Crime & Justice in the 20th century

791 sourced entries, 1901 CE to 1999 CE, oldest first. Also see Crime & Justice across every century or everything else in the 20th century.

• 1901July 1 – The first United Kingdom Fingerprint Bureau is established at Scotland Yard, the Metropolitan Police headquarters in London, by Edward Henry.source
• 1901October 29 – In Amherst, New York, nurse Jane Toppan is arrested for murdering the Davis family of Boston with an overdose of morphine; she will confess to at least 31 killings.source
• 1902February 27 – Australian officers Breaker Morant and Peter Handcock are executed for the murder of Boer prisoners of war near Louis Trichardt.source
• 1902March 10 – A Circuit Court decision in the United States ends Thomas Edison's monopoly on 35 mm movie film technology.source
• 1902August 24 – A statue of Joan of Arc is unveiled in Saint-Pierre-le-Moûtier, the French town which she stormed in 1429.source
• 1902October 16 – The first Borstal (youth offenders' institution) opens in Borstal, Kent, U.K.source
• 1902November 30 – The second-in-command of Butch Cassidy's Wild Bunch, Harvey Logan ("Kid Curry"), is captured after a shootout with lawmen in Knoxville, Tennessee. He is sentenced to a $5,000 fine and 20 years hard labor for robbery but escapes custody in 1903.source
• 1904June 28 – The original icon of Our Lady of Kazan is stolen and subsequently destroyed in Russia.source
• 1904Summer – Henri Matisse paints Luxe, Calme et Volupté at Saint-Tropez; it will be considered the starting point of Fauvism.source
• 1904October 13 – Pavlos Melas is encircled at Statista and killed during the Macedonian Struggle.source
• 1904December 2 – The St. Petersburg Soviet urges a run on the banks; the attempt fails, and the executive committee is arrested.source
• 1905February 1 – U.S. Senator John H. Mitchell of Oregon is indicted by a federal grand jury on charges arising from a scandal involving land grants in the state and illegally using his influence for private clients.source
• 1905February 16 – Six of the 11 crew of the British Royal Navy submarine HMS A5 are killed by a pair of explosions caused by gasoline fumes in port in Ireland.source
• 1905July 15 – The popular fictional character Arsène Lupin, the gentleman thief, is introduced in France.source
• 1905October 13 – Annie Kenney and Christabel Pankhurst interrupt a Liberal Party (UK) rally at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester, England, and choose imprisonment when convicted, the first militant action of the suffragette campaign.source
• 1905October – Fauvist artists, led by Henri Matisse and André Derain, first exhibit their works, at the Salon d'Automne in Paris.source
• 1905Pathé Frères colors black and white films by machine.source
• 1906April 25 – Georgian Socialist-Federalist Revolutionary Party under the leadership of Leo Kereselidze successfully robs the Dusheti treasury of the Russian Empire, one of the largest expropriations of the time.source
• 1906October 16 – Imposter Wilhelm Voigt impersonates a Prussian officer and takes over the city hall in Köpenick for a short time.source
• 1907June 26 – Tiflis bank robbery: Bolsheviks attack a cash-filled bank coach in the centre of Tiflis, Georgia, killing 40 people.source
• 1907July 6 – Guardians of the Irish Crown Jewels notice that they have been stolen.source
• 1907September 22 – Uruguay abolishes capital punishment.source
• 1908February 1 – Lisbon Regicide: King Carlos I of Portugal and Prince Luis Filipe are shot dead in Lisbon.source
• 1908November 6 – Western bandits Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid are supposedly killed in Bolivia, after being surrounded by a large group of soldiers. There are many rumors to the contrary however, and their grave sites are unmarked.source
• 1910March 10 – Slavery in China, which has existed since the Shang dynasty, is made illegal.source
• 1911August 21 – Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa is stolen from the Louvre museum in Paris by Vincenzo Peruggia; the painting is returned in 1913.source
• 1913February 23 – Joseph Stalin is arrested by the Russian secret police, the Okhrana, in Petrograd, and exiled to Siberia.source
• 1913September 7–8 – The Fourth Congress of the International Psychoanalytical Association (the last occasion on which Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud will meet) takes place in Munich.source
• 1913November 6 – Mohandas Gandhi is arrested, while leading a march of Indian miners in South Africa.source
• 1913December 12 – Vincenzo Peruggia tries to sell the Mona Lisa in Florence, and is arrested.source
• 1913Between the two Balkan Wars, a group of Bulgarian teachers and priests including teacher Gligor Zisov are deported by the newly established Greek authorities to Bulgaria but killed by Greek soldiers.source
• 1914March 10 – Suffragette Mary Richardson damages Velázquez's painting Rokeby Venus in London's National Gallery, with a meat chopper.source
• 1914April 14–18 – The first International Criminal Police Congress is held in Monaco; 24 countries are represented, including some from Asia, Europe, and the Americas; the Dean of the Paris Law School is president.source
• 1914July 25 – Serbia responds to the ultimatum from the 23rd accepting some but not all of Austria-Hungary's demands. In response Austria-Hungary severs diplomatic ties with Serbia and begins to mobilise its own forces. Radomir Putnik, Chief of the Serbian General Staff, is arrested in Budapest, but subsequently allowed to return to Serbia.source
• 1914August 8 – German colonial forces execute Martin-Paul Samba, for high treason.source
• 1915January 12 – A Fool There Was premières in the United States, starring Theda Bara as a femme fatale; she quickly becomes one of early cinema's most sensational stars.source
• 1915June – Armenian genocide: 15,000 civilians from the Ottoman Armenian population of Bitlis are massacred by Ottoman Turks and Kurds.source
• 1915Armenian genocide: 17,000 civilians from the Ottoman Armenian population of Trebizond are massacred by Ottoman Turks.source
• 1915October 12 – WWI: British nurse Edith Cavell is executed by a German firing squad, for helping Allied soldiers escape from Belgium.source
• 1916February 9 (6.00 p.m.) – Tristan Tzara "founds" the art movement Dadaism (according to Hans Arp).source
• 1916February 11 – Emma Goldman is arrested for lecturing on birth control in the United States.source
• 1916September 13 – Mary, a circus elephant, is hanged in the town of Erwin, Tennessee for killing her handler, Walter "Red" Eldridge.source
• 1916October 21 – Friedrich Adler shoots Count Karl von Stürgkh, Minister-President of Austria.source
• 1916December 30 – (December 17 Old Style) – The mystic Grigori Rasputin is murdered in Saint Petersburg.source
• 1917January 28 – The United States ends its search for Pancho Villa.source
• 1917Mata Hari is arrested in Paris for spying.source
• 1917May 22 – Ell Persons is lynched in Memphis, in connection with the rape and murder of 16-year-old Antoinette Rappal.source
• 1917July 12 – Bisbee Deportation: The Phelps Dodge Corporation has over 1,000 suspected IWW members from its metal mines deported from Bisbee, Arizona.source
• 1917July 16–18 – July Days: Serious clashes occur in Petrograd; Vladimir Lenin escapes to Finland; Leon Trotsky is arrested.source
• 1917The first Cottingley Fairies photographs are taken in Yorkshire, England, apparently depicting fairies (a hoax not admitted by the child creators until 1981).source
• 1918March 25 – Karl Muck, music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, is arrested under the Alien Enemies Act, and imprisoned for the duration of WWI.source
• 1918June 12 – Grand Duke Michael of Russia is murdered, thereby becoming the first of the Romanovs to be killed by the Bolsheviks.source
• 1918June 22 – Suspects in the Chicago Restaurant Poisonings are arrested, and more than 100 waiters are taken into custody for poisoning restaurant customers with a lethal powder called Mickey Finn.source
• 1918July 17 – Execution of the Romanov family: By order of the Bolshevik Party, and carried out by the Cheka, former emperor Nicholas II, his wife Alexandra Feodorovna, their children, Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, Alexei and retainers are shot at the Ipatiev House, in Ekaterinburg, Russia.source
• 1919January 15 – Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht are murdered following the Spartacist uprising.source
• 1919March 5 – A. Mitchell Palmer becomes United States Attorney General, through recess appointment.source
• 1919April 10 – Mexican Revolution leader Emiliano Zapata is ambushed and shot dead in Morelos.source
• 1919April 12 – French serial killer Henri Désiré Landru is arrested.source
• 1919April 25 – Pancho Villa takes Parral, Chihuahua, in Mexico, and executes the mayor and his two sons.source
• 1919July 31 – British police strikes in London and Liverpool for recognition of the National Union of Police and Prison Officers; over 2,000 strikers are dismissed.source
• 1919November 7 – The first of the Palmer Raids is conducted on the second anniversary of the Russian Revolution: over 10,000 suspected communists and anarchists are arrested in 23 different U.S. cities by the end of January 1920.source
• 1919November 10 – Abrams v. United States: The Supreme Court of the United States upholds the conviction of Abrams for inciting resistance to the war effort against Soviet Russia.source
• 1920May 15 – Russian Revolution: Russian White soldier Maria Bochkareva is executed in Soviet Russia.source
• 1920May 24 – Venustiano Carranza is buried in Mexico City; all of his mourning allies are arrested. Adolfo de la Huerta is elected provisional president.source
• 1920June 15 – Duluth lynchings: Three African American circus workers are sprung from jail, subjected to a kangaroo court and hanged by a white mob in Duluth, Minnesota, in the northern United States.source
• 1920September 22 – The London Metropolitan Police forms the Flying Squad, a motorised mobile detective patrol unit.source
• 1921January 17 – The first recorded public performance of the illusion of "sawing a woman in half" is given by English stage magician P. T. Selbit at the Finsbury Park Empire variety theatre in London.source
• 1921June 3 – The death penalty is abolished in Sweden.source
• 1921July 14 – A Massachusetts jury finds Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti guilty of first degree murder following a widely publicized trial whose verdict will spark protests around the world.source
• 1922March 10 – Mahatma Gandhi is arrested in Bombay for sedition.source
• 1922March 18 – In British India, Mahatma Gandhi is sentenced to six years in prison for sedition (he serves only two).source
• 1922March 31 – Six die in the Hinterkaifeck murders north of Munich.source
• 1922May 29 – British Liberal MP Horatio Bottomley is jailed for seven years for fraud.source
• 1922June 24 – Weimar Republic foreign minister Walther Rathenau is assassinated; the murderers are captured on July 17.source
• 1922The last hunted California grizzly bear is shot.source
• 1922November 24 – Popular author and anti-Treaty Republican Erskine Childers is executed by firing squad in Dublin, after conviction by an Irish Free State military court for the unlawful possession of a gun, a weapon presented to him by Michael Collins in 1920 as a gift.source
• 1922December 11 – The trial of Edith Thompson and Frederick Bywaters ends at the Old Bailey in London, for the murder of Thompson's husband; both are found guilty and sentenced to hang.source
• 1922December 20 – Antigone by Jean Cocteau appears on stage in Paris, with settings by Pablo Picasso, music by Arthur Honegger and costumes by Coco Chanel.source
• 1923August 31 – The Italian navy occupies Corfu, in retaliation for the murder of an Italian officer. The League of Nations protests, and the occupation ends on September 30.source
• 1923September 7 – At the International Police Conference in Vienna, the International Criminal Police Commission (ICPC), better known as Interpol, is set up.source
• 1923November 1 – The 1923 Victorian Police strike begins in Australia, with half of the Victoria Police force standing down over the use of labor spies. Rioting and looting take place in Melbourne city centre.source
• 1923November 11 – Adolf Hitler is arrested for his leading role in the Beer Hall Putsch.source
• 1924January 12 – Gopinath Saha shoots Ernest Day, whom he has mistaken for Sir Charles Tegart, the police commissioner of Calcutta, and is arrested soon after.source
