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Highlights for September 18
1634 Anne Hutchinson arrives in the New World
Anne Hutchinson, an Englishwoman who would become an outspoken religious thinker in the American colonies, arrives at the Massachusetts Bay Colony with her family.
She settled in Cambridge and began organizing meetings of Boston women in her home, leading them in discussions of recent sermons and religious issues. Soon ministers and magistrates began attending her sessions as well. Hutchinson preached that faith alone was sufficient for salvation, and therefore that individuals had no need for the church or church law. By 1637, her influence had become so great that she was brought to trial and found guilty of heresy against Puritan orthodoxy. Banished from Massachusetts, she led a group of 70 followers to Rhode Island--Roger Williams' colony based on religious freedom--and established a settlement on the island of Aquidneck.
After the death of her husband in 1642, she settled near present-day Pelham Bay, New York, on the Long Island Sound. In 1643, she and all but one of her children were massacred in an Indian attack. She is recognized as the first notable woman religious leader in the American colonies.
1959 A serial killer is executed
Serial killer Harvey Glatman is executed in a California gas chamber for murdering three young women in Los Angeles. Resisting all appeals to save his life, Glatman even wrote to the appeals board to say, "I only want to die."
Glatman had been a smart kid. As a Boy Scout, he developed an obsession with rope. When his parents noticed that he was strangling himself on occasion, they took him to a doctor who told them that it was just a phase and that he would grow out of it. As a teenager, he threatened a girl with a toy gun in Colorado. Skipping bail, he made his way to New York, where he later spent five years in Sing Sing prison on robbery charges.
Following his release, Glatman moved to Los Angeles and opened up a television repair shop. He took up photography as a hobby, in addition to playing with ropes. On August 1, 1957, he combined these two interests in a sinister way. On the pretense of a freelance modeling assignment, Glatman lured 19-year-old Judy Ann Dull to his apartment, where he raped her and then took photos of her, bound and gagged. He then drove her out to the desert east of Los Angeles and strangled her to death with his favorite rope. By the time Dull's body was found, there were no clues linking the crime to Glatman.
Back in Los Angeles, Glatman posted the pictures of Dull on his walls and became further obsessed with rape and murder. His next victim was Shirley Ann Bridgeford, whom he also strangled to death in the desert. In July 1958, Glatman struck again, following the same twisted procedure. But in October, his luck ran out.
Lorraine Vigil, who answered one of Glatman's modeling ads, was driving with him to his studio when she noticed that he was heading out of the city. She began to struggle with Glatman, who pulled out a pistol and tried to tie her hands. After being shot through the hip, Vigil was able to wrestle the gun away from him. In the ensuing struggle, they both tumbled out of the car-just as a police officer drove past.
Glatman was arrested and confessed to the three murders, seeming to delight in recounting his sadistic crimes. His trial lasted a mere three days before he was sent off to San Quentin to die.
1961 Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld Dies in Plane Crash:
United Nations Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld dies when his plane crashes under mysterious circumstances near Ndola in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia). Hammarskjöld was on his way to meet with Moise Tshombe, leader of the breakaway Congolese province of Katanga, with the aim of negotiating an end to the Congo crisis.
Dag Hammarskjöld, the second secretary-general of the United Nations, was an influential force for peace during his seven years as head of the United Nations. He was the son of Hjalmar Hammarskjöld, who was the prime minister of Sweden from 1914 to 1917. Dag Hammarskjöld worked as an economist and in 1930 joined the Swedish civil service as secretary of a government committee on unemployment. Beginning in 1936, he was permanent undersecretary in the Ministry of Finance. He joined Sweden's foreign ministry in 1947 and in 1951 formally entered the cabinet as deputy foreign minister. The same year, he traveled to the United Nations as vice chairman of the Swedish delegation and in 1952 was appointed acting U.N. chairman for Sweden.
Elected U.N. secretary-general on the recommendation of the Security Council on April 7, 1953, he led missions to China, the Middle East, and elsewhere to arrange peace settlements and become better acquainted with the United Nations' member states. He played a key role in the resolution of the Suez Canal Crisis of 1956. In 1957, he was unanimously reelected secretary-general.
