Erin O'Riordan writes smart, whimsical erotica. Her erotic romance novel trilogy, Pagan Spirits, is now available. With her husband, she also writes crime novels. Visit her home page at ko-fi.com.
August 2, 1923: The 29th U.S. president, Warren G. Harding, becomes the 3rd U.S. president to die in office from natural causes when he suffers a deadly heart attack in San Francisco. Following the assassinations of Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley, he is the 6th U.S. president to die in office of all causes.
August 2, 1973: Approximately 50 people are killed when the Summerland indoor amusement park catches fire. The building’s ceiling is constructed using a transparent acrylic material, which melts, raining burning-hot liquid acrylic down on the victims of the fire.
August 2, 1997: William S. Burroughs dies, having had a heart attack the previous day.
April 15, 1865: After being in a coma for eight hours, Abraham Lincoln dies from the bullet wound inflicted on him by John Wilkes Booth.
April 15, 1888: English poet Matthew Arnold dies. He has suffered a heart attack while chasing after a streetcar.
April 15, 1912: The HMS Titanic sinks into the Atlantic Ocean, having struck an iceberg shortly before midnight. Of the approximately 2,200 people on board, 1,500 die.
April 15, 1989: Nearly 100 spectators die in a crowd crush at a football match at Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England.
April 15, 2013: In a terrorist attack by two brothers from Chechnya at the Boston Marathon, two pressure cooker bombs detonate, killing three people and injuring hundreds of others. The older brother of the two terrorists is also killed while trying to evade police. The other is tried, convicted, and sentenced to life in prison.
Beatles Trivia April 14, 1963: The Beatles and the Rolling Stones meet for the first time. The Beatles are in Richmond, England, to film a TV appearance. The Rolling Stones are performing at a Richmond club; the two groups meet backstage.
Bummer April 14th
April 14, 1865: U.S. president Abraham Lincoln is shot by John Wilkes Booth.
April 14, 1922: Shortly after she heard a radio program on which Sir Arthur Conan Doyle describes his Spiritualist beliefs, a New Jersey woman named Maude Fancher decides she wants to live in the spirit world with her 2-year-old son Cecil. She kills Cecil, then attempts to kill herself by drinking a bottle of Lysol cleaning solution. Maude Fancher survives.
April 14, 1965: Perry Edward Smith and Dick Hickok are executed by hanging by the state of Kansas for the murders of the Clutter family on November 15, 1959.
April 14, 2017: 5-year-old Charlie Holt is crushed to death when his head becomes lodged in a small space between the stationary and rotating sections of the Sun Dial rotating restaurant at the Westin Peachtree Plaza Hotel in Atlanta, Georgia.
April 14, 1865: U.S. president Abraham Lincoln is shot by John Wilkes Booth.
April 15, 1865: After being in a coma for eight hours, Abraham Lincoln dies from the bullet wound inflicted on him by John Wilkes Booth.
April 21, 2016: The musician who performs as Prince (Prince Rogers Nelson) is found dead in an elevator inside his home. He has apparently passed away from taking pills of the opioid medication hydrocodone, to which he was addicted, which were counterfeit and laced with fentanyl. He is 57 years old.
On the same day, true crime writer Michelle McNamara dies in her sleep of an accidental overdose of street drugs and prescription medication. McNamara’s husband, actor Patton Oswalt, has acknowledged that McNamara was addicted to opioids. Her health condition was caused, in part, by her harrowing research on her book I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer. The book tells the story of a serial rapist and murderer who was not caught until 2018, two years after McNamara’s death.
April 22, 1915: 27-year-old poet Rupert Brooks dies of sepsis due to wounds he received fighting for the British Royal Navy during the First World War.
April 22, 1987: 52-year-old Ruthie Mae McCoy, who lives in the Grace Abbott Homes public housing project in Chicago, called the police to report that, “...some people next door are totally tearing this down, you know–” When the dispatcher pressed her for clarification, McCoy said, “Yeah, they throwed the cabinet down...I’m in the projects, I’m on the other side. You can reach—can reach my bathroom, they want to come through the bathroom.”
What the dispatcher didn’t know was that in the Grace Abbott Homes, the contractors who built the building had left the apartments’ back-to-back bathrooms connected by a narrow tunnel, which had made access easier for the plumbers. Neighborhood residents intent on burglary had discovered that by removing the bathroom mirror of one apartment, they could crawl through the narrow tunnel and reach the bathroom of the apartment on the opposite side.
