Erin O'Riordan's Almanac for January 15: https://ko-fi.com/post/January-15th-O4O7ZOP2Q
Author Julie S. Howlin post of the day: Martin Luther King Day
Bummer January 15th
January 15, 1890: 26-year-old circus performer Lucía Zárate, who was born with Majewski osteodysplastic primordial dwarfism type II that gave her an extremely small stature, is traveling on a circus train with her fellow performers when the train breaks down in the Sierra Nevada mountain range in California. Zárate, who weighed only 4.7 pounds (2.1 kg) at age 17, dies of hypothermia while the train is stranded.
January 15, 1919: More than two million gallons of molasses spill from a tank that bursts in the North End of Boston, Massachusetts, flooding the streets. Over 150 people are injured; 21 people and an unknown number of horses die.
January 15, 1947: Betty Bersinger takes her 3-year-old daughter for a walk in their South Los Angeles neighborhood. Bersinger spots what she initially thinks is a mannequin lying in an empty lot. To her horror, she soon realizes the naked, bisected figure is a woman’s corpse. Bersinger phones the police from a nearby home.
The victim of this hideous crime is Elizabeth Short, 22 years old, last seen alive on the 9th of January. The murderer of the Boston native has never been arrested.
Some family members of Dr. George H. Hodel suspect their relative was involved in the crime; Hodel died in 1999 and this cannot be proven.
As of 2026, Michael Connelly, the journalist-novelist known for the Harry Bosch and Lincoln Lawyer novels series, hosts a podcast called Killer In the Code. It looks into a theory that the killer of Elizabeth Short and the self-named Zodiac Killer are the same person.
January 15, 1951: Mount Lamington on the island of Papua begins to erupt, spouting tall plumes of smoke. Its eruptions will continue until July 1956, resulting in the deaths of approximately 3,000 people. Many of them are residents of the village of Sangara, and most of their deaths come about either by burns from the dense pyroclastic flow or by inhaling and breathing superheated gases and toxic materials.
January 15, 2008: 25-year-old actor Brad Renfro dies of an accidental heroin overdose.
January 15, 2018: Limerick, Ireland’s alternative rock band The Cranberries’s lead singer Dolores O’Riordan dies at age 46 after becoming intoxicated with champagne and five small bottles of liquor and then accidentally drowning in a London hotel bathtub.
Dolores O'Riordan at Dorothy Surrenders: https://dorothysurrenders.blogspot.com/2020/06/music-monday_22.html
