa had allegedly written to prominent Nazi chums (including Heinrich Himmler) in 1942, but a shocked and appalled Trifa insisted that he'd never written them. Come on, would an Archbishop lie?

1

Italian Police Follow An Incredibly Complex Chain Of DNA Samples To Solve A Murder

Yara Gambirasio was a 13-year-old gymnastics enthusiast who went missing in Italy in November of 2010. Her body was discovered three months later in a field. Someone in Italy had done this, and the authorities were going to find that someone even if they had to test every goddamn person in the country. That is not hyperbole.

Kat88/Wiki Commons Yes, even the ones living in that large piece of gum stuck to the boot.

DNA had been collected off of the girl's body, and when no matches were found in the existing database, authorities simply expanded that database -- they took close to 22,000 voluntary DNA swabs from people living in the area.

Eventually, they got a partial hit: Damiano Guerinoni was not an exact match, but testing indicated that someone in his family might be. Unfortunately, that family was larger than some entire towns: his father had 11 brothers and sisters. The investigators kept looking, until they finally got a closer match from Damiano's uncle, bus driver Giuseppe Guerinoni. Case closed, right? Not really, since Guiseppe had died 11 years earlier (they got the sample from a postage stamp). His children were tested and cleared, and he had no other offspring that his wife knew of.

Note that we said "knew of."

Blitz If he hadn't been dead yet, he would have been soon.

Apparently, our driver friend had a rather "active" social life outside the bounds of his marriage, and had a secret son somewhere along the way. Authorities were now looking for a bastard, both figuratively and literally. After putting together an exhaustive list of 532 living women who "Casanova" Guerinoni had or could have slept with, they tested all of them, twice, and found a match with 67-year-old Ester Arzuffi. It turned out that her oldest two children, twins, had been fathered by ol' Giuseppe. The female twin was quickly ruled out, which left Ester's son: 43-year-old Massimo Giuseppe Bossetti.

Police quickly got a DNA sample from Massimo under the guise of a breathalyzer test -- it was a match to the DNA found at the crime scene. He was sentenced to life in prison and, we can only hope, to being punched in the nuts by every single one of the 22,000 people he inconvenienced.

Think Nana and Pop-Pop's loving 60-year monogamous relationship is quaint and old-fashioned? First off, sorry for that disturbing image, but we've got some news for you: the monogamous sexual relationship is actually brand new relative to how long humans have been around. Secondly, it's about to get worse from here: monkey sex. On this month's live podcast, Jack O'Brien and the Cracked staff welcome Dr. Christopher Ryan, podcaster and author of 'Sex at Dawn', onto the show for a lively Valentine's Day discussion about love, sex, why our genitals are where they are, and why we're more like chimps and bonobos than you think. Tickets go on sale soon!

For more crimes Sherlock probably couldn't solve, check out 8 Unsolved Crimes That Were Clearly Committed By Satan and 5 Creepy Crimes That Raise Endless Unanswered Questions.

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