The Case of Timmothy Pitzen, a Missing Boy Whose Mother’s Suicide Note Promised He Would Never Be Found

September 10, 2015September 10, 2015 / Tristan / 9 Comments

Picture of Timmothy Pitzen and his mother Amy. (Image credit here.)

On May 11, 2011, Amy Fry-Pitzen picked her 6-year-old son Timmothy up from his kindergarten class at Greenman Elementary School in Aurora, Illinois. It was only 8:35 AM, but Amy said that the boy had to leave early because of a family emergency. When Amy’s husband and Timmothy’s father James arrived at the school to pick Timmothy up at the usual time, he was surprised to hear that Amy had already gotten Timmothy. As he told school officials, he didn’t know of any family emergency. He tried calling Amy afterward, but she never picked up her phone.

Surveillance footage of Amy and Timmothy leaving his school. (Image credit here.)

Two days after Amy and Timmothy disappeared, Amy used her cellphone to call some of her friends and family to tell them that she and her son were okay. Timmothy was heard in the background by a few of the callers, and some of them even had a conversation with him. The same night, Amy checked into a motel in Illinois by herself. Her body was found dead the next afternoon by hotel employees.

Amy had slashed her wrists and taken a fatal dose of antihistamines. No trace of Timmothy was anywhere to be found, and Amy’s cellphone was also missing. A suicide note Amy left behind promised that Timmothy was safe with people who would take care of him, but claimed that he would never be found. While investigators found a stain of Timmothy’s blood in Amy’s SUV, they weren’t sure how old it was. Relatives said it was probably from a nosebleed the boy had more than a year before.

Amy Fry-Pitzen’s SUV. (Image credit here.)

From eyewitness reports and surveillance footage, we know that Amy and Timmothy went to a car repair shop after Amy had gotten him from school. They went to the zoo as they waited for the car to get fixed, and then Amy drove them to the KeyLime Cove Resort. In the morning, they went to another resort, this time in Wisconsin. They stayed the night there, and Timmothy was seen in line with Amy when she checked out around 10 AM. Amy made her phone calls at 1:30 PM, but was seen shopping back in Illinois around 7 PM. She checked into the Rockford Inn around 11 PM, the last time she was seen alive.

Surveillance footage of Amy walking into a store a few hours before her death. (Image credit here.)

While Amy suffered from depression and had once made a suicide attempt before, her family and friends don’t believe that she had any reason to hurt Timmothy. Police suspect that the whole affair had been planned, and Amy had traveled to a few of the spots included in her trip a few months before her death.

(The left picture is of Timmothy before his disappearance. The right is an age-progression picture of what Timmothy might look like as a 10-year-old. (Image credit here.)

In October 2013, Amy’s phone was turned into police by a woman who had found it along a road in Illinois 2 years earlier. The phone, however, contained no further clues, and a search of the area where it was found turned up nothing. A review of her phone records and emails have shown that Amy wasn’t in contact with anybody who her family was unfamiliar with. While there have been unconfirmed sightings of Timmothy since his disappearance, there is a bleak suspicion that Amy might have lied about his whereabouts and committed suicide after killing him.

The Mysterious Suicide of French Politician Robert Boulin

August 16, 2015August 17, 2015 / Tristan / Leave a comment

Robert Boulin.

On October 30, 1979, the body of Robert Boulin was found in a pond in the forest of Rambouillet in southern France. Boulin, a Gaullist politician and veteran of the French Resistance during World War II, had not been seen since the day before, when he had gone out to lunch with his son. His car and an empty container of barbiturates were found near his body. Inside the car were some letters declaring his intention to kill himself.

A note he wrote to police, dated the day of his death, was received a few days later. Boulin wrote, “I have decided to drown myself in a lake in the forest of Rambouillet, where I enjoyed horse-riding.”

The autumn of that year, Boulin was embroiled in a real-estate scandal in which he illegally acquired five acres of land in the Rambouillet area. At that time, Boulin was the Minister of Labor, and was well on his way to becoming the next prime minister. The revelation of the scandal in the press, however, harshly tarnished his political career and reputation. According to the official account of his death, Boulin was so devastated that it drove him to suicide. The authorities closed the case quickly, attributing his death to drowning.

The spot where Boulin’s body was discovered.

