Elizabeth Smart

baueradd000 Uncategorized November 16, 2020History, Kidnapping, Real Life 0 Comment

Elizabeth Smart

Most people have heard the story of Elizabeth Smart. She is an american girl who got abducted from her home in Salt Lake City at age 14. In this article I’m gonna tell you more about the story and her life before.

Who is Elizabeth Smart?

Elizabeth Smart was born on November 3rd 1987 in Salt Lake Utah. She has 5 siblings and is the second oldest. One of her favorite things to do was play the harp. She got abducted when she was only 14 years old in June 2002. Brian David Mitchell and his wife Wanda Bareez held her hostage until she got her freedom back in 2003. While she got held hostage she got raped, drugged, and forced to do religious rituals. Smart is now an activist and has written her own book called my story.

Her abduction

On June 4 of 2002 Elizabeth’s family attended an Award ceremony for her school. She won many prizes for academic and physical fitness. The next morning around midnight or 1a.m. she got woken up by a man holding a knife to her neck. He told her to come with him or he would kill her and her family. Meanwhile Smart’s 9 year old sister Mary saw the whole thing. Mary was awake a little bit when she saw this man in her room. She didn’t know who he was or what he was doing but she heard him tell Elizabeth to go get some shoes and then they walked out. After they walked out Mary went to the door to tell her parents but then saw the man forcing Smart down the hall, so she just went back into her bed to hide. About two hours later Mary got up and went and told her parents.

Smart’s kidnappers name is Brian David Mitchell. Once Elizabeth and Brian got out of the house he took her to a forest where they hiked to a camp that Brian’s wife, Wanda Barzee, was waiting for them.

Mitchell thought he was a prophet and so he did a ceremony for smart and then declared that she was his wife. After that he raped her. Mitchell raped her daily and sometimes more than once a day. They held Elizabeth captive for 9 months and they would live/move between Utah and California. Mitchell would tie Smart to a tree and give her drugs and alcohol. Sometimes he wouldn’t feed her for days, almost starving her and tried to convince her that he was a prophet. Mitchell tried to brainwash Smart to believe his insane religious beliefs.

Her Rescue

A couple months after Elizabeth’s kidnapping her sister Mary remembered that the man who took Smart looked like a man who had worked on her house as a handyman in the past. He had once called himself Emmanuel.

Soon after Mary figured that out her family told the police and the police then discovered that Emmanuelś real name is Brian David Mitchell. One day someone saw Mitchell walking with Elizabeth, who was wearing a veil, sunglasses, and a wig,in Salt Lake and then reported him. Apparently Brian would take Smart out places a lot but no one would recognize her. The police arrested Brian and his wife and then took Smart to be with her family again.

The prosecution for Brian went on for years but on December 10 of 2010, almost 8 years after the kidnapping, Brian was sentenced to life in prison. Brazee was sentenced 15 years locked up because she helped in the crime.

Smart is now an activist and goes and speaks to people. She has come a long way since she got kidnapped and now has a family and 3 kids. She lives in Salt Lake City and is very happy!

John Wayne Gacy – ¨The Killer Clown¨

anderemm014 Uncategorized November 16, 2020History, JohnWayneGacy, Murders 0 Comment

John Wayne Gacy – “The Killer Clown”

John Wayne Gacy was an american serial killer who lived from March 17, 1942, to May 10, 1994. He raped and murdered at least 33 young male victims. All murders took place from 1972-1978.

Growing up

It is unclear what John’s childhood was like. Some say that he grew up with an alcoholic father who would beat him and his siblings with a razor strap if they misbehaved. Some people also suspect that his mother was assaulted by her husband, John’s father. John was often not able to be with or play with other kids at school because of a congenital heart condition. The condition made his father angry and his father used it as a reason to abuse him. Other experts say that he had a ¨fairly ordinary childhood¨ but was interested in sadism which got him in trouble with police in the 1960`s. John revealed that he had struggled immensely with accepting his attraction to men.

