20 Historical Criminals Undone By Absurdly Small Mistakes

In the 1920s, Al Capone ran Chicago’s organized-crime ring, earning millions annually through bootleg liquor and gambling. Federal agents couldn’t get him on a violence charge, but they did build a tax case instead. In September 1930, Capone’s own lawyer, Lawrence Mattingly, wrote the Internal Revenue Service, trying to negotiate paying back taxes and inadvertently admitting that Capone had significant taxable income. Prosecutors used the letter against Capone at his 1931 trial.

In 40 years, Willie Sutton stole about $2 million, and he escaped prison three times. Once, after getting out in 1947, he was able to live peacefully in Brooklyn under an assumed name. But in February of 1952, a young man named Arnold Schuster, working as a tailor’s assistant, recognized Sutton from an FBI wanted poster he’d seen hanging in his father’s tailor shop while riding the subway. Schuster followed Sutton, dialed the police, and they nabbed Sutton while he was buying a car battery at a gas station. He was given a life sentence, and he always insisted that he never said the banks were his targets, “because that’s where the money is.”

Bruno Richard Hauptmann was a German-born carpenter living in New York who had been connected to the abduction and murder of infant Charles Lindbergh Jr. in 1932. The Lindbergh family paid a ransom in gold certificates. In 1934, Hauptmann paid for gas with one. The gas station manager saw the certificate, knew that gold certificates were being removed from circulation, and scribbled Hauptmann’s license plate number along the side. Police followed the plate back to Hauptmann’s home, and when officers searched his garage, they found him in possession of thousands of dollars worth of ransom money. He was subsequently convicted and hanged.

Vincenzo Peruggia, a glazier who worked at the Louvre Museum in Paris, hid overnight in a broom closet in August 1911. Taking the portrait out of its frame, he slipped out of the museum carrying only the painting, mistakenly thinking he was helping return a work of art that Napoleon had stolen from Italy. He kept it hidden away for over two years before sending a letter to an art dealer in Florence, signed with his real name, that offered to sell the painting. That art dealer called the police, and Peruggia was quickly apprehended.

Fawkes was the explosives expert among a group of 13 English Catholics who planned to blow up Parliament during its opening session on November 5, 1605, to kill King James I. An anonymous letter warning Lord Monteagle not to attend the opening session of Parliament arrived ten days before the explosion and reached the office of the secretary of state. When guards searched the cellars under the House of Lords at midnight, they discovered Fawkes with 36 barrels of gunpowder. He was arrested on the spot, tried for treason, and executed in January 1606.

Between 1944 and 1949, John George Haigh killed six people to steal their money. He dissolved their bodies in acid at his workshop in Crawley, England. When a woman named Olive Durand-Deacon went missing, Haigh casually informed a detective that he had used acid to kill her. He thought prosecutors would not be able to convict him since there was no corpse to link him to the crime. However, a pathologist examined the residue from the acid and discovered human gallstones and dentures, which can survive being dissolved in acid. Haigh was tried and convicted of murder and hanged.

Hawley Harvey Crippen was an American homeopath practicing in London. He murdered his wife Cora and fled toward Canada by ship with his mistress Ethel Le Neve, who disguised herself as a young boy. The captain of the ship, Henry Kendall, saw that the two were holding hands lovingly, and the boy’s clothes didn’t fit properly. He used the ship’s brand-new wireless telegraph to alert Scotland Yard, and the chief inspector traveled on a faster ship and arrested Crippen at sea. He was hanged in November 1910.

H. H. Holmes was an American con man and serial killer. His real name was Herman Webster Mudgett. While in jail in St. Louis, he met Marion Hedgepeth, a convicted train robber. Mudgett offered him $500 for a tip on a lawyer who could help set up a fake-death insurance scam. After killing his accomplice, Benjamin Pitezel, Mudgett denied that he owed Hedgepeth anything. Hedgepeth became furious and reported the incident to the Pinkerton Detective Agency. The Pinkertons tracked down and arrested Mudgett shortly thereafter.

Charles Ponzi was an Italian immigrant living in Boston who raised millions of dollars by promising investors incredible returns in a matter of weeks. When pressed by the press, Ponzi hired publicist William McMasters to protect his image. McMasters wanted to see the books and found that Ponzi was deep in debt and that he held almost none of the assets that he had promised his investors. McMasters sold his story to a Boston newspaper, which ran an exposé on Ponzi that triggered a bank run. Shortly thereafter, Ponzi was arrested.

George Joseph Smith married women using a different name each time, got them to sign their wills over to him, and then drowned them in the bath, making it appear as if they’d had an accident. When the third woman, Margaret Lofty, died, a man named Charles Burnham read a newspaper story about her case. His own daughter had drowned the same way in a Blackpool bath the previous year, also married to a man named George Smith. Burnham sent a clipping of the article to Scotland Yard. An inspector put two and two together, and Smith was arrested and eventually hanged for it.