• 1924April 1 – Adolf Hitler is sentenced to 5 years in Landsberg Prison in Germany for his participation in the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch (he serves less than 9 months).source
• 1924May 30 – Italian socialist leader Giacomo Matteotti speaks out against fascism. A few days later he is kidnapped and murdered in Rome.source
• 1924October 25 – Authorities of the British Raj in India arrest Subhas Chandra Bose and jail him for the next 2 years.source
• 1924November 10 – The Trial of the 149 begins in Estonia, eventually resulting in the conviction of 129 communists, including several members of the Riigikogu.source
• 1924December 19 – German serial killer Fritz Haarmann is sentenced to death for the murder and dismemberment of at least 24 young males in Hanover.source
• 1925April 15 – Fritz Haarmann, a serial killer convicted of the murder of 24 boys and young men, is guillotined in Germany.source
• 1925April–October – The Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes is held in Paris, giving a name to the Art Deco style.source
• 1925August 8 – The Ku Klux Klan, the largest fraternal racist organization in the United States, demonstrates its popularity by holding a parade with an estimated 30,000-35,000 marchers in Washington, D.C.source
• 1925October – The major money forgery and fraud of Alves dos Reis is exposed in Portugal.source
• 1925November 24 – The silent film El Húsar de la Muerte is released in Santiago, Chile.source
• 1926February 1 – Land on Broadway and Wall Street in New York City is sold at a record $7 per sq inch; it is only affordable for four more years.source
• 1926May 18 – Evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson disappears, while visiting a Venice, California beach. She reappears nearly a month later claiming to have been kidnapped.source
• 1926September 23 – Gene Tunney defeats Jack Dempsey to become heavyweight boxing champion of the world.source
• 1926November 10 – In San Francisco, a necrophiliac serial killer named Earle Nelson (dubbed "Gorilla Man") kills and then rapes his 9th victim, a boarding house landlady named Mrs. William Edmonds.source
• 1926November 25 – The death penalty is re-established in Italy.source
• 1926November 26 – All Italian Communist deputies are arrested.source
• 1926December 3 – English detective story writer Agatha Christie disappears from her home in Surrey; on December 14 she is found under her husband's mistress's surname at a Harrogate hotel.source
• 1927April 27 – The Carabineros de Chile (Chilean national police force and gendarmerie) are created.source
• 1927May 12 – British police officers raid the office of the Soviet trade delegation in London.source
• 1927June 13 – Léon Daudet, the leader of the French monarchists, is arrested in France.source
• 1928March 15 – March 15 incident: The Japanese government cracks down on socialists and communists, arresting over 1,000 people.source
• 1928June 4 – Huanggutun incident: Zhang Zuolin, a warlord, is killed by Japanese agents in China.source
• 1928August 16 – Serial killer Carl Panzram is arrested in Washington, D.C., for burglary. Later it will be discovered that he has committed multiple murders, rapes and other major crimes.source
• 1928August 26 – In Scotland, May Donoghue finds the remains of a snail in her ginger beer, leading to the landmark negligence case Donoghue v Stevenson.source
• 1929August 23–24 – The 1929 Hebron massacre: 65–68 Jews are killed by Palestinians and the remaining Jews are forced to leave Hebron.source
• 1929October 25 – Former U.S. Interior Secretary Albert B. Fall is convicted of bribery for his role in the Teapot Dome scandal, becoming the first Presidential cabinet member to go to prison for actions in office.source
• 1929December – New York toy salesman Edwin S. Lowe popularizes Bingo after coming across the game of "Beano" in Atlanta, Georgia. After someone accidentally yells "bingo" instead of "beano" with a group of friends in Brooklyn, New York, he begins production of the game, going on to develop more than 6,000 card combinations under the E. S. Lowe company, as the popularity of the game grows to become a national pastime.source
• 1930April 11 – Anglo-Indian hunter Jim Corbett shot the second of the man-eating tigers of Chowgarh.source
• 1930October 14 – Ståhlberg kidnapping: The former and first President of Finland, Kaarlo Juho Ståhlberg, and his wife, Ester Ståhlberg, are kidnapped from their home by members of the far-right Lapua Movement but released unharmed.source
• 1931March 23 – Indian revolutionary leaders Bhagat Singh, Shivaram Rajguru and Sukhdev Thapar are hanged for conspiracy to murder in the British Raj.source
• 1931August 2 – Murder of Paul Anlauf and Franz Lenck: Two Berlin police officers are killed by Communists.source
• 1931November 8 – French police launch a large-scale raid against Corsican bandits.source
• 1932March 1 – Lindbergh kidnapping: Charles Lindbergh Jr., the infant son of Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, is kidnapped from the family home near Hopewell, New Jersey. On May 12 he is found dead just a few miles away.source
• 1932April 6 – The trial of fraudulent art dealer Otto Wacker begins in Berlin.source
• 1932April 19 – German art dealer Otto Wacker is sentenced to 19 months in prison for selling fraudulent paintings he attributed to Vincent van Gogh.source
• 1932Potempa Murder of 1932: In the eastern town of Potempa, five Nazi "Brownshirts" break into the house of Konrad Pietrzuch, a Communist miner, and proceed to castrate and beat him to death in front of his mother.source
• 1932September 2 – Despite the court's sentence of death against the "Potempa five", Chancellor von Papen in his capacity as Reich Commissioner of Prussia refuses to have them executed under the grounds that they were not aware of the emergency law at the time they committed the murder, but in reality because he is still hoping for Nazi support for his government.source
• 1932September 28 – The court of Helsinki sentences Vilho Kallio, Ville Saari and Ida Maria Viden to prison for the Tattarisuo mutilation case.source
• 1932October – Hergé's Tintin in America (Tintin en Amérique) concludes serial publication and is issued in book format (in black and white) in Belgium.source
• 1933April 13 – The Children and Young Persons Act is passed in the United Kingdom. This raises the age of criminal responsibility from 7 to 8, raises the minimum age for capital punishment to 18, places restrictions on the identification in the press of persons under 18 appearing in court, sets a minimum full-time working age of 14 and makes it illegal to sell tobacco products to under-16s.source
• 1933April 26 – The Gestapo secret police is established in Nazi Germany by Hermann Göring.source
• 1933April 27 – The Stahlhelm veterans' organization joins the Nazi party in Germany.source
• 1933Persecution of Jehovah's Witnesses begins with the seizure of the Bible Students' office in Magdeburg.source
• 1933July 4 – Gandhi is sentenced to prison in India.source
• 1933August 30 – German-Jewish philosopher Theodor Lessing is shot in Marienbad (Mariánské Lázně), Czechoslovakia, dying the following day.source
• 1933September 12 – Leó Szilárd, waiting for a red light on Southampton Row in Bloomsbury (London), conceives the idea of the nuclear chain reaction.source
• 1933October 16 – Parricides committed in the United States by Victor Licata lead to calls for the legal prohibition of cannabis.source
• 1934March 13 – John Dillinger and his gang rob the First National Bank in Mason City, Iowa, United States, stealing $52,000.source
• 1934May 23 – American outlaws Bonnie and Clyde are ambushed and killed by police in Bienville Parish, Louisiana.source
• 1934June 30 – July 2 – Night of the Long Knives in Germany: Nazis purge the Sturmabteilung (SA), the left-wing Strasserist faction of the Nazi Party, and prominent conservative anti-Nazis, in a series of political murders.source
• 1934September 19 – Bruno Richard Hauptmann is arrested in connection with the Lindbergh kidnapping case in the U.S.source
• 1935February 13 – Richard Hauptmann is convicted and sentenced to death for the kidnapping and murder of Charles Lindbergh Jr. in the United States.source
• 1935June 10 – Alcoholics Anonymous is founded in Akron, Ohio, United States, by William G. Wilson and Dr. Robert Smith.source
• 1935September 15 – The Nuremberg Laws go into effect in Germany, removing citizenship from Jews.source
• 1936November 19 and 20 – Buenaventura Durruti, a major Spanish anarchist, is fatally shot in Madrid, dying the following day.source
• 1936December 12 – Xi'an Incident: Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek of the Republic of China is kidnapped by Marshal Zhang Xueliang.source
• 1936The Viking Age craftsman's Mästermyr chest is discovered in the Mästermyr mire (after which it is later named), west of Hemse, on the island of Gotland, Sweden.source
• 1936Joseph Stalin's Great Purge begins in the Soviet Union.source
• 1937January 30 – The Moscow Trial initiated on January 23 is concluded. Thirteen of the defendants are sentenced to death (including Georgy Pyatakov, Nikolay Muralov and Leonid Serebryakov), while the rest, including Karl Radek and Grigory Sokolnikov are sent to labor camps and later murdered. They were initially spared for implicating others, including Rykov, Bukharin and Tukhachevsky, setting the stage for further trialssource
• 1937July 1 – The Gestapo arrests pastor Martin Niemöller in Germany.source
• 1937July 31 – NKVD Order No. 00447 "Об операции по репрессированию бывших кулаков, уголовников и других антисоветских элементов" ("The operation for repression of former kulaks, criminals and other anti-Soviet elements") is approved by the decision of the Politbureau of the CC of the VKP(b) of the Soviet Union, initially as a 4-month plan for 75,950 people to be executed and an additional 193,000 to be sent to the Gulag.source
• 1937August 9 – The Polish Operation of the NKVD (1937–38) is signed by Nikolai Yezhov as a continuation of the Great Purge.source
• 1937October 1 – The Marihuana Tax Act becomes law in the United States.source
• 1938October 2 – Tiberias massacre: Arab raiders murder 19 Jewish immigrants.source
• 1938October 5 – Nuremberg Laws: In Nazi Germany, Jews' passports are invalidated, and those who need a passport for emigration purposes are given one marked with the letter J ("Jude" – "Jew").source
• 1938November 30 – Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, leader of the Romanian fascist Iron Guard, is murdered on the orders of King Carol II of Romania. Officially, Codreanu and the 13 other Iron Guard leaders are "shot while trying to escape".source
• 1938The last Schomburgk's deer in the wild is said to have been killed.source
• 1939January 5 – Pioneering U.S. aviator Amelia Earhart is officially declared dead, eighteen months after her disappearance.source
• 1939May 29 – Albanian fascist leader Tefik Mborja is appointed as member of the Italian Chamber of Fasces and Corporations.source
• 1939June 17 – In the last public execution in France, 6-times murderer Eugen Weidmann is guillotined.source
• 1939November 4 – Stewart Menzies is appointed head of the British Secret Intelligence Service.source
• 1939November 9 – WWII: Venlo Incident: Two British agents of SIS are captured by the Germans.source
• 1939November 17 – WWII: To punish protests against the Nazi occupation of the Czech homeland, the Nazis storm the University of Prague and murder 9 Czech graduate students, send over 1,200 to concentration camps, and close all Czech universities, an event which will be commemorated as International Students' Day.source
• 1940February 2 – Vsevolod Meyerhold is executed in the Soviet Union on charges of treason and espionage. He is cleared of all charges fifteen years later, in the first waves of de-Stalinization.source
• 1940July 27 – Eleven British nationals, including Melville James Cox, are arrested on suspicion of spying for military intelligence by the secret police in Japan. Cox commits suicide in Tokyo on July 29, according to a report by the Japanese Foreign Ministry.source
• 1940August 20 – Leon Trotsky is attacked with an ice axe in his Mexico home by NKVD agent Ramón Mercader.source
• 1940September 12 – In Lascaux, France, 17,000-year-old cave paintings are discovered by a group of young Frenchmen hiking through Southern France. The paintings depict animals, and date to the Stone Age.source
• 1940October 9 – The Lead Singer of The Beatles, John Lennon was born.source
• 1940October 16 – Nazi Governor-General Hans Frank establishes the Warsaw Ghetto.source