Johns victims

In 1968 John was convicted for sexually assaulting a teenage boy and was sent to Iowa State Men’s Reformatory where he had to undergo psychological evaluation. When police went to search his house they found a crawl space under his house. In the crawl space there were 29 makeshift tombs that had a total of 29 bodies, all young males. 8 of the bodies were never identified, and 4 other bodies were found in Illinois rivers. Experts believe the first victim died in 1972 and the last victim died only 10 days before his arrest in 1978. John started his killings with homeless male prostitutes and soon moved to killing suburban teenagers. John often lured young boys into his car. Robert Piest was one of the young boys who was lured into his car. Piest was offered a construction job by John who was the last person Piest was seen with. Ten days after Piest’s disappearance the police searched Gacy’s house. The police found evidence of involvement in many different crimes. The body of Gacy’s firs known victim, Timothy McCoy, was the first body to be found. McCoy was killed in 1972 after Gacy lured him to his home. After an unknown amount of time of investigating the police found numerous trenches with human remains under the crawl space under his house. Gacy admitted to killing ¨about¨ 30 bodies But later denied all of the murders. Gacy died by lethal injection on the 10th of May 1994.

For more information you can go to these links:

https://www.biography.com/crime-figure/john-wayne-gacy

https://www.britannica.com/biography/John-Wayne-Gacy

https://www.chicagotribune.com/nation-world/chi-chicagodays-gacy-story-story.html

https://murderpedia.org/male.G/g1/gacy-john-wayne.htm

Ted Bundy

anderemm014 Uncategorized November 6, 2020History, murder, Ted 5 Comments

Theodore Robert Bundy also is known as ¨Ted Bundy¨ was an American serial killer, rapist, and kidnaper who lived from November 24th, 1946 to January 24th, 1989 when he was sentenced to death in Florida’s electric chair.

Ted Bundy’s family life

Ted was born in Burlington, Vermont, on the 24th of November in 1946 where he lived as his grandparents adopted child. Ted was an illegitimate child and was told that his mother was his sister. Elanor Louise Cowel who was Ted´s mother moved with Ted to Tacoma, Washington, after a few years of living with his grandparents. In Washington, Elanor met Jonnie Bundy they later got married. Ted showed interest in macabre and knives at an early age of three. As a teenager, Ted liked to peer into other people’s windows but never showed an interest in steeling the things he wanted from the houses he peered into.

Ted Bundy´s victims

Ted was in a relationship with a wealthy and had a long dark-haired girl who most of his later victims resembled. Bundy confessed to 36 murders that took place in 1970 but some experts believe it could be close to 100 or more. Most of the Bundy’s killings went in a pattern of raping his victims than beating them to death. Around 1974 when most experts believe Bundy began his murderous rampage many women in the Seattle area and in nearby Oregon many women went missing. Stories of Ted told by victims or victim’s families described him as a young dark-haired man as that’s who the victims were last seen with. Often he lured his victims into his car by saying that he was hurt and needed help. Their kindness often proved to be a mistake.

Ted´s downfall

Ted later moved to Utah in the fall of 1974 to attend law school. That year women started disappearing. The following year Ted was pulled over by police. The police searched his vehicle and found various weapons and burglary tools including a crowbar, rope, facemask, handcuffs, and various other weapons. In 1975 Ted got arrested for the kidnapping of Carol Daronch one of the victims that escaped Ted´s clutches. He got convicted and was sentenced to 1-15 years in jail. Ted escaped from prison two times in 1977. The first time he escaped he jumped out of the window on the trip to the courthouse. On Bundy’s second escape he murdered a 12-year-old girl. Tes was executed in Florida’s electric chair in 1989.

For more information go to https://www.biography.com/crime-figure/ted-bundy

Tornadoes

moffaann000 Uncategorized March 13, 2020Alley, Bill Lee, Current Events, death, Densely, Dixie, Dixie Alley, Georgia, History, Kansas, Mississippi, Mobile home, Nashville, National, National Weather, Night, Populated, Rain-wrapped, Search and rescue, Southeast, Storm, Tennessee, Tornado Alley, Twister, Weather 0 Comment

Tornadoes

Tornadoes are formed from thunderstorms, you need warm moist air from the Gulf of Mexico and cool dry air from Canada. When those two air masses meet, they create a instability atmosphere. Rising the air within the draft tilts the rotating the air from horizontal to vertical.

