Elena Semander

popular name: John Schuessler

date_of_death: October 16, 1955

age: 13

cause_of_death: Homicide

claim_to_fame: Crime and their Victims

best_know_for: John Schuessler was a young boy who was brutally raped and murdered with his brother Anton Schuessler and friend Robert Peterson in 1955. The crime scene where the bodies where found was largely contaminated by investigators and photographers who destroyed important evidence. This murder case remained unsolved for 40 years until stable handyman Kenneth Hansen became a suspect (along with his boss Silas Jayne) thanks to evidence that was unearthed as a result of an investigation into another sensational cold case - the 1977 murder of candy-company heiress Helen Vorhees Brach.

popular name: Mary Lily Flagler Bingham

date_of_death: July 27, 1917

age: 50

cause_of_death: Edema with myocarditis along with high levels of morphine, arsenic and mercury

claim_to_fame: Crime and their Victims

best_know_for: Mary Lily Kenan Flagler Bingham was an American philanthropist and heiress who became notorious when she married one of the richest men of the Gilded Age - Henry Flagler - a founder of Standard Oil with John Rockefeller. Growing up in an affluent household, she soon moved with her family to Wilmington in the late 1870s. Her affluence afforded her education, uncommon for a woman on the cusp of the twentieth century. She first met Henry Flagler in 1891 at a party in Newport, Rhode Island. Kenan was only twenty-three years old; Flagler was sixty-one, and still married to Ida Alice. As they became more romantically involved, Mary Lily’s family grew suspicious of Flagler’s intentions, at least until the tycoon gifted her two million dollars’ worth of jewelry and stock in Standard Oil, along with a mansion in Palm Beach that would come to be known as Whitehall. Flagler also set about divorcing Ida Alice, which resulted in him paying Florida state legislators off in order to have insanity declared a viable reason for initiating divorce proceedings. Two months after the law was passed, Flagler divorced her, and he married Mary Lily, a woman nearly half his age, on the Kenans’ family plantation ten days later in 1901. Henry Flagler and Mary Lily Kenan Flagler by most accounts had a comfortable and loving marriage. Their marriage lasted until May of 1913, as after a fall down the stairs at Whitehall, the 83-year-old Flagler passed away, leaving his massive fortune to her. Mary Lily Kenan thus became the world’s richest woman. Three years later she became reaquinted with and married Robert Worth Bingham. A seemly healthy and active socialite, she slowly succumbed to a mysterious illness and died just 8 months later after her marriage to Bingham.

popular name: Salvatore Maranzano

date_of_death: September 10, 1931

age: 45

cause_of_death: Murdered - mob hit

claim_to_fame: Crime and their Victims

best_know_for: Salvatore Maranzano, nicknamed Little Caesar, was an Italian-American mobster and an early Cosa Nostra boss who led what later would become the Bonanno crime family in New York City. He instigated the Castellammarese War in 1930 to seize control of the American Mafia, winning the war after the murder of rival faction head Joe Masseria in April 1931. He then briefly became the Mafia's capo di tutti capi ("boss of all bosses") and formed the Five Families in New York City but was murdered on September 10, 1931, on the orders of Charles "Lucky" Luciano, who established the Commission, in which families shared power to prevent future turf wars. The grave of Salvatore Maranzano can be found at St. John Cemetery in Queens, New York.