Henri Désiré Landru attracted affluent women by placing personal ads in the newspaper. He took their money, then murdered them at a rented villa outside Paris, evading police for years. In that time, he had lived under almost 90 different aliases. The sister of one of the vanished victims noticed Landru exiting a Parisian store, recognized him, and told the authorities. Landru was detained nearby. A notebook found in his home contained the names of all his victims and the dates when they disappeared. However, no bodies were ever recovered. Landru was convicted and executed by guillotine.

Nine people were killed by the so-called “Vampire of Düsseldorf,” Peter Kürten. In one incident, he attacked a young woman named Maria Budlick, but he released her on condition that she would not tell anyone what had happened. However, she wrote a friend about the incident and included Kürten’s address. She misaddressed the envelope, and postal workers opened it rather than trying to find a different address. The envelope ended up with another resident. The resident gave the envelope to the police, who found Budlick, who then took them to Kürten’s flat. Kürten was later executed.

The Irishman Colonel Thomas Blood masqueraded as a priest for months to ingratiate himself with Talbot Edwards, the man responsible for keeping England’s Crown Jewels safe inside the Tower of London. Then Blood and his cronies held Edwards captive, sawed the royal scepter in two, pounded the crown flat with a mallet, and tried to make off with it in his own cloak. Before they could get away, however, Edwards’s son came home unexpectedly and sounded the alert. As guards pursued Blood toward the gate, he let the crown fall to the ground. Eventually King Charles II pardoned him.

William Brodie was an Edinburgh cabinetmaker and city councilor. He made wax impressions of his clients’ keys. To cover gambling debts, Brodie set up a burglary ring. After a robbery went wrong, his partners were caught. They confessed and implicated Brodie. To escape justice, Brodie fled to Holland, but on the way he gave letters admitting his real identity to a fellow passenger couple to deliver back home. The couple saw that Brodie was a wanted man and read the letters. They turned Brodie in. He was found guilty and hanged.

Velvalee Dickinson ran a doll shop on Madison Avenue in New York, and during the Second World War she secretly reported on the movements of US Navy ships for Japanese intelligence, using coded letters about dolls. To disguise herself, she made up fake return addresses from her mailing list of actual customers. Four of her letters were returned as undeliverable in 1942, but one of those women was curious enough to hand it over to the FBI, who sent it to codebreakers, who traced it to Dickinson’s shop.

George Metesky was a former electrician for the New York power company. He’d filed a disability claim after a work accident, but it had been denied, and enraged, he planted more than 30 pipe bombs in the city over 16 years and signed his bomb threats “F.P.” After the bomber posted a description of his old workplace injury in a newspaper, a clerk named Alice Kelly looked up old disability claims and found that Metesky’s had used the exact same words. Kelly told police, they searched his house, and arrested him.

Carl Austin Hall and his accomplice, Bonnie Heady, kidnapped 6-year-old Bobby Greenlease near Kansas City and extracted a record ransom at the time. Hall left Heady behind and headed for St. Louis, where he drank himself into a stupor over several days in high-priced hotel rooms and tossed bills to anyone nearby. A cab driver named Emmett Scanlon got suspicious about the weight of his bags and the carelessness with which he dispensed money. Scanlon contacted police. Hall was caught, and he admitted his crimes. He and Heady were eventually executed.

During the Second World War, William Joyce, known as Lord Haw-Haw because he spoke with a theatrical voice that wasn’t quite right, broadcast Nazi propaganda into Britain from a German radio station. When Germany was defeated, he fled to a town near Flensburg, under an assumed name. In the woods, he approached two British officers who were off duty. He talked to them in English. One of them was Captain Geoffrey Perry, who recognized Joyce’s voice immediately. “You wouldn’t happen to be Lord Haw-Haw, would you?” he said. Joyce was arrested, and he was found guilty of treason and hanged.

Thomas Jennings, an ex-con, broke into a Chicago house to commit burglary and killed the owner, a railroad clerk named Clarence Hiller, when Jennings was discovered. As he escaped, Jennings put his hand on a freshly painted porch railing and left four very clear fingerprints. He was captured by police moments later wearing torn, bloodstained clothing and carrying a gun that had been recently fired. By matching his fingerprints to his criminal record, detectives helped make Jennings’ case the first in the U.S. in which an appeals court recognized fingerprint evidence.

Glamour Girl Slayer Harvey Glatman lured three young women in Los Angeles to their deaths under the guise of posing for him. The next time he pulled a gun on a young model named Lorraine Vigil in his car, outside Santa Ana, California, Vigil fought back and grabbed the weapon. It went off in Glatman’s thigh during their struggle, and Vigil wrested it from him, holding the killer at bay with her gun until a highway patrolman arrived. Glatman admitted to all three killings and was executed.

This content was created with the help of AI.