Southeast Tornadoes

In Dixie Alley, tornadoes are harder to spot and occurs at night. Unlike the plain where the tornadoes can be seen from miles away, you can’t spot the tornadoes in the south because of the rugged terrain and it has more trees there. Which makes it difficult to spot a tornado. Lots of the tornadoes that occur in the area, are rain-wrapped so they are less visible to the eye.

Lots of the tornadoes there move faster and stay on the ground longer, because they are pushed with a stronger jet stream which results with a faster moving storm. It’s not uncommon for the tornadoes there to move upward of 50 miles per hour.

Is It Hard To Live In A Place With Tornadoes Like That?

It’s hard to live there because with how fast the tornadoes are going, and how the tornadoes come up at night. The people there are most likely to be sleep when the tornadoes happen. It ends up putting more pressure on the forecaster because, they have to get the information out to the public in enough time that the public can react to the warning.

Nashville residents have only minutes to react before the tornadoes hit their home. Many house there don’t have a basement there or a underground shelter.

Densely Populated

The southeast are densely populated, which means more death there. As you move east from Kansas to Mississippi, Georgia, Tennessee, the population increases rapidly. They also have a problem with more mobile house. If you get hit in a mobile home, you are more likely to get killed. You have a unique exposure, and vulnerability problem in a mobile home.

Even though there are more tornadoes in Tornado Alley then in Dixie Alley, there has been more deaths in Dixie then in Tornado because Dixie Alley has a more populated area.

Tornado In Southeast Area

The tornadoes that hit in Tennessee on Tuesday, March 3, 2020 hours after midnight killed at least 24 people some of them in bed asleep. The tornadoes, destroyed 140 building there in Tennessee and buried many people in rubble and wrecked basements. The tornadoes came at such a fast speed, that if anyone was in the way of the tornadoes they wouldn’t have enough time to get away from the tornadoes.

The government send out many search and rescue team to the area of the tornadoes. They found 25 people died and a number of people missing. When morning came they found blown down walls, flattened home, building, and business, with broken power lines, and snapped trees making the roads and street impassable.

In one neighborhood volunteers found five bodies, and they are still looking for two more bodies.

One of the people there in Nashville in the time of the tornadoes stated that, “ The dogs started to bark before the sirens went off. They knew what was coming,” said Paula Wade, of east Nashville.

Roofs came crashing down on many people, when they were just waking up to the sirens. Many people got trapped inside, but were able to find a way out of their houses. Mike Stephens woke up to a tree falling through his roof.

Gov. Bill Lee said that he saw many people going to peoples aid and help out one another. He said “ In the worst circumstances, the best of people comes out, and that’s what we’re seeing,” he said.

In Nashville, the tornadoes hit mostly north and east of the heart of downtown. The tornadoes spared many of the towns tourist attracts. The twister decided to hit and destroy the largely African American of Bordeaux .and North Nashville, and neighborhoods.

Many Nashville residents walk around on the sidewalks, that are littered with trash and parts of peoples homes. They are able to look into peoples house. With missing walls, and missing roofs you can easily look into peoples kitchen and into peoples living rooms.

The National Weather Services said that the tornadoes inflicted the east part of Tennessee. They also decided that the infliction of the tornadoes was at least a EF-3 intensity, the agent said.

One of the twister destroyed homes, and buildings a crossed a 10-mile stretch. The tornadoes, inflicted three dozen buildings some of it including the tower, and stained glass of a historic church. One of the other tornadoes destroyed 100 structures, along a 2 mile stretch. The tornadoes wiped away houses and brought the wreckage far away.

The Rise and Fall of Queen Elizabeth I

Cam Membreno Uncategorized March 13, 2020British History, Elizabethan Era, England, History, Queen Elizabeth I, Queen Mary I 0 Comment

Named after the Elizabethan era and one of England’s most recognized queens in history, Queen Elizabeth I.