• 1940November 16 – An unexploded pipe bomb is found in the Consolidated Edison office building (only in 1957 later is the culprit, former employee George Metesky, apprehended).source
• 1941March 15 – Berlin-based American journalist Richard C. Hottelet is arrested by the Gestapo on "suspicion of espionage", but eventually released in July as part of a prisoner exchange with the U.S.source
• 1941June 28–30 – The Holocaust: Iași pogrom – "At least 13,266" Romanian Jews are massacred by local governmental forces.source
• 1941July 4 – Massacre of Lviv professors: Polish scientists and writers are murdered by Nazi German troops in the occupied Polish city of Lwów.source
• 1941October 5 – The Holocaust: In Berdychiv (Ukraine), 20–30,000 Jews are shot dead.source
• 1941October 18 – Film The Maltese Falcon is released in the United States, starring Humphrey Bogart and directed by John Huston.source
• 1941November 14 – The Holocaust: In Slonim (Byelorussian SSR), German forces engaged in Operation Barbarossa murder 9,000 Jews.source
• 1941December 8 – The Holocaust: The Nazi German Chełmno extermination camp opens in occupied Poland, near the village of Chełmno nad Nerem (Kulmhof) and the first mass gassing of Jews begins here when the SS use gas vans to murder people from the Łódź Ghetto. Between December 1941–April 1943 and June 1944–January 1945, at least 153,000 Jews will be killed in the camp.source
• 1941Adolf Hitler makes his Nacht und Nebel decree, declaring that all political prisoners and those involved in both German resistance to Nazism and resistance to Nazism throughout German-occupied Europe are to be apprehended by the Gestapo, Sicherheitsdienst and other security forces under Heinrich Himmler's control.source
• 1941Raid on Alexandria: Italian Regia Marina divers on human torpedoes place limpet mines on ships of the British Royal Navy Mediterranean Fleet in port at Alexandria, Egypt, disabling battleships Queen Elizabeth and Valiant.source
• 1941The Classic Comics series is launched in the United States, with a version of The Three Musketeers.source
• 1942March 15 – The Holocaust: Dünamünde Action – 1,900 central European Jews are shot dead north east of Riga, 1,840 are killed on the 26th.source
• 1942The Holocaust: the Nazi German extermination camp Sobibór opens in occupied Poland, on the outskirts of the town of Sobibór. Between April 1942 and October 1943, at least 160,000 people are killed here.source
• 1942Bataan Death March: American and Filipino prisoners of war are forced to march from San Fernando to Capas (some 65 miles). During the march some 15,000 soldiers are killed by severe physical abuse and wanton killings.source
• 1942July 16 – The Holocaust: By order of the Vichy France government headed by Pierre Laval, French police officers round-up 13,000–20,000 Jews and imprison them in the Winter Velodrome.source
• 1942Bastille Day Gaullist demonstrations in Vichy France; 2 women are shot dead by members of the fascist French Popular Party (PPF) in Marseille.source
• 1942The SS Robert E. Lee is sunk in the Gulf of Mexico by , which is itself sunk by the escorting patrol craft.source
• 1942August 9 – Indian leader Mohandas Gandhi is arrested in Bombay, by British forces.source
• 1942September 26 – The Holocaust: Nazi official August Frank issues the August Frank memorandum, setting out how the belongings of "evacuated" (i.e. murdered) Jews are to be disposed of.source
• 1942October 28 – Film actor Errol Flynn is accused of statutory rape by two teenage girls.source
• 1942U.S. serviceman Edward Leonski is hanged at Melbourne's Pentridge Prison, for the "Brown-Out" murders of three women in May.source
• 1943January 4 – WWII: Greek-Polish athlete and saboteur Jerzy Iwanow-Szajnowicz is executed by the Germans at Kaisariani.source
• 1943January 22 – The Holocaust: Round up of Marseille begins – Over 4,000 Jews are arrested in Nazi-occupied Marseille as part of "Action Tiger", before being transported to extermination camps in Poland.source
• 1943January 29 – Nazi German police arrest alleged necrophiliac and serial killer Bruno Lüdke.source
• 1943February 22 – Members of the White Rose are executed in Nazi Germany.source
• 1943May 29 – Norman Rockwell's illustration of 'Rosie the Riveter' first appears, on the cover of The Saturday Evening Post.source
• 1943July 10 – The Holocaust: Jedwabne pogrom – At least 340 Polish Jews are marched to a local barn, locked inside and subsequently burned to death.source
• 1943Krasowo-Częstki massacre: The village of Krasowo-Częstki in Nazi-occupied Poland is completely burned and 257 of its inhabitants, mostly women and children, murdered by the Ordnungspolizei and SS in retaliation for German deaths in a skirmish with Polish partisans nearby.source
• 1943October 30 – The Merrie Melodies animated cartoon Falling Hare, one of the only shorts with Bugs Bunny getting out-smarted, is released in the United States.source
• 1944March 4 – Louis Buchalter, the leader of 1930s crime syndicate Murder, Inc., is executed at Sing Sing prison, in Ossining, New York, along with Emanuel Weiss and Louis Capone.source
• 1944March 11 - Resistance leader Joop Westerweel is arrested while returning to the Netherlands, having escorted a group of Jewish children to safety in Spain.source
• 1944March 18 – WWII: The Nazis execute almost 400 prisoners, Soviet citizens and anti-fascist Romanians at Rîbnița.source
• 1944The "Great Escape": 76 Royal Air Force prisoners of war escape by tunnel "Harry" from Stalag Luft III in Silesia this night. Only 3 men (2 Norwegians and a Dutchman) return to the UK; of those recaptured, 50 are summarily executed soon afterwards, in the Stalag Luft III murders.source
• 1944German General Kreipe is kidnapped on Crete, Greece.source
• 1944June 16 – At age 14, African-American teenage boy George Stinney Jr. becomes the youngest person ever executed by electric chair in the United States. His conviction was vacated 70 years later, in 2014, due to him not receiving a fair trial.source
• 1944Joel Brand is intercepted by British agents in Aleppo.source
• 1944July 6 – WWII: At Camp Hood, Texas, future baseball star and 1st Lt. Jackie Robinson is arrested and later court-martialed, for refusing to move to the back of a segregated U.S. Army bus (he is eventually acquitted).source
• 1944August 31 – The Mad Gasser of Mattoon apparently resumes his mysterious attacks in Mattoon, Illinois for two weeks.source
• 1944Sant'Anna di Stazzema massacre: The Waffen-SS and Black Brigades paramilitaries murder about 560 civilians and refugees (including more than 100 children) in the Italian village of Sant'Anna di Stazzema, burn their bodies, and leave their houses semi-derelict.source
• 1944168 captured Allied airmen, including Phil Lamason, accused of being "terror fliers" by the Gestapo, arrive at Buchenwald concentration camp, where they form the KLB Club.source
• 1944The Holocaust: A tip from a Dutch informer leads the Gestapo to a sealed-off area in an Amsterdam warehouse, where they find Jewish diarist Anne Frank, her family, and others in hiding. All will die in captivity, except for Otto Frank, Anne's father.source
• 1944September 2 – The last execution of a Finn in Finland will take place when soldier Olavi Laiho is executed by shooting in Oulu.source
• 1944October 7 – The Holocaust: Members of the Sonderkommando – a special detachment of Jewish prisoners who are forced to empty the gas chambers after a mass gassing and undertake the burning of the bodies – organises the only armed revolt that ever takes place in Auschwitz concentration camp. They succeed in destroying the gas chambers and Crematorium IV. The Waffen-SS murders more than 450 prisoners who take part in the revolt.source
• 1944October 10 – The Holocaust/Porajmos: 800 Romani children are systematically murdered at the Auschwitz concentration camp.source
• 1944October 14 – WWII: German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel commits forced suicide rather than face public disgrace and execution for allegedly conspiring against Adolf Hitler.source
• 1944October 31 – Serial killer Dr Marcel Petiot is apprehended at a Paris Métro station after 7 months on the run.source
• 1944The Home Guard (United Kingdom) is stood down.source
• 1945Chenogne massacre: German prisoners are allegedly killed by American forces near the village of Chenogne, Belgium.source
• 1945February 9 – Walter Ulbricht becomes leader of the German Communists in Moscow.source
• 1945March 8 – Nazi authorities kill 117 Dutch men in reprisal for the attempted murder of Hanns Albin Rauter.source
• 1945April 9 – Johann Georg Elser, would-be assassin of Adolf Hitler, is executed at Dachau concentration camp.source
• 1945April 9 – Abwehr conspirators Wilhelm Canaris, Hans Oster and Hans von Dohnányi are hanged at Flossenbürg concentration camp, along with pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer and other people associated with resistance groups.source
• 1945April 18 – American war correspondent Ernie Pyle is killed by Japanese machine gun fire on the island of Ie Shima off Okinawa.source
• 1945April 28 – The bodies of Benito Mussolini, his mistress, Clara Petacci, and other followers are hung by their heels at a gas station in the public square of Milan, Piazzale Loreto, following their execution by Italian partisans after an attempt to flee the country.source
• 1945May 23 – The Flensburg Government is dissolved by the Allies, and German president Karl Dönitz and German chancellor Lutz Graf Schwerin von Krosigk are arrested by British RAF Regiment personnel at Flensburg. They are respectively the last German head of state and head of government until 1949.source
• 1945May 23 – Heinrich Himmler, former head of the Nazi SS, commits suicide in British custody.source
• 1945May 28 – U.S.-born Irish-raised William Joyce ("Lord Haw-Haw") is captured on the German border. He is later charged in London with high treason for his earlier English-language wartime broadcasts from German radio, convicted, and then hanged in January 1946.source
• 1945May 29 – Dutch painter Han van Meegeren is arrested for collaboration with the Nazis, but the "Dutch Golden Age" paintings he has sold to Hermann Göring (Koch) are later proved to be his own fakes.source
• 1945German Protestant theologian Gerhard Kittel is arrested by the French forces in Tübingen, Germany.source
• 1945Expatriate American poet Ezra Pound is arrested by the Italian resistance movement but soon released by them as of no interest; on May 5 he turns himself in to the United States Army and is imprisoned as a traitor.source
• 1945Interpol (being headquartered in Berlin) effectively ceases to exist (it is recreated on June 3, 1946).source
• 1945A Japanese fire balloon kills six people, Elsie Mitchell and five children, near Bly, Oregon, when it explodes as they drag it from the woods. These are the only people killed by an enemy attack on the American mainland during WWII.source
• 1945August 11 – The Holocaust: Kraków pogrom – Róża Berger is shot dead by Polish militia.source
• 1945September 5 – Iva Toguri D'Aquino, a Japanese American suspected of being wartime radio propagandist "Tokyo Rose", is arrested in Yokohama.source
• 1945September 5 – Russian code clerk Igor Gouzenko comes forward with numerous documents implicating the Soviet Union in many spy rings in North America, both in the United States and in Canada.source
• 1945September 10 – Vidkun Quisling is sentenced to death for being a Nazi collaborator in Norway.source
• 1945October 9 – Former prime minister Pierre Laval is sentenced to death, for collaboration with the Nazis in Vichy France.source
• 1945October 24 – Norwegian Nazi leader Vidkun Quisling is executed by firing squad, for treason against Norway.source
• 1945October 29 – At Gimbels Department Store in New York City, the first ballpoint pens go on sale at $12.50 each.source
• 1945November 20 – The Nuremberg trials begin: Trials against 22 Nazis for war crimes of World War II start at the Palace of Justice, Nuremberg.source
• 1945December 1 – German general Anton Dostler is executed by firing squad in Italy for the war crime of ordering the summary execution of captured U.S. commandos. The U.S. military tribunal which has tried him has not accepted his plea of "superior orders", setting a precedent for future Allied war crimes trials.source
• 1946January 22 – The National Intelligence Authority, and its operational arm, the Central Intelligence Group, are established in the United States; these become part of the Central Intelligence Agency in 1947.source
• 1946April 29 – Trials against war criminals begin in Tokyo; the accused include Hideki Tojo, Shigenori Tōgō and Hiroshi Ōshima.source