During his second term, he initiated and directed the United Nations' vigorous role in the Congolese Civil War, which broke out after Belgium granted independence to the Congo in June 1960. A U.N. force was sent to restore order, but it soon became entangled in the Cold War aspects of the conflict. In September 1960, the Soviet Union demanded Hammarskjöld's resignation after the United Nations gave tacit approval to the removal of Congo's left-leaning prime minister, Patrice Lumumba. Despite the challenge to his authority, Hammarskjöld remained secretary-general.
In 1961, the U.N. force in the Congo turned its attention against Katanga, the wealthy Congolese province that had seceded in 1960 with the support of Belgium mining interests. The U.N. troops mounted an offensive against Katanga, fighting Katangalese troops and white mercenaries, and Katangalese leader Moise Tshombe escaped with some of his forces to Northern Rhodesia.
On the night of September 18, 1961, Hammarskjöld was flying to Ndola to meet with Tshombe to negotiate an end to the bloodshed when his Swedish DC6 aircraft crashed just a few miles short of its destination. The secretary-general and 15 others were killed. Hammarskjöld's body was thrown out of the wreckage and came to rest in a sitting position beside a giant ant-hill. Many suspected that the plane had been shot down or exploded by a bomb, a theory that was reinforced when the sole survivor of the crash, an American security guard, spoke of hearing an explosion before the plane went down. In 1962, the Rhodesian Federal Inquiry Commission, which investigated the crash, concluded that the pilot flew too low and struck trees, thereby bringing the aircraft to the ground.
Dag Hammarskjöld was posthumously awarded the 1961 Nobel Peace Prize. He was succeeded as U.N. secretary-general by U Thant of Myanmar.
Newspaper heiress and wanted fugitive Patty Hearst is captured in a San Francisco apartment and arrested for armed robbery.
On February 4, 1974, Patricia Hearst, the 19-year-old daughter of newspaper publisher Randolph Hearst, was kidnapped from her apartment in Berkeley, California, by two black men and a white woman, all three of whom were armed. Her fiancé, Stephen Weed, was beaten and tied up along with a neighbor who tried to help. Witnesses reported seeing a struggling Hearst being carried away blindfolded, and she was put in the trunk of a car. Neighbors who came out into the street were forced to take cover after the kidnappers fired their guns to cover their escape.
Three days later, the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA), a small U.S. leftist group, announced in a letter to a Berkeley radio station that it was holding Hearst as a "prisoner of war." Four days later, the SLA demanded that the Hearst family give $70 in foodstuffs to every needy person from Santa Rosa to Los Angeles. This done, said the SLA, negotiations would begin for the return of Patricia Hearst. Randolph Hearst hesitantly gave away some $2 million worth of food. The SLA then called this inadequate and asked for $4 million more. The Hearst Corporation said it would donate the additional sum if the girl was released unharmed.
In April, however, the situation changed dramatically when Patty Hearst declared, in a tape sent to the authorities, that she was joining the SLA of her own free will. Later that month, a surveillance camera took a photo of her participating in an armed robbery of a San Francisco bank, and she was also spotted during the robbery of a Los Angeles store.
On May 17, police raided the SLA's secret headquarters in Los Angeles, killing six of the group's nine known members. Among the dead was the SLA's leader, Donald DeFreeze, an African American ex-convict who called himself General Field Marshal Cinque. Patty Hearst and two other SLA members wanted for the April bank robbery were not on the premises.
Finally, on September 18, 1975, after crisscrossing the country with her captors--or conspirators--for more than a year, Hearst, or "Tania," as she called herself, was captured in a San Francisco apartment and arrested for armed robbery. Despite her later claim that she had been brainwashed by the SLA, she was convicted on March 20, 1974, and sentenced to seven years in prison. In May 1977, she was released on probation and returned to a more routine existence. She later married her bodyguard.
If you have other Birthdays or events to add for this day please E-Mail me.
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