Boulin’s family has publicly denied this. They’ve pointed out that the water he was supposed to have drowned in was only a foot-and-a-half deep. Furthermore, as was only recorded in a second autopsy that was conducted in 1983, there were “bruises around his wrists and a blood clot behind his head.” The judge in charge of the case asked for Boulin’s lungs to be checked to confirm that they contained water, but the jars storing the lungs inexplicably disappeared. Boulin’s family believe that his death was the result of foul play, and have accused his former Gaullist colleagues of plotting and covering up the murder.

After years of keeping quiet, the local policeman who first saw Boulin’s body came out publicly in 2011 with some new information. The officer, Francis Deswarte, reported that Boulin’s head was out of the water, and had red marks all over his face. Deswarte said that he was dismissed from the case only a half-hour later. Two or three months passed, and he was then called in for questioning by federal police, who ordered him to keep quiet about what he saw. When he asked about the red marks, they told him that Boulin’s body had been dropped by the firefighters who were taking it out of the water, despite that Deswarte himself saw the body being removed without a problem.

In light of this new information, no new investigation has been opened.

This article originally appeared on Bizarrepedia, a site full of interesting articles about serial killers, unsolved crimes, and other strange things.

5 Conspiracy Theories About the Death of Marilyn Monroe

August 4, 2015November 1, 2016 / Tristan / 23 Comments

In the early hours of August 5, 1962, movie star Marilyn Monroe was reported dead in her home in Los Angeles, California. She had been found lying face down in her bed, naked and with her hands by her side.

Around midnight, her housekeeper Eunice Murray had noticed that Marilyn’s bedroom light was on. She knocked on the door a few times, but Marilyn didn’t answer. At 3:00 AM, Murray started to worry and called Dr. Ralph Greenson, Marilyn’s psychiatrist. After he failed to knock down her door, he looked through her window and saw her lying on her bed. He then broke the window, checked her for a pulse, and realized she was dead. The police were called at 4:30 AM.

Marilyn Monroe’s bedroom.

When they arrived, they questioned Murray, Greenson, and another doctor on the scene. They inspected the room and noticed that despite that there were empty pill bottles on her nightstand, there was no glass or cup of water anywhere to be found. Greenson estimated that Monroe died around 12:30 AM, while undertaker Guy Hockett thought her time of death sometime between 9:30 and 11:30 PM. The autopsy, conducted by Dr. Thomas Noguchi, concluded that Monroe had overdosed on sedative drugs, possibly to commit suicide.

Marilyn’s body being taken out of her home.

Her death has since been surrounded in controversy, and many of her fans and admirers believe that she was given the pills against her will. The investigation was quick and suspicious, and the official account of her death begs numerous unanswered questions. Why, for example, did it take Murray so long to call for help? What about the reports that Greenson summoned an ambulance and then turned it away after finding Marilyn dead? And how did a drinking glass, after the police search, turn up in Marilyn’s room? Murray would later change her story several times over her life, and the first policeman on the scene, Jack Clemmons, said that “Her hands were by her side and her legs were stretched out perfectly straight. It was the most obviously staged death scene I had ever seen. The pill bottles on her bedside table had been arranged in neat order and the body deliberately positioned, it all looked too tidy.”

There have been numerous theories about what really happened to Marilyn Monroe, many of them placing the blame on the Kennedy brothers or Dr. Ralph Greenson. Below are five of the most common ones, provided by crackpots and experts alike.

5. She was Murdered by Communists

Author and conspiracy theorist Frank A. Cappell.

In June 1964, far right-wing author Frank A. Cappell published arguably the first book that expressed skepticism about the official account of Marilyn’s demise, The Strange Death of Marilyn Monroe. Cappell’s 70 page booklet featured some of the earliest tropes now common in conspiracy circles, including that the Kennedys had a hand in her death. Cappell argued that both Marilyn and Robert F. Kennedy were communists, and that Marilyn was ultimately the victim of a vast communist conspiracy. According to Cappell, “Many ‘suicides’ and ‘heart attacks’ and ‘accidental deaths’ are in reality murders ordered by the Communist Party.”

4. She was Killed by the FBI or CIA

Cover of Norman Mailer’s best-selling biography.

A lot of the ideas in Cappell’s booklet were introduced to the mainstream in Norman Mailer’s best-selling Marilyn: A Biography, which was published in 1973 to great public attention. Mailer, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist never shy of provoking controversy, repeated the link between Marilyn’s death and the Kennedys.