• 1946June 1 – Ion Antonescu, prime minister and "Conducator" (Leader) of Romania during World War II, is executed: he was found guilty of betraying the Romanian people for the benefit of Germany and sentenced to death by the Bucharest People's Tribunal.source
• 1946October 15 – Nuremberg trials: Hermann Göring, founder of the Gestapo and recently convicted Nazi war criminal, poisons himself two hours before his scheduled execution.source
• 1946October 16 – The remaining ten Nazi war criminals sentenced to death at the Nuremberg trials are executed by hanging, in a gymnasium in the Palace of Justice, Nuremberg.source
• 1946December 22 – The Havana Conference begins between U.S. organized crime bosses in Havana, Cuba.source
• 1946The first female police officers are hired in Korea and Japan.source
• 1947January 15 – Elizabeth Short, an aspiring actress nicknamed the "Black Dahlia", is found brutally murdered in a vacant lot in Los Angeles; the mysterious case is never solved.source
• 1947March 31 – The leaders of the Kurdish People's Republic of Mahabad, the second Kurdish state in the history of Iran, are hanged at Chuwarchira Square in Mahabad, after the state has been overrun by the Iranian army.source
• 1947November 16 – In Brussels, 15,000 people demonstrate against the relatively short prison sentences of Belgian Nazi criminals.source
• 1947November 17 – The Screen Actors Guild implements an anti-Communist loyalty oath.source
• 1947November 27 – In Paris, France, police occupy the editorial offices of the communist newspapers.source
• 1948January 26 – Teigin poison case: a man masquerading as a doctor poisons 12 of 16 bank employees of the Tokyo branch of Imperial Bank and takes the money; artist Sadamichi Hirasawa is later sentenced to death for the crime, but is never executed.source
• 1948March 17 – The Hells Angels motorcycle gang is founded in California.source
• 1948May 15 – The murder of June Anne Devaney a 3-year-old girl in Blackburn, England. To solve the crime, officers take 46,253 sets of fingerprints before identifying her murderer.source
• 1948July 15 – The first London chapter of Alcoholics Anonymous is founded.source
• 1948Eugene Dennis, William Z. Foster and ten other Communist Party USA leaders are arrested and charged under the Alien Registration Act.source
• 1948August 3 – Whittaker Chambers appears under subpoena before the HUAC and alleges that several former U.S. Federal officials were communists, including Harry Dexter White and Alger Hiss.source
• 1948August 5 – Alger Hiss appears before the HUAC, to deny the allegations of Whittaker Chambers.source
• 1948August 13 – Harry Dexter White and Donald Hiss refute allegations of Communism by Whittaker Chambers, before the HUAC.source
• 1948November 1 – The Foley Square trial of Eugene Dennis and ten other CPUSA leaders begins, in New York City.source
• 1948December 15 – The United States Department of Justice indicts Alger Hiss, on two counts of perjury.source
• 1948December 26 – Cardinal József Mindszenty is arrested in Hungary and accused of treason and conspiracy.source
• 1949May 31 – The first trial of Alger Hiss for perjury begins in New York City, with Whittaker Chambers as principal witness for the prosecution.source
• 1949June 8 – Second Red Scare in the United States: Celebrities including Helen Keller, Dorothy Parker, Danny Kaye, Fredric March, John Garfield, Paul Muni and Edward G. Robinson are named as Communist Party members in a Federal Bureau of Investigation report.source
• 1949September 6 – Howard Unruh, a World War II veteran, kills 13 neighbors in Camden, New Jersey with a souvenir Parabellum P.08 pistol, to become America's first single-episode mass murderer.source
• 1949September 9 – Notorious World War II veteran Edwin Alonzo Boyd commits his first career bank robbery, in Toronto.source
• 1949September 24 – László Rajk, ex-foreign minister of Hungary, is sentenced to death.source
• 1949September 29 – Iva Toguri D'Aquino is found guilty in the United States of broadcasting for Japan as "Tokyo Rose" at the end of World War II.source
• 1949October 14 – The Foley Square trial of Eugene Dennis and ten other leaders of the Communist Party USA ends in New York City (the longest trial in U.S. history to this date); all defendants are found guilty and all but one sentenced to five years of prison.source
• 1949November 17 – The second trial of Alger Hiss for perjury begins in New York, again with Whittaker Chambers as principal witness.source
• 1949December 14 – Traicho Kostov, who until March was acting president of the Council of Ministers of Bulgaria, is sentenced to death for anti-Communist Party activity.source
• 1950January 1 – The International Police Association (IPA) – the largest police organization in the world – is formed.source
• 1950January 21 – In the United States, suspected spy Alger Hiss is convicted on two counts of perjury.source
• 1950February 8 – The Stasi is founded in East Germany, and acts as a secret police until 1990.source
• 1950March 1 – Klaus Fuchs is convicted in London of spying against both Britain and the United States for the Soviet Union, by giving to the latter top secret atomic bomb data.source
• 1950May 8 – Tollund Man is unearthed in Denmark.source
• 1950May 11 – The Kefauver Committee hearings into U.S. organized crime begin.source
• 1950November 13 – The President of Venezuela, Colonel Carlos Delgado Chalbaud, is kidnapped and murdered in Caracas.source
• 1950Raid Pyrénéen, a French timed bicycle challenge, is first staged.source
• 1951January 15 – In a criminal court in West Germany, Ilse Koch, The "Witch of Buchenwald", wife of the commandant of the Buchenwald concentration camp, is sentenced to life imprisonment.source
• 1951February 19 – Jean Lee becomes the last woman hanged in Australia, when she and her two pimps are hanged for the murder and torture of a 73-year-old bookmaker.source
• 1951March 6 – The trial of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for conspiracy to commit espionage begins in the United States.source
• 1951March 29 – Second Red Scare: In the United States, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage. On April 5 they are sentenced to death.source
• 1951June 7 – Nazi war criminal Otto Ohlendorf is hanged at Landsberg Prison, Bavaria.source
• 1951July 26 – The first birch bark manuscript is discovered in Novgorod.source
• 1952April 9 – Santa Teresa Church tragedy: 50 people are trampled to death in the Basilica of St. Teresa, Caracas, Venezuela, after someone shouts "Fire!"; 40 people are arrested in connection with the crush.source
• 1952August 12 – Night of the Murdered Poets: 13 Soviet Jewish poets are executed.source
• 1953January 15 – Georg Dertinger, foreign minister of East Germany, is arrested for spying.source
• 1953January 15 – British security forces in West Germany arrest 7 members of the Naumann Circle, a clandestine Neo-Nazi organization.source
• 1953March 8 – The Thieves World, which has been transformed into the Russian mafia, are freed from prisons by the Malenkov regime, ending the Bitch Wars.source
• 1953April 8 – Jomo Kenyatta is sentenced to 7 years in prison for the alleged organization of the Mau Mau Uprising in the British Kenya Colony.source
• 1953August 17 – The first planning session of Narcotics Anonymous is held in Southern California (see October 5).source
• 1953October 5 – The first meeting of Narcotics Anonymous is held (the first planning session was held August 17).source
• 1953December 23 – The Soviet Union announces officially that Lavrentiy Beria has been executed.source
• 1954January 15 – Mau Mau leader Waruhiu Itote is captured in Kenya.source
• 1954March 28 – The trial of A. L. Zissu and 12 other Zionist leaders ends with harsh sentences in Communist Romania.source
• 1954June 22 – Parker–Hulme murder case: Pauline Parker, 16 and her friend Juliet Hulme, 15, bludgeon Parker's mother to death using a brick, at Victoria Park in New Zealand.source
• 1954July 15 – Juan Fangio, Argentine driver for German Grand Prix team Mercedes-Benz, makes a new fastest lap of the Silverstone Circuit in England, with an average speed of 100.35 mph, the previous record being 100.16 mph.source
• 1954August 24 – Brazilian president Getúlio Vargas commits suicide, after being accused of involvement in a conspiracy to murder his chief political opponent, Carlos Lacerda.source
• 1954December 3 – A German court dismisses charges against Werner Naumann, head of the Neo-Nazi Naumann Circle.source
• 1954The case of Lothar Malskat, who had admitted that he had painted the supposedly antique frescoes in Marienkirche himself, goes to trial.source
• 1955July 13 – Ruth Ellis is hanged for murder in London, becoming the last woman ever to be executed in the United Kingdom.source
• 1955August 28 – Black 14-year-old Emmett Till is lynched and shot in the head for allegedly whistling at a white woman in Money, Mississippi; his white murderers, Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam, are acquitted by an all-white jury.source
• 1955September 24 – Founder of Swiss watchmaker Glycine Watch SA, Eugène Meylan, age 64, is murdered.source
• 1955October 4 – The Reverend Sun Myung Moon is released from prison in Seoul, South Korea.source
• 1955December 1 – In Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks refuses to obey bus driver James F. Blake's order that she give up her seat to make room for a white passenger, and is arrested, leading to the Montgomery bus boycott.source
• 1956February 11 – British spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean resurface in the Soviet Union, after being missing for 5 years.source
• 1956June 4 – Montgomery bus boycott: The related civil suit is heard in federal district court; the U.S. Supreme Court will uphold the ruling in November.source
• 1956June 13 – The International Criminal Police Organization adopts Interpol as its official name.source
• 1956June 21 – Playwright Arthur Miller appears before the House Un-American Activities Committee in Washington, D.C.source
• 1956November 13 – Browder v. Gayle: The United States Supreme Court declares illegal the state and municipal laws requiring segregated buses in Montgomery, Alabama, thus ending the Montgomery bus boycott.source
• 1956November 18 – At a reception for Western ambassadors at the Polish embassy in Moscow, Nikita Khrushchev utters his famous phrase "We will bury you".source
• 1956November 20 – In Yugoslavia, former prime minister Milovan Đilas is arrested after he criticizes Josip Broz Tito.source
• 1956December 19 – British doctor John Bodkin Adams is arrested for the murder of 2 patients in Eastbourne, England; he will be acquitted.source
• 1957February 18 – The last person to be executed in New Zealand, Walter James Bolton, is hanged at Mount Eden Prison for poisoning his wife.source
• 1957April 17 – Suspected English serial killer Dr John Bodkin Adams is found not guilty of murder, at the Old Bailey.source
• 1957Albeit the practice was in decline since the late 19th Century, and illegal since 1912, the very last new case of Chinese foot binding was reported this year.source
• 1957Mao Zedong admits that 800,000 "class enemies" had been summarily liquidated in China between 1949 and 1954.source
• 1958June 16 – Imre Nagy and other leaders of the failed Hungarian Revolution of 1956 are hanged for treason, following secret trials.source
• 1959February 18 – Jesús Sosa Blanco, a colonel in the Cuban army of Fulgencio Batista, is executed in Cuba after being convicted of committing 108 murders for Batista.source
• 1959June 23 – Convicted Manhattan Project spy Klaus Fuchs is released after nine years in a British prison and allowed to emigrate to Dresden, East Germany where he resumes a scientific career.source
• 1959October 29 – First appearance of Astérix the Gaul, in a French comic magazine.source
• 1959November 15 – The brutal Clutter family murders are committed in Holcomb, Kansas, inspiring Truman Capote's In Cold Blood (1966).source
• 1960April 9 – White gunman David Pratt shoots South African Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd in Johannesburg, wounding him seriously.source
• 1960May 11 – In Buenos Aires, four Mossad agents abduct fugitive Nazi German war criminal Adolf Eichmann in order that he can be taken to Israel and put on trial. This is announced on May 23 by Prime Minister of Israel David Ben-Gurion.source
• 1960June 5 – The Lake Bodom murders occur in Finland.source
• 1960August 17 – The trial of American U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers begins in Moscow.source