This is what happened to McCoy: would-be burglars came through the space where her bathroom mirror had been and shot her to death. A second 911 call from a neighbor reported the sound of gunshots coming from McCoy’s apartment. Police knocked on McCoy’s door that night, but when they received no answer, they left without entering the apartment. Apparently they were unwilling to break down the door due to the prospect of being sued.
McCoy’s lifeless body is found the next day; she has been shot four times. The tragic story of urban neglect and the intruders who entered the apartment through a bathroom mirror inspired the movie Candyman.
April 22, 2000: Playing Judas in an Easter play in Rome, Renato Di Paolo dies by accidental hanging. His death is caught on film by a member of the audience.
April 22, 2012: Brazilian actor Tiago Klimeck is taken off life support and dies. He has been in a coma since accidentally hanging himself while performing as Judas Iscariot in an Easter passion play in Itarare, Brazil. Klimeck is 27 years old. He may have accidentally gotten some of his clothes tangled in the safety harness meant to give him the illusion of hanging by his neck.
April 22, 2021: 57-year-old Gregory Jacobs, the musician who rapped under the name Shock G and other aliases, dies of an apparently accidental overdose of fentanyl, alcohol, and methamphetamine.
April 25, 2002: Rapper Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes is driving an SUV in La Cieba, Honduras, where she’s filming a documentary while on a spiritual retreat with her two siblings. She swerves to avoid an oncoming vehicle, only to swerve into the path of another vehicle, causing her to swerve sharply to the left. She strikes two trees, throwing her and three passengers from the SUV. Lopes, who is only 30 years old, dies instantly of severe head trauma. Her passengers are injured, but survive.
He's so handsome he looks like he should play an antihero in a Marvel Comics Universe movie. Yet this historical hottie has absolutely no right to look so attractive. He is, in fact, an attractive sociopath who had no problems taking part in a conspiracy to brutally murder up to four people, as part of the larger conspiracy to assassinate president Abraham Lincoln.
I read about Lewis Powell and his better-known co-conspirator, John Wilkes Booth, in Killing Lincoln by Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard.
Mr. Tit Elingtin scoffed when I told him I was reading one of Bill O'Reilly's books. We're not very much fans of Mr. O'Reilly's loudmouthed talk show on Fox News - or anything that's on Fox News, really. (As a person of Middle Eastern descent, I often come away from watching Fox News with the feeling that I'm being blamed for something I haven't done. This is a familiar feeling to Jewish persons, but not one of which we are fond.)
Perhaps my husband would be happier if, instead, I had chosen to read Fox News Fuckfest.
(Yes, that's a real book, a piece of "bizarro erotica." I wouldn't necessarily be opposed to reading it someday, just out of curiosity.)
To be perfectly fair, it should be noted that the co-author with the real experience in historical research and writing is Mr. Dugard.
Let it be further noted that I purchased this book off my Irish Granny's want list. I bought it from Better World Books, then gave it to her, and she read it. Then my dad read it. When he was done it passed back to me, and I read it, and then I'll re-donate it Better World Books to await its next reader(s).
Bill O'Reilly notwithstanding, this was a fascinating little slice of American history. I knew a little bit about Booth being part of a larger conspiracy, but I never knew the details. The story of Mary Surratt, the only woman ever executed by hanging in the U.S., is quite sad. She didn't really do anything wrong, but got swept up in the fervor to punish Lincoln's killers because of the actions of her son.
Lewis Powell was a scumbag, but his last act was one of compassion, declaring before the crowd (100 people won a sort of lottery to witness the hangings) that Mary Surratt was innocent. But that still doesn't excuse the fact that he savagely beat Secretary William Seward, Seward's son Frederick, and Frederick's wife, leaving all three for dead. He was also very rude to the Sewards' butler, William Bell. He called Mr. Bell a very bad name such as only the likes of Draco Malfoy or Donald Trump would use.
But the Sewards survived, and William Seward would go on to purchase Alaska for the United States (known at the time as "Seward's folly" before oil and gold were discovered there. Now that Sarah Palin has been discovered there, maybe we should go back to calling it a folly again).
So the unfairly handsome Lewis Powell probably deserved his fate, to be hanged by the neck until he was dead.