Starting from the prime of her life, Queen Elizabeth I was born on September 7th, 1533 in Greenwich, England. She was the daughter of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn but due to accusations of adultery and incest, her mother Anne was executed on May 19th in 1536 when Elizabeth was two years old. Elizabeth had siblings such as her half-sister Mary Tudor, daughter of Catherine of Aragon who was nicknamed Bloody Mary and later died in November of 1558.
Elizabeth also had a half-brother named Edward, son of Jane Seymour who was crowned king at the age of nine and later died in July of 1553.

After the death of Edward, he appointed Lady Jane Grey to be his successor afterward due to the fear of Mary trying to restore Catholicism and undoing the Church of England. But due to the citizens’ disagreement, Mary Tudor gained the spot on the throne after nine days. Elizabeth supported Mary and her decisions but Elizabeth also went along with the Church of England. Mary later died and her reign ended with Elizabeth next in line to be crowned.

When Mary’s reign ended, Elizabeth was left with a lot of the problems that Mary left behind, such as the war with France and conflict between religions that roam England. However, she quickly ended the war and resolved the religious tension and conflict in her country. England was finally at peace and had the chance to regrow. Elizabeth worked in the court and enjoyed playing the lute and watching plays perform on her behalf. Elizabeth also loved jewelry and embellished gowns made with gold and silver to compliment her pale look.

Just as everything was in peace, income the rivalry between Mary, Queen of Scots with her beloved cousin Elizabeth. Many believed that Mary was the true successor to the throne of Henry the VIII’s elder sister’s granddaughter. The rivalry began when Mary came to claim her place on the English throne during Elizabeth’s reign since Mary was catholic many Catholics of England encouraged her place on the throne. Mary united Franc and Scotland by her marriage with the future king, Francis II. But due to his death in 1561, she later returned to Scotland. Elizabeth imprisoned her beloved cousin for multiple assassination attempts and twenty years later executed Mary in 1587.

England started to go down in a downfall later in Elizabeth’s reign due to unemployment, dying crops, and riots. And had to face many challenges of being on England’s throne. Later in Elizabeth’s final years despite her powering fading, Elizabeth still cared dearly about her people and made one of her most famous speeches named “Golden Speech” made on November 30th of 1601 at the Whitehall Palace of a delegation of 140 members, and Elizabeth alleged the neglected issues and won over the members.

Elizabeth never wanted to marry any man or have children, she had no interest in sharing power or ruling with anyone, because of that reason she was named “The Virgin Queen”. Succession was another problem for Elizabeth since she’s seen all the troubles that come from royal marriages. She’s had a good number of matches but none of them suited to her standards or liking’s.

Once the time came, Elizabeth I died on March 24th of 1603, there are suspicions that the makeup she’s been using to create a pale porcelain look named “Spirits of Saturn” caused health issues that led up to her death. Elizabeth had no spouse or children to inherit the English throne nor successors, so instead of the son of her beloved cousins and rival Mary of Scots, James I took the place on the English throne. Elizabeth’s coffin was carried on April 28th down Whitehall and was buried in Henry IIV’s Chapel.

And that’s how the Elizabethan Era came to be.

The Black Death

gowermck000 Uncategorized March 13, 2020Bubonic Plague, History, The Black Death, The Black Plague 0 Comment

You have probably heard of the Black Plague, but what is it exactly? In this article, I will tell you what the Black Death was, when it started and how it started.

The Black Death, also known as the Black Plague, was a bad disease that started in about 1340. It originated in Asia but soon spread to Europe. This disease was so bad, that it killed 30-60% who got sick with it. This is an insane death rate. Think about it; The Coronavirus is starting to cause events to shut down and it’s death rate is only 3.4% right now. If the Black Death were to be here right now that could mean 2,331,138,600-4,662,277,200 dying from the Black death. That is crazy right? Now you have seen just how bad it was, lets see how it started spreading across America.

The Black Death started by fleas on mice/rats spreading this disease to humans in Asia. Many people didn’t know about it, and so they went on with their business and traveled still, getting other parts of Europe sick. The disease spread to Europe by the rats being carried on merchant boats and other ships down the Meditterainian Basin. That is how the Black Death started and spread.

That is the end of my article! I hope you learned something new or found this helpful/entertaining.