• 1960Cold War: American U-2 pilot Francis Gary Powers is sentenced in Moscow to 10 years in prison for espionage.source
• 1960December 1 – Patrice Lumumba, deposed premier of the Republic of the Congo, is arrested by the troops of Colonel Joseph Mobutu.source
• 1961January 9 – British authorities announce they have uncovered a large Soviet spy ring, the Portland spy ring, in London.source
• 1961February 13 – The Congo government announces that villagers have killed Patrice Lumumba.source
• 1961April 11 – The trial of Nazi Adolf Eichmann begins in Jerusalem.source
• 1961May 8 – British intelligence officer George Blake is sentenced to 42 years imprisonment for spying, having been found guilty of being a double agent in the pay of the Soviet Union, the longest non-life sentence ever handed down by a British court.source
• 1961May 24 – Civil rights movement: Freedom Riders are arrested in Jackson, Mississippi for "disturbing the peace", after disembarking from their bus.source
• 1961May 30 – Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, ruler of the Dominican Republic since 1930, is killed in an ambush.source
• 1961June 22 – Moise Tshombe is released for lack of evidence of his connection to the murder of Patrice Lumumba.source
• 1961August 21 – Jomo Kenyatta is released from prison in Kenya.source
• 1961October 12 – The death penalty is abolished in New Zealand.source
• 1961October 31 – Joseph Stalin's body is removed from the Lenin Mausoleum in Moscow.source
• 1961November 11 – Congolese soldiers murder 13 Italian United Nations pilots.source
• 1961December 11 – Adolf Eichmann is pronounced guilty of crimes against humanity for his part in The Holocaust by a war crimes tribunal of three Israeli judges. On December 15 he is sentenced to death.source
• 1961December 30 – Congolese troops capture Albert Kalonji of South Kasai (who soon escapes).source
• 1962February 12 – Six members of the Committee of 100 of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the U.K. are found guilty of a breach of the Official Secrets Act.source
• 1962March 24 – OAS leader Edmond Jouhaud is arrested in Oran.source
• 1962April 7 – Milovan Đilas, author and former vice-president of Yugoslavia is re-arrested.source
• 1962April 13 – OAS leader Edmond Jouhaud is sentenced to death in France.source
• 1962April 14 – A Cuban military tribunal convicts 1,179 Bay of Pigs attackers.source
• 1962April 20 – OAS leader Raoul Salan is arrested in Algiers.source
• 1962May 14 – Milovan Đilas is given a further sentence in Yugoslavia, for publishing Conversations with Stalin.source
• 1962May 23 – Raoul Salan, founder of the French terrorist Organisation armée secrète, is sentenced to life imprisonment in France.source
• 1962June 12 – Alcatraz escape attempt: Frank Morris, John Anglin and Clarence Anglin escape from the Alcatraz Island prison in the United States; it is never confirmed that they make it ashore.source
• 1962August 5 – Anti-apartheid activist Nelson Mandela is arrested by the South African government near Howick, and charged with incitement to rebellion. On November 7, he is sentenced to imprisonment.source
• 1962August 17 – East German border guards kill 18-year-old Peter Fechter as he attempts to cross the Berlin Wall into West Berlin, leading to mass protests on the Western side.source
• 1962October 22 – John Vassall, a former clerical officer in British naval intelligence, is sentenced to 18 years imprisonment after admitting to passing secret material to the Soviet Union.source
• 1962October 26 – Spiegel affair: German police occupy the offices of Der Spiegel in Hamburg.source
• 1962November 1 – The comic book antihero Diabolik first appears in Italy.source
• 1962November 2 – Greville Wynne, a British trader acting as a courier for MI6, is arrested by the KGB in Budapest and imprisoned in Moscow after confessing to espionage.source
• 1962November 5 – West German defense minister Franz Josef Strauß is relieved of his duties over the Spiegel affair due to his alleged involvement in police action against the magazine.source
• 1962November 26 – Spiegel affair: German police end their occupation of the offices of Der Spiegel.source
• 1962December 14 – Leonardo da Vinci's early 16th-century painting the Mona Lisa is assessed for insurance purposes at US$100 million before touring the United States for several months, the highest insurance value for a painting in history. However, the Louvre, its owner, chooses to spend the money that would have been spent on the insurance premium on security instead.source
• 1963April 16 – Martin Luther King, Jr. issues his "Letter from Birmingham Jail".source
• 1963April 20 – In Quebec, Canada, members of the terrorist group Front de libération du Québec bomb a Canadian Army recruitment center, killing night watchman Wilfred V. O'Neill.source
• 1963June 20 – Swedish Air Force Colonel Stig Wennerström is arrested as a spy for the Soviet Union.source
• 1963August 8 – The Great Train Robbery takes place in Buckinghamshire, England.source
• 1963September 10 – Sicilian Mafia boss Bernardo Provenzano is indicted for murder (he is captured 43 years later, on April 11, 2006).source
• 1964February 25 – Cassius Clay (later Muhammad Ali) beats Sonny Liston in Miami Beach, Florida, and is crowned the heavyweight champion of the world.source
• 1964April 16 – In the Assize Court at Buckingham, England, sentences totalling 307 years are passed on twelve men who stole £2,600,000 in used bank notes, after holding up the night train from Glasgow to London in August 1963 – a heist that becomes known as the Great Train Robbery.source
• 1964April 20 – British businessman Greville Wynne, imprisoned in Moscow since 1963 for spying, is exchanged for Soviet spy Gordon Lonsdale.source
• 1964April 25 – Thieves steal the head of the Little Mermaid statue in Copenhagen, Denmark. Although the attack is attributed to Jørgen Nash, the Danish media blame painter Henrik Bruun, who never confesses to the crime.source
• 1964May 2 – Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore, hitchhiking in Meadville, Mississippi, are kidnapped, beaten and murdered by members of the Ku Klux Klan. Their badly decomposed bodies are found by chance in July during the search for missing activists Chaney, Goodman, and Schwerner.source
• 1964May 7 – At a mail rockets demonstration by Gerhard Zucker on Hasselkopf Mountain near Braunlage (Lower Saxonia, Germany), three people are killed by a rocket explosion.source
• 1964May 23 – Madeline Dassault, 63, wife of a French plane manufacturer and politician, is kidnapped while leaving her car in front of her Paris home; she is found unharmed the next day in a farmhouse 27 mi km from Paris.source
• 1964June 12 – Nelson Mandela and 7 others are sentenced to life imprisonment in South Africa, and sent to the Robben Island prison.source
• 1964August 8 – A Rolling Stones gig in Scheveningen gets out of control. Riot police end the gig after about fifteen minutes, upon which spectators start to fight the riot police.source
• 1964August 13 – The last judicial hangings in the United Kingdom take place when murderers Gwynne Owen Evans and Peter Anthony Allen are executed in Manchester and Liverpool respectively.source
• 1964September 2 – Indian Hungry generation poets, including Malay Roy Choudhury, are arrested on charges of conspiracy against the state and obscenity in literature.source
• 1964October 1 – Three thousand student activists at the University of California, Berkeley, surround and block a police car from taking a CORE volunteer arrested for not showing his ID, when he violated a ban on outdoor activist card tables. This protest eventually explodes into the Berkeley Free Speech Movement.source
• 1964October 26 – Eric Edgar Cooke becomes the last man executed in Western Australia, for murdering 8 citizens in Perth between 1959 and 1963.source
• 1964October 29 – A collection of irreplaceable gemstones, including the 565 carat g Star of India, is stolen from the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.source
• 1965February 21 – Malcolm X is gunned down while giving a speech at the Audubon Ballroom in Harlem.source
• 1965August 19 – At the conclusion of the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, 66 ex-SS personnel receive life sentences, 15 others shorter ones.source
• 1965August 31 – U.S. President Johnson signs a law penalizing the burning of draft cards with up to 5 years in prison and a $1,000 fine.source
• 1965September 18 – In Denmark, Palle Sørensen shoots 4 policemen in pursuit; he is apprehended the same day.source
• 1965October 6 – Ian Brady, a 27-year-old stock clerk from Hyde in Cheshire, is arrested for allegedly hacking to death (with a hatchet) 17-year-old apprentice electrician Edward Evans at a house on the Hattersley housing estate. He and his girlfriend Myra Hindley are subsequently identified as the perpetrators of the "Moors murders" of four young people aged from 10 to 16.source
• 1965October 8 – Indonesian mass killings of 1965–1966: The Indonesian army instigates the arrest and execution of communists which last until next March.source
• 1965October 15 – Vietnam War: The Catholic Worker Movement stages an anti-war protest in Manhattan. One draft card burner is arrested, the first under the new law.source
• 1966March 20 – Football's FIFA World Cup Trophy is stolen while on exhibition in London; it is found seven days later by a mongrel dog named "Pickles" and his owner David Corbett, wrapped in newspaper in a south London garden.source
• 1966April 19 – Moors murders: Ian Brady and Myra Hindley go on trial at Chester Crown Court in north west England for the murders of 3 children who vanished between November 1963 and October 1965.source
• 1966May 6 – The Moors murders trial ends in the UK with Ian Brady being found guilty on all three counts of murder and sentenced to three concurrent terms of life imprisonment. Myra Hindley is convicted on two counts of murder and of being an accessory in the third murder committed by Brady, receiving two concurrent terms of life imprisonment and a seven-year fixed term for being an accessory.source
• 1966May 19 – Gertrude Baniszewski is found guilty of torturing and murdering 16-year-old Sylvia Likens in Indianapolis, United States, and is sentenced to life in prison (she is released on parole in December 1985).source
• 1966June 2 – Four former cabinet ministers including Évariste Kimba are executed in the Democratic Republic of the Congo for alleged involvement in a plot to kill Mobutu Sese Seko.source
• 1966June 6 – Civil rights activist James Meredith is shot by a sniper while traversing Mississippi in the March Against Fear.source
• 1966June 13 – Miranda v. Arizona: The Supreme Court of the United States rules that the police must inform suspects of their rights before questioning them.source
• 1966July 3 – 31 people are arrested when a demonstration by approximately 4,000 anti-Vietnam War protesters in front of the United States Embassy in London in Grosvenor Square turns violent.source
• 1966July 13 – In Chicago, United States, Richard Speck breaks into a nurses' dormitory and murders eight of the nine student nurses who live there.source
• 1966September 6 – South African Prime Minister Hendrik Verwoerd is stabbed to death in Parliament by Dimitri Tsafendas.source
• 1966September 30 – Baldur von Schirach and Albert Speer are released from Spandau Prison in West Berlin.source
• 1966October 21 – Aberfan disaster in South Wales (U.K.): 144 (including 116 children) are killed by a collapsing coal spoil tip.source
• 1966December 31 – Eight paintings worth millions of pounds are stolen from Dulwich Picture Gallery in London, but are recovered locally within a week.source
• 1967January 23 – In Munich, the trial begins of Wilhelm Harster, accused of the murder of 82,856 Jews (including Anne Frank) when he led German security police during the German occupation of the Netherlands. He is eventually sentenced to 15 years in prison.source
• 1967February 3 – Ronald Ryan becomes the last man hanged in Australia, for murdering a guard while escaping from prison in December 1965.source
• 1967March 1 – Brazilian police arrest Franz Stangl, ex-commander of Treblinka and Sobibór extermination camps.source
• 1967March 13 – Moise Tshombe, ex-prime minister of Congo, is sentenced to death in absentia.source
• 1967March 21 – Charles Manson is released from Terminal Island. Telling the authorities that prison had become his home, he requested permission to stay. Upon his release, he relocates to San Francisco where he spends the Summer of Love.source