He believed, to get back at the Kennedys for the disastrous Bay of Pigs fiasco, right-wing agents of the FBI or CIA killed Marilyn to upset the Kennedy brothers. He also claimed that Marilyn called the White House on the night of her death, and that the FBI confiscated her phone records. Mailer, however, didn’t have a single shed of evidence to back up his claims, and later admitted he only wrote the book for money.

3. It was a Fake Suicide Attempt Gone Awry

Peter Lawford and Marilyn Monroe at John F. Kennedy’s birthday celebration in 1962.

According to this theory, based on a non-authenticated report supposedly circulated among the FBI in 1964, Marilyn thought she could revive her career by making a suicide attempt. Peter Lawford, a friend of Marilyn and the brother-in-law of Robert F. Kennedy, heard about this plan from some of Marilyn’s other friends. After telling Kennedy, whom allegedly was having an affair with Marilyn and wanted to get rid of her, Lawford persuaded Dr. Ralph Greenson and Eunice Murray to help orchestrate the suicide “attempt”.

So Greenson prescribed a few bottles of Seconal tablets to Marilyn, and then Murray is said to have put them in Marilyn’s bedroom on the night of her death. Believing that the pills could easily be pumped out of her stomach, Marilyn swallowed dozens of the them to overdose. After she became unconscious, Murray called Greenson, and they waited to contact the police until Marilyn died.

2. She was the Victim of a Mafia Hit

Mob boss Sam Giancana.

Darwin Porter, a biographer and travel writer who has written dozens of books, claims in Marilyn At Rainbow’s End that Marilyn was killed by the Mafia. Porter speculates that mob boss Sam Giancana, possibly paid off by one of the Kennedy brothers, ordered a hit on her. He said that Robert F. Kennedy had gone to Marilyn’s house that day and gotten into an argument. After he left, a partner of Gianacana named Johnny Roselli visited her at 10 PM.

When he left, he unlocked the front door, and then let five Mafia hitmen in. One of the hitmen sneeked up behind Marilyn while she was in the front room, and then slipped a chloroform-soaked washcloth over her face. They then undressed her, administered an enema of barbiturates, and moved her into her bedroom. They left after hearing Eunice Murray walk into the house. After the police were called, Peter Lawford arrived at the scene and stole a little red diary, which was said to have been filled with details about Marilyn’s affairs and sex encounters.

1. She was Killed by RFK and Ralph Greenson

Marilyn Monroe with the Kennedy brothers.

Journalists Jay Margolis and Richard Buskin in their book The Murder of Marilyn Monroe: Case Closed, repeated the story about Marilyn and Robert F. Kennedy having an affair and then getting into an argument the day before her body was found.

According to this theory Kennedy told Marilyn that he wouldn’t marry her, and Marilyn threatened to stage a public conference and reveal her affairs with him and his brother John. Kennedy demanded that Marilyn leave him alone, and to hand over the diary in which she kept track of her affairs. Marilyn refused, and Kennedy left in a fit of rage.

Dr. Ralph Greenson, Marilyn’s psychiatrist.

He called up her psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson, another man Marilyn had been sleeping with. Kennedy falsely told Greenson that she was planning to go public with the affair she was having with him. Greenson, worried that his reputation would be ruined, agreed to go with Kennedy to convince Marilyn to hand over the diary. That evening, Kennedy came back to Marilyn’s house, bringing along two bodyguards, Greenson, and his brother-in-law Peter Lawford.

One of the bodyguards shot Marilyn with an injection of Nembutal to calm her down, and then Kennedy threw her to the floor. While Kennedy and Lawford were looking for the diary, his bodyguards tore Marilyn’s clothes off and administered a powerful enema that would further sedate her. The group of men left around 10:30 PM, and Marilyn’s housekeeper Eunice Murray and son Norman Jefferies found her naked and unconscious on her bed a short while after. They called for an ambulance, and one of the attendants, James Edwin Hall, attempted to revive her with a resuscitator.

Suddenly, Ralph Greenson appeared on the scene, explained who he was, and then ordered Hall to remove the resuscitator. Greenson thrust a foot-long syringe into Marilyn’s chest, and then allowed her to be moved into the ambulance. At about 4:30 AM, Greenson called LAPD sergeant Jack Clemmons and told him that Marilyn had committed suicide. Marilyn was taken back to her home, and her death was subsequently ruled a suspected suicide.