• 1967March 26 – Jim Thompson, co-founder of the Thai Silk Company, disappears from the Cameron Highlands.source
• 1967May 18 – Tennessee Governor Ellington repeals the "Monkey Law" (officially the Butler Act; see the Scopes Trial).source
• 1967June 2 – Protests in West Berlin against the arrival of the Shah of Iran turn into fights, during which 27-year-old student Benno Ohnesorg is killed by a police officer. His death results in the founding of the terrorist group 2 June Movement.source
• 1967June 26 – The Buffalo Race Riot begins, lasting until July 1, and leads to over 180 arrests.source
• 1967June 30 – Moise Tshombe, former president of Katanga and former prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, is kidnapped and taken to Algeria.source
• 1967September 1 – Ilse Koch, known as the "Witch of Buchenwald", commits suicide in the Bavarian prison of Aichach.source
• 1967October 8 – Guerrilla leader Che Guevara and his men are captured in Bolivia; they are executed the following day.source
• 1967October 16 – Thirty-nine people, including singer-activist Joan Baez, are arrested in Oakland, California, for blocking the entrance of that city's military induction center.source
• 1967October 26 – U.S. Navy pilot John McCain is shot down over North Vietnam and taken prisoner. His capture is confirmed two days later, and he remains a prisoner of war for more than five years.source
• 1967November 15 – General Georgios Grivas and his 10,000 strong Greek Army division are forced to leave Cyprus, after 24 Turkish Cypriot civilians are killed by the Greek Cypriot National Guard in the villages of Kophinou and Ayios Theodhoros; relations sour between Nicosia and Athens. Turkey flies sorties into Greek territory, and masses troops in Thrace on her border with Greece.source
• 1967November 17 – French author Régis Debray is sentenced to 30 years imprisonment in Bolivia. (He will be released in 1970 after less than three years imprisonment.)source
• 1967December 5 – In New York City, Benjamin Spock and Allen Ginsberg are arrested for protesting against the Vietnam War.source
• 1967December 9 – Jim Morrison is arrested on stage in New Haven, Connecticut for attempting to spark a riot in the audience during a concert.source
• 1967Gunsmoke, after 12 seasons and with declining ratings, almost gets cancelled, but protests from viewers, network affiliates and even members of Congress and especially William S. Paley, the head of the network, lead the network to move the series from its longtime late Saturday time slot to early Mondays for the fall—displacing Gilligan's Island, which initially had been renewed for a fourth season but is cancelled instead. Gunsmoke would remain on CBS until 1975.source
• 1968February 1 – Vietnam War: Execution of Nguyễn Văn Lém – A Viet Cong officer is summarily executed by Nguyễn Ngọc Loan, a South Vietnamese National Police Chief. The event is photographed by Eddie Adams. The photo makes headlines around the world, eventually winning the 1969 Pulitzer Prize, and sways U.S. public opinion against the war.source
• 1968March 6 – Un-recognized Rhodesia executes 3 black citizens, the first executions since UDI, prompting international condemnation.source
• 1968April 2 – Bombs explode at midnight in two department stores in Frankfurt-am-Main; Andreas Baader and Gudrun Ensslin are later arrested and sentenced for arson.source
• 1968April 11 – German left-wing students blockade the Springer Press headquarters in Berlin and many are arrested (one of them Ulrike Meinhof).source
• 1968June 3 – Radical feminist Valerie Solanas shoots Andy Warhol at his New York City studio, The Factory; he survives after a 5-hour operation.source
• 1968June 20 – Austin Currie, Member of the Parliament of Northern Ireland, along with others, squats in a house in Caledon to protest discrimination in housing allocations.source
• 1968July 23–28 – Black militants led by Fred (Ahmed) Evans engage in a fierce gunfight with police in the Glenville Shootout of Cleveland, Ohio, in the United States, leaving 7 people killed.source
• 1968July 26 – Vietnam War: South Vietnamese opposition leader Trương Đình Dzu is sentenced to 5 years hard labor for advocating the formation of a coalition government as a way to move toward an end to the war.source
• 1968December 10 – Japan's biggest heist, the never-solved "300 million yen robbery", occurs in Tokyo.source
• 1968December 20 – The first known Zodiac Killer murder takes place in Lake Herman Road, Vallejo, California.source
• 1969January 27 – Fourteen men, 9 of them Jews, are executed in Baghdad for spying for Israel.source
• 1969March 3 – In a Los Angeles court, Sirhan Sirhan admits that he killed presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy.source
• 1969April 9 – Fermín Monasterio Pérez is murdered by ETA in Biscay, Spain; the 4th victim in the name of Basque nationalism.source
• 1969August 4 – The Zodiac Killer adopts his persona in a letter in which he introduces himself with the phrase, "This is the Zodiac speaking."source
• 1969August 9 – On orders from Charles Manson, members of the Manson Family invade the Los Angeles home of film director Roman Polanski, and murder his pregnant wife, the actress Sharon Tate, and four others.source
• 1969August 10 – A day after murdering Sharon Tate and four others, members of the Manson Family kill Leno and Rosemary LaBianca in Los Angeles.source
• 1969August 29 – A Trans World Airlines flight from Rome to Tel Aviv is hijacked and diverted to Syria.source
• 1969October 11 – The Zodiac Killer shoots and kills taxi driver Paul Stine in the Presidio Heights neighborhood of San Francisco; this is the serial killer's last known murder.source
• 1969October 18th - Carravagio's Nativity with Saint Francis and Saint Lawrence is stolen from the oratory of San Lorenzo in Palermo, Sicily.source
• 1969December 6 – Meredith Hunter is stabbed to death by Hells Angels at the Altamont Free Concert, an event which came to be viewed as the end of the hippie era and the de facto conclusion of late-1960s American youth culture.source
• 1969December 24 – Charles Manson is allowed to defend himself at the Tate-LaBianca murder trial.source
• 1970April 4 – Fragments of burnt human remains believed to be those of Adolf Hitler, Eva Braun, Joseph Goebbels, Magda Goebbels and the Goebbels children are crushed and scattered in the Biederitz river at a KGB center in Magdeburg, East Germany.source
• 1970June 1 – Assassination of Pedro Eugenio Aramburu: Former de facto President of Argentina is extrajudicially executed by Montoneros three days after being kidnapped from his Buenos Aires apartment.source
• 1970September 6 – Dawson's Field hijackings: The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hijacks four passenger aircraft from Pan Am, TWA and Swissair on flights to New York from Brussels, Frankfurt and Zurich and flies them to a desert airstrip in Jordan.source
• 1970September 29 – In Berlin, Red Army Faction members rob three banks, with loot totaling over DM 200,000.source
• 1970October 5 – The Front de libération du Québec (FLQ) kidnaps British trade commissioner James Cross in Montreal and demands release of all imprisoned FLQ members, beginning Quebec's October Crisis. The next day the Canadian government announces that it will not meet the demand.source
• 1970October 10 – October Crisis: In Montreal, Quebec Minister of Labour Pierre Laporte becomes the second statesman kidnapped by members of the FLQ terrorist group.source
• 1970October 17 – October Crisis: Quebec politician Pierre Laporte is found murdered by the FLQ in south Montreal.source
• 1970December 1 – The Basque ETA (separatist group) kidnaps West German Eugen Beihl in San Sebastián.source
• 1970December 3 – Burgos Trial: In Burgos, Spain, the trial of 16 Basque terrorism suspects begins.source
• 1970December 3 – October Crisis: In Montreal, kidnapped British trade commissioner James Cross is released by the Front de libération du Québec terrorist group after being held hostage for 60 days. Police negotiate his release and in return the Government of Canada grants 5 terrorists from the FLQ's Chenier Cell their request for safe passage to Cuba.source
• 1970December 7 – Giovanni Enrico Bucher, the Swiss ambassador to Brazil, is kidnapped in Rio de Janeiro; kidnappers demand the release of 70 political prisoners.source
• 1970December 22 – Franz Stangl, the ex-commander of Treblinka extermination camp, is sentenced to life imprisonment.source
• 1970December 25 – ETA releases Eugen Beihl in Spain.source
• 1970December 28 – The suspected killers of Pierre Laporte, Jacques and Paul Rose and Francis Sunard, are arrested near Montreal.source
• 1970Sammlung zeitgenössischer Kunst der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, the Federal collection of contemporary art, is established in Germany.source
• 1971January 1 – Fifth Street Women's Building Takeover: A coalition of over 100 feminists illegally occupy an abandoned city building in New York City. They establish a women's center, homeless shelter, food co-operative, and lesbian center before being raided by police 13 days later.source
• 1971January 8 – Tupamaros kidnap Geoffrey Jackson, British ambassador to Uruguay, in Montevideo, keeping him captive until September.source
• 1971January 9 – Uruguayan president Jorge Pacheco Areco demands emergency powers for 90 days due to kidnappings, and receives them the next day.source
• 1971January 25 – In Los Angeles, Charles Manson and 3 female "Family" members are found guilty of the 1969 Tate–LaBianca murders.source
• 1971March 26 – Sheikh Mujibur Rahman is arrested by the Pakistan army.source
• 1971March 29 – A Los Angeles jury recommends the death penalty for Charles Manson and female followers Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel and Leslie Van Houten.source
• 1971April 19 – Charles Manson is sentenced to death in the United States; in 1972, the sentence for all California death-row inmates will be commuted to life imprisonment.source
• 1971April 20 – Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education: The Supreme Court of the United States rules unanimously that busing of students may be ordered to achieve racial desegregation.source
• 1971May 15 – Israeli ambassador to Turkey Efraim Elrom is kidnapped; he is found killed in Istanbul May 25.source
• 1971May 26 – Qantas agrees to pay $500,000 to bomb hoaxer/extortionist Mr. Brown (Peter Macari), who is later arrested.source
• 1971May 27 – Six armed passengers hijack a Romanian passenger plane and force it to fly to Vienna.source
• 1971May 27 – Christie's auctions a diamond known as Deepdene; it is later found to be artificially colored.source
• 1971June 10 – Corpus Thursday: A student rally on the streets of Mexico City is roughly dispersed.source
• 1971June 28 – Assassin Jerome A. Johnson shoots Joe Colombo, boss of his eponymous crime family, in the head during an Italian-American rally, putting him in a coma.source
• 1971July 28 – Abdel Khaliq Mahjub, Sudanese communist leader, is hanged.source
• 1971September 24 – Britain expels 90 KGB and GRU officials; 15 are not allowed to return.source
• 1971November 24 – During a severe storm over Washington State, a man calling himself Dan Cooper (later misreported as D. B. Cooper) parachutes from the Northwest Orient Airlines plane he had hijacked, with US$200,000 in ransom money, and is never seen again.source
• 1971November 24 – A Brussels court sentences pretender Alexis Brimeyer to 18 months in jail for falsely using a noble title; Brimeyer has already fled to Greece.source
• 1971December 19 – The controversial dystopian crime film A Clockwork Orange, directed by Stanley Kubrick is released in New York City.source
• 1971December 26 – Former teacher Patrick Critton hijacks Air Canada Flight 932, diverting the flight from Canada to Cuba. He would remain a fugitive for almost 30 years.source
• 1972February 23 – US activist Angela Davis is released from jail. Rodger McAfee, a farmer from Caruthers, California, helps her make bail.source
• 1972April 10 – Tombs containing bamboo slips, among them Sun Tzu's Art of War and Sun Bin's lost military treatise, are accidentally discovered by construction workers in Shandong.source
• 1972April 29 – The fourth anniversary of the Broadway musical Hair is celebrated with a free concert at a Central Park bandshell, followed by dinner at the Four Seasons. There, 13 Black Panther protesters and the show's co-author, Jim Rado, are arrested for disturbing the peace and for using marijuana.source
• 1972June 17 – Watergate scandal: Five White House operatives are arrested for burgling the offices of the Democratic National Committee.source
• 1972August 22 – Rhodesia is expelled by the International Olympic Committee for its racist policies.source
• 1972September 5–6 – Munich massacre: Eleven Israeli athletes at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich are murdered after eight members of the Arab terrorist group Black September invade the Olympic Village; five guerillas and one policeman are also killed in a failed hostage rescue.source
• 1972November 19 – Seán Mac Stíofáin, a leader of the Provisional Irish Republican Army, is arrested in Dublin after giving a radio interview to RTÉ and charged with being a member of the IRA.source
• 1972December 7 – Imelda Marcos, First Lady of the Philippines, is stabbed and seriously wounded by an assailant; her bodyguards shoot the assailant.source
• 1972December 28 – The bones of Nazi Party official Martin Bormann are discovered in Berlin during construction work.source
• 1973July 21 – Lillehammer affair: Agents of Mossad, the Israeli secret intelligence agency, shoot and kill a Moroccan waiter in Lillehammer, Norway, mistakenly believing him to be a senior member of the Palestinian Black September Organization.source
• 1973August 8 – South Korean politician Kim Dae-jung is kidnapped in Tokyo by the KCIA.source
• 1973August 23 – The Norrmalmstorg robbery occurs, famous for the origin of the term Stockholm syndrome.source
• 1973August 25 – Disappearance of Joanne Ratcliffe and Kirste Gordon: Two Australian girls go missing whilst attending an Australian rules football match at the Adelaide Oval, never to be seen again.source
• 1973November – Queen Sisowath Kossamak of Cambodia is released from house arrest to Beijing.source
• 1973December 14 – Rhodesia executes two Blacks at Salisbury Central Prison for murder.source
• 1974January 31 – Two members of the Japanese Red Army (JRA) and two members of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) made a failed attempt to blow up oil tanks at the Shell oil refinery complex on Pulau Bukom at Singapore. The terrorists then hijacked the ferry Laju and took its five crew members hostage.source
• 1974November 13 – Ronald Joseph DeFeo Jr. shoots and kills all six of his family members while they sleep in their beds inside the family's Amityville, New York, home.source
• 1975January 1 – Watergate scandal (United States): John N. Mitchell, H. R. Haldeman and John Ehrlichman are found guilty of the Watergate cover-up.source
• 1975February 27 – The 2 June Movement kidnaps West German politician Peter Lorenz. He is released on March 4 after most of the kidnappers' demands are met.source
• 1975March 25 – King Faisal of Saudi Arabia is shot and killed by his nephew.source
• 1975September 14 – Rembrandt's painting The Night Watch is slashed a dozen times at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.source
• 1975September 27 – Francoist Spain executes five ETA and FRAP members, the last executions in Spain to date.source
• 1975December 21 – Six people, including Carlos the Jackal, kidnap delegates of an OPEC conference in Vienna.source
• 1975Victoria (Australia) abolishes capital punishment.source
• 1976March 1 – U.K. Home Secretary Merlyn Rees ends Special Category Status for those sentenced for scheduled terrorist crimes relating to the civil violence in Northern Ireland.source
• 1976March 1 – Bradford Bishop allegedly murders five of his family members in Bethesda, Maryland. The crime goes undiscovered for 10 days and the suspect is never caught. From 2014 to 2018 he is on the FBI Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list.source
• 1976March 4 – The Maguire Seven are found guilty in London of possessing explosives for use by the Provisional Irish Republican Army and subsequently jailed for 14 years; their convictions were overturned in 1991.source
• 1976March 20 – Patty Hearst is found guilty of armed robbery of a San Francisco bank in 1974.source
• 1976April 21 – The Great Bookie Robbery in Melbourne, Australia: Bandits steal A$1.4 million in bookmakers' settlements from Queen Street, Melbourne.source
• 1976May 9 – Ulrike Meinhof of the Red Army Faction is found hanged in an apparent suicide in her Stuttgart-Stammheim prison cell.source
• 1976June 20 – Hundreds of Western tourists are moved from Beirut and taken to safety in Syria by the U.S. military, following the murder of the U.S. Ambassador.source
• 1976June 20 – Czechoslovakia beats West Germany 5–3 on penalties to win Euro 76 when the game ends 2–2 after extra time.source
• 1976July 3 – Gregg v. Georgia: The Supreme Court of the United States rules that the death penalty is not inherently cruel or unusual and is a constitutionally acceptable form of punishment overturning the Furman v. Georgia case of 1972.source
• 1976July 4 – Entebbe Raid: Israeli airborne commandos free 103 hostages being held by Palestinian hijackers of an Air France plane at Uganda's Entebbe Airport; Yonatan Netanyahu and several Ugandan soldiers are killed in the raid.source
• 1976July 15 – Twenty-six Chowchilla schoolchildren and their bus driver are abducted and buried in a box truck within a quarry in Livermore, California. The captives dig themselves free after 16 hours. The quarry-owner's son and two accomplices are arrested for the crime.source
• 1976July 16–20 – Albert Spaggiari and his gang break into the vault of the Société Generale Bank in Nice, France.source
• 1976July 20 – American criminal Gary Gilmore is arrested for murdering two men in Utah.source
• 1976July 29 – In New York City, the "Son of Sam" pulls a gun from a paper bag, killing one and seriously wounding another, in the first of a series of attacks that terrorize the city for the next year.source
• 1976August 2 – A gunman murders Andrea Wilborn and Stan Farr and injures Priscilla Davis and Gus Gavrel, in an incident at Priscilla's mansion in Fort Worth, Texas. T. Cullen Davis, Priscilla's husband and one of the richest men in Texas, is tried and found innocent for Andrea's murder, involvement in a plot to kill several people (including Priscilla and a judge), and a wrongful death lawsuit. Cullen goes broke afterwards.source
• 1976August 6 – Former United Kingdom Postmaster General John Stonehouse is sentenced to 7 years' jail for fraud, theft and forgery.source
• 1976August 24 – In Uruguay, the army captures Marcelo Gelman and his pregnant wife. Gelman is later killed and his wife disappears.source
• 1976September 16 – Beginning with the Night of the Pencils, a series of kidnappings and forced disappearances followed by torture, rape, and murder of students under the Argentine dictatorship takes place.source
• 1976September 24 – Patty Hearst is sentenced to seven years in prison for her role in the armed robbery of a San Francisco bank in 1974 (an executive clemency order from U.S. President Jimmy Carter will set her free after only 22 months).source
• 1976October 6 – The Cultural Revolution in China concludes upon the capture of the Gang of Four.source
• 1976The New Jersey Legislature passes legislation legalizing casinos in the shore town of Atlantic City commencing in 1978. After signing the bill into law, Governor Brendan Byrne declares "The mob is not welcome in New Jersey!" referring to the Mafia's influence at casinos in Nevada.source
• 1977April 7 – German Federal Prosecutor Siegfried Buback and his driver are shot by Red Army Faction members while waiting at a red light near his home in Karlsruhe. The "Ulrike Meinhof Commando" later claims responsibility.source
• 1977May 16 – A 20-passenger S-61L topples sideways at takeoff from the roof of the Pan Am Building in Midtown Manhattan. Four passengers are killed by the turning rotors and a woman at street level is killed by a falling blade.source
• 1977May 27 – A demonstration and coup attempt in Angola takes place. Thousands are killed by the government and Cuban forces.source
• 1977July 27 – The Soviet Politburo orders Boris Yeltsin to demolish the Ipatiev House, where Tsar Nicholas II of Russia and his family were shot in 1918. Yeltsin later refers to this as a barbarian act.source
• 1977September 5 – German Autumn: Employers Association President Hanns Martin Schleyer is kidnapped in Cologne, West Germany. The kidnappers kill three escorting police officers and his chauffeur. They demand the release of Red Army Faction prisoners.source
• 1977September 8 – Interpol issues a resolution against the copyright infringement of video tapes and other material, which is still cited in warnings on opening pre-credits of videocassettes and DVDs.source
• 1977September 10 – Murderer Hamida Djandoubi is the last person executed by guillotine in France (at Marseille) and the last legal beheading in the Western world.source
• 1977September 19 – North Korean agents abduct Yutaka Kume from Noto Peninsula starting the North Korean abductions of Japanese citizens.source
• 1977October 17–18 – German Autumn: GSG 9 troopers storm the hijacked Lufthansa passenger plane in Mogadishu, Somalia; three of the four hijackers die.source
• 1977October 18 – German Autumn: Red Army Faction members Andreas Baader, Jan-Carl Raspe and Gudrun Ensslin commit suicide in Stammheim prison; Irmgard Möller fails (their supporters still claim they were murdered). They are buried on October 27.source
• 1977October 19 – German Autumn: Kidnapped industrialist Hanns Martin Schleyer is found murdered in Mulhouse, France.source
• 1978January 18 – The European Court of Human Rights finds the British government guilty of mistreating prisoners in Northern Ireland, but not guilty of torture.source
• 1978February 1 – Film director Roman Polanski skips bail in the United States and flees to France, after pleading guilty to charges of engaging in sex with a 13-year-old girl.source
• 1978March 1 – Charlie Chaplin's remains are stolen from Cosier-sur-Vevey, Switzerland.source
• 1978March 16 – Former Italian Premier Aldo Moro is kidnapped by the Red Brigades; 5 bodyguards are killed.source
• 1978March 18 – Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Prime Minister of Pakistan, is sentenced to death by hanging, for ordering the assassination of a political opponent.source
• 1978March 28 – Stump v. Sparkman (435 U.S. 349): The Supreme Court of the United States hands down a 5–3 decision, in a controversial case involving involuntary sterilization and judicial immunity.source
• 1978April 9 – Somali military officers stage an unsuccessful coup against the government of Siad Barre; security forces thwart the attempt within hours, and several conspirators are arrested.source
• 1978April 27 – Saur Revolution – Afghanistan's president Mohammad Daoud Khan and his family are murdered; Nur Muhammad Taraki succeeds him, beginning the Afghan conflict.source
• 1978May 4 – Communist activist Henri Curiel is murdered in Paris.source
• 1978May 9 – In Rome, the corpse of former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro, is found in a red Renault 4.source
• 1978May 17 – Charlie Chaplin's coffin is found some 15 km mi from the cemetery from which it was stolen, near Lake Geneva.source
• 1978May 18 – Soviet dissident Yuri Orlov is sentenced to 7 years' hard labor, for distributing 'counterrevolutionary material'.source
• 1978May 23 – American basketball player center Bill Walton of the Portland Trail Blazers was named the National Basketball Association regular season MVP.source
• 1978May 29 – Ali Soilih is found dead in the Comoros, allegedly shot when trying to escape.source
• 1978September 19 – Police in the West Midlands of England launch a massive murder hunt, when 13-year-old newspaper boy Carl Bridgewater is shot dead after disturbing a burglary.source
• 1978September 23 – California Angels outfielder Lyman Bostock is shot to death at age 27 while visiting friends in Gary, Indiana during an Angels' road trip in Chicago, Illinois.source
• 1978September 27 – The last Forest Brother guerrilla movement fighter is discovered and killed in Estonia.source
• 1978September 30 – Finnair Flight 405 aircraft is hijacked by Aarno Lamminparras in Oulu, Finland.source
• 1978September – Serial criminal Lawrence Singleton commits heinous crime against Mary Vincent.source
• 1978December 4 – Dianne Feinstein succeeds the murdered George Moscone, to become the first woman mayor of San Francisco; she will remain in office until January 8, 1988.source
• 1978December 11 – Lufthansa heist: Six men rob a Lufthansa cargo facility in New York City's John F. Kennedy International Airport.source
• 1978December 15 – Superman: The Movie is released in cinemas in the United States.source
• 1978December 19 – Former Prime Minister of India Indira Gandhi is arrested and jailed for a week for breach of privilege and contempt of parliament.source