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Sources:

http://www.marilynmonroe.ca/camera/books/89.html

https://books.google.com/books?id=eb2oQbu8xcsC&pg=PT32&lpg=PT32&dq=marilyn+monroe+norman+mailer+cia&source=bl&ots=4dlzbnrxMZ&sig=_pVvqZVqm6z534ZfYhYrjePcjLI&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CEoQ6AEwCmoVChMIwOePo9P_xgIVCJANCh0lHQDr#v=onepage&q=marilyn%20monroe%20norman%20mailer%20cia&f=false

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2630449/EXCLUSIVE-Bobby-Kennedy-ordered-Marilyn-Monroes-murder-lethal-injection-prevent-revealing-torrid-affairs-RFK-JFK-dirty-Kennedy-family-secrets-new-book-claims.html

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/marilyn-monroe-death-new-book-1174703

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-443111/Did-Kennedy-clan-fool-Marilyn-killing-herself.html

20 Bizarre and Disturbing Japanese Woodblock Prints

August 1, 2015August 22, 2015 / Tristan / 2 Comments

(This article is recommended for mature audiences only. It contains images of graphic violence and sexual content.)

This is a gallery of mostly 19th century woodblock prints. Many of them were made by Tsukioka Yoshitoshi, an artist who pioneered the muzan-e (“bloody print”) genre in the 1860s. This collection also features prints by Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Takato Yamamoto, Utagawa Kunisada, Katsushika Hokusai, and Utagawa Yoshiiku.

20. “Sakuma Daigaku Drinking Blood from a Severed Head.” Sakuma was a mid-16th century samurai who served Oda Nobunaga, an important historical figure who paved the way for the unification of Japan when it was engulfed in social and political turmoil during the Sengoku period (1467-1603).

Tsukioka Yoshitoshi.

19. “People Join Together to Form Another Person.”

Utagawa Kuniyoshi.

18. “Reizei Hangan Takatoyo”. Takatoyo was a 16th century samurai and poet. He is shown here committing seppuku.

Tsukioka Yoshitoshi.

17. “Night of the Scarlet Moon.” This is actually the work of a modern artist. You can visit his official site right here.

Takato Yamamoto.

16. “Bound to Death.” Scene from the kabuki play Yotsuya Kadian.

Utagawa Kunisada.

15. “The Demon’s Arm.”

Tsukioka Yoshitoshi.

14. “The Lone House.” The old woman in the center is the Hag of Adachi Moor, a deranged serial killer and cannibal who ran an inn.

Utagawa Kuniyoshi.

13. Not sure about the title of this one, or if it’s even by Yoshitoshi.

Tsukioka Yoshitoshi.

12. “Cat Janken.” Janken is a Japanese game similar to Rock-Paper-Scissors.

Utagawa Kuniyoshi.

11. “Greedy Old Woman.”

Tsukioka Yoshitoshi.

10. That “monster” coming out of the tanuki is actually one of its testicles. Kuniyoshi created a whole series about tanuki and their gonads.

Utagawa Kuniyoshi.

9. “Gosho Gorozo Battling a Shadow.” Possibly a scene from a kabuki play called Gosho no Gorozo.

Tsukioka Yoshitoshi.

8. “Two Severed Heads in the Reeds.”

Katsushika Hokusai.

7. “Princess Shiranui and Captive Man.” Princess Shiranui was the wife of Minamoto no Tametomo, a 12th century samurai who committed seppuku after being surrounded by enemy soldiers during the Genpei War.

Tsukioka Yoshitoshi.

6. “Furuteya Hachirobei Murdering a Woman in a Graveyard.”

Tsukioka Yoshitoshi.

5. “The Prostitute Oyaku and a Seated Ghost.”

Tsukioka Yoshitoshi.

4. “Seimonya Keijuro.” I think this is a scene from a kabuki play of the same name.

Utagawa Yoshiiku.

3. “Naosuke Gombei Ripping Off a Face.” I’m not exactly sure, but I believe this Naosuke Gombei was an 18th century servant who killed his master, his wife, and their three children.

Tsukioka Yoshitoshi.

2. “The Lonely House.” Another depiction of the Hag of Adachi Moor, getting ready to kill a pregnant woman.

Tsukioka Yoshitoshi

1 This piece seems a bit obscure; I have no idea who made this or what it’s called.

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