• 1978December 22 – Chicago serial killer John Wayne Gacy, who was subsequently convicted of the murder of 33 young men and boys committed between 1972 and 1978, is arrested.source
• 1979January 6 – Geylang Bahru family murders: Four children, aged five to ten, are brutally killed in Geylang Bahru, Singapore.source
• 1979January 19 – Former U.S. Attorney General John N. Mitchell is released on parole after 19 months at a federal prison in Alabama.source
• 1979January 20 – Capital punishment in Peru: Following a hasty conviction on espionage and treason charges, Air Force member Julio Vargas Garayar became the last person to be executed by Peru.source
• 1979February 7 – Nazi criminal Josef Mengele suffers a fatal stroke and drowns while swimming in Bertioga, Brazil. His remains are found in 1985.source
• 1979February 13 – The Guardian Angels are formed in New York City as an unarmed organization of young crime fighters.source
• 1979February 14 – In Kabul, Muslim extremists kidnap the American ambassador to Afghanistan, Adolph Dubs, who is killed during a gunfight between his kidnappers and police.source
• 1979February 27 – The annual Mardi Gras celebration in New Orleans is cancelled due to a strike called by the New Orleans Police Department.source
• 1979April 1–18 – Police lock Andreas Mihavecz in a holding cell in Bregenz, Austria and forget about him, leaving him there without food or drink.source
• 1979April 4 – Pakistani Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto is executed by hanging for the murder of a political opponent.source
• 1979May 21 – Dan White is convicted of manslaughter, rather than murder, for the assassination of San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk, after using what would become known as the "Twinkie defense" and persuading a jury that the crime was not premeditated. The maximum sentence is seven years imprisonment, with eligibility for early parole, prompting the "White Night riots" in the gay community.source
• 1979May 25 – Etan Patz, six years old, is kidnapped in New York. He is often referred to as the "Boy on the Milk Carton" and the investigation later sprouts into one of the most famous child abduction cases of all time. This is a cold case until 2010 when it is re-opened. In April 2017, Pedro Hernandez is convicted of the murder and kidnapping and sentenced to life imprisonment.source
• 1979May 25 – John Spenkelink is executed in Florida, in the first use of the electric chair in America after the reintroduction of the death penalty in 1976.source
• 1979June 20 – A Nicaraguan National Guard soldier kills ABC TV news correspondent Bill Stewart and his interpreter Juan Espinosa. Other members of the news crew capture the killing on tape.source
• 1979June 22 – Former Liberal Party leader Jeremy Thorpe was acquitted of conspiracy to murder Norman Scott, who had accused Thorpe of having a relationship with him.source
• 1979July 21 – The disco music genre dominates and peaks on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, with the first six spots (beginning with Donna Summer's Bad Girls), and seven of the chart's top ten songs ending that week.source
• 1979July 22 – 1979 Ba'ath Party Purge: Iraqi president Saddam Hussein arranges the arrest and later execution of nearly seventy members of his ruling Ba'ath Party.source
• 1979August 9 – Raymond Washington, co-founder of the Crips, one of the largest, most notorious gangs in the United States, is killed in a drive-by shooting in Los Angeles.source
• 1979September 9 – The long-running comic strip For Better or For Worse begins its run, in Canada, before becoming syndicated elsewhere in North America and the world.source
• 1979September 16 – The Sugarhill Gang release Rapper's Delight in the United States, the first rap single to become a Top 40 hit on the Billboard Hot 100.source
• 1979September 29 – The overthrown dictator Francisco Macías Nguema of Equatorial Guinea is convicted of genocide and executed by firing squad.source
• 1979November 2 – French police shoot gangster Jacques Mesrine in Paris.source
• 1979November 9 – The Carl Bridgewater murder trial ends in England with all four men found guilty. James Robinson, 45, and 25-year-old Vincent Hickey are sentenced to life imprisonment with a recommended 25-year minimum for murder. 18-year-old Michael Hickey is also found guilty of murder and sentenced to indefinite detention. Patrick Molloy, 53, is found guilty on a lesser charge of manslaughter and sentenced to 12 years in prison.source
• 1979November 15 – British art historian and former Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures Anthony Blunt's role as the "fourth man" of the 'Cambridge Five' double agents for the Soviet NKVD during World War II is revealed by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom; she gives further details on November 21.source
• 1979November 23 – The Troubles: In Dublin, Ireland, Provisional Irish Republican Army member Thomas McMahon is sentenced to life in prison for the assassination of Lord Mountbatten of Burma in August. He was released in 1998 under the terms of the Good Friday Agreement.source
• 1980January 22 – Andrei Sakharov, Soviet scientist and human rights activist, is arrested in Moscow.source
• 1980February 2 – Abscam: FBI personnel target members of the Congress of the United States in a sting operation.source
• 1980April 26 – Louise and Charmian Faulkner disappear from outside their flat in St Kilda, Victoria, Australia.source
• 1980May 7 – Paul Geidel, convicted of second-degree murder in 1911, is released from prison in Beacon, New York, after 68 years and 245 days (the longest-ever time served by an inmate).source
• 1980July 19 – Former Turkish Prime Minister Nihat Erim is killed by two gunmen in Istanbul, Turkey.source
• 1980August 17 – In Australia, baby Azaria Chamberlain disappears from a campsite at Ayers Rock (Uluru), reportedly taken by a dingo.source
• 1980October 25 – Proceedings on the Hague Convention on the Civil Aspects of International Child Abduction conclude at The Hague.source
• 1980October 27 – The Chun Doo-hwan government forcibly arrests and investigates monks and personnel of the Jogye Order.source
• 1980November 20 – The Gang of Four trial begins in China.source
• 1980December 2 – A missionary (Jean Donovan) and three Roman Catholic nuns (Maura Clarke, Ita Ford, Dorothy Kazel), all Americans, are murdered by a military death squad in El Salvador while doing charity work during that country's civil war.source
• 1980December 8 – Murder of John Lennon: Mark David Chapman is arrested following the murder of English musician John Lennon, formerly of the Beatles, outside his New York City apartment building, The Dakota.source
• 1980December 14 – Four people are murdered and four others are injured by two armed robbers at Bob's Big Boy on La Cienega Boulevard in Los Angeles, United States, in what is one of the city's most brutal crimes ever.source
• 1981May 15 – A prison officer, 31-year-old Donna Payant, disappears at Green Haven Correctional Facility in New York. She is later found to have been murdered by convicted serial killer Lemuel Smith. It is the first time a female prison officer has been killed while on duty in the United States.source
• 1981May 22 – Serial killer Peter Sutcliffe is found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment on 13 counts of murder and 7 of attempted murder in England.source
• 1981Aer Lingus flight 164 is hijacked just before landing at London Heathrow airport. The flight continues on to France before the hijacker who reportedly demanded for the releasing of the third secret of Fatima, is subdued.source
• 1981July 1 – Wonderland murders: The Wonderland Gang of cocaine dealers is brutally murdered in Los Angeles. Eddie Nash is suspected of involvement, but will never be convicted.source
• 1981August 24 – Mark David Chapman is sentenced to 20 years to life in prison after pleading guilty to murdering John Lennon in Manhattan eight months earlier.source
• 1981September 10 – Picasso's painting Guernica is moved from New York to Madrid.source
• 1981September – Little Miss Bossy, the first book in the Little Miss series (the female counterpart to the Mr. Men series) is first published, in the U.K.source
• 1981December 17 – American Brigadier General James L. Dozier is kidnapped in Verona by the Italian Red Brigades.source
• 1981Srimulat, comedian group from Central Java performed on TVRI Jakarta for the first time. It makes the comedian group was known by Indonesian people and had been a legendary comedian group.source
• 1982February 25 – The European Court of Human Rights rules that teachers who cane, belt or tawse children against the wishes of their parents are in breach of the Human Rights Convention.source
• 1982March 16 – Claus von Bülow is found guilty of the attempted murder of his wife by a court in Newport, Rhode Island.source
• 1982April 26 – From 26 to 27 April, policeman Woo Bum-kon goes on a killing spree in Uiryeong County, South Korea. By the early morning of April 27, after killing at least 56 people with several firearms and grenades, he kills himself via grenade. It becomes the deadliest spree shooting in recorded history up until the 2011 Norway attacks.source
• 1982May 8 – French-Canadian racing driver Gilles Villeneuve is killed during qualifying for the 1982 Belgian Grand Prix.source
• 1982July 16 – In New York City, the Reverend Sun Myung Moon is sentenced to 18 months in prison and fined $25,000 for tax fraud and conspiracy to obstruct justice.source
• 1982September 29 – Chicago Tylenol murders: an unknown killer laces Tylenol capsules with potassium cyanide that kills seven in Chicago, Illinois.source
• 1982December 7 – The first U.S. execution by lethal injection is carried out in Texas.source
• 1982December 8 – The December murders occur in Suriname.source
• 1983January 24 – 25 members of the Red Brigades are sentenced to life imprisonment for the 1978 murder of Italian politician Aldo Moro.source
• 1983February 2 – Giovanni Vigliotto goes on trial on charges of polygamy involving 105 women.source
• 1983February 10 – Dismembered sets of human remains are found at a block of flats in Muswell Hill, North London. 37-year-old civil servant Dennis Nilsen, is arrested on suspicion of murder.source
• 1983August 18 – Five people are killed and 18 others injured when a road train is deliberately driven into a motel at Ayers Rock in the Northern Territory of Australia (the driver, Douglas Edward Crabbe, is convicted in March 1984).source
• 1983August 23 – In a crackdown on crime, the Chinese state executes 19 people for murder, 10 for rape, and one for auto theft. By the end of the year, Amnesty International estimates that at least 600 people have been executed in China.source
• 1983August 29 – Two U.S. Marines are killed by mortar blast in Beirut, marking the first U.S. combat fatalities of the Multinational Force in Lebanon.source
• 1983September 26 – The mass burial of around 700,000 unsold Atari video game cartridges, consoles, and computers occurs in Alamogordo, New Mexico.source
• 1983October 12 – Japan's former Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka is found guilty of taking a $2 million bribe from Lockheed, and sentenced to 4 years in jail.source
• 1983December 19 – The Jules Rimet Trophy is stolen from the Brazilian Soccer Confederation building in Rio de Janeiro. As of 2025, the trophy has not been recovered.source
• 1983Leopold Kohr, the people of Belau, Amory and Hunter Lovins/Rocky Mountain Institute and Manfred Max Neef/CEPAUR win the Right Livelihood Award.source
• 1984March 16 – Gary Plauché shoots his son's rapist at Baton Rouge Metropolitan Airportsource
• 1984April 12 – Palestinian gunmen take Israeli bus number 300 hostage. Israeli special forces storm the bus, freeing the hostages (one hostage, two hijackers killed).source
• 1984May 30 – Liverpool beat Roma 5–2 after penalties in the final of the 1984 European Cup football tournament.source
• 1984June 19 – 17-year-old Ricky Kasso murders Gary Lauwers in Northport, New York, contributing to the Satanic panic association of heavy metal music and satanism.source
• 1984July 1 – Argentinian footballer Diego Maradona is sold by FC Barcelona (Spain) to S.S.C. Napoli (Italy) for a world record fee at this date of $10.48M (£6.9M).source
• 1984July 18 – San Ysidro McDonald's massacre: 41-year-old James Huberty walks into a McDonald's in the San Ysidro district of San Diego, resulting in 21 deaths, with Huberty being killed by a sniper 77 minutes after the ordeal begins.source
• 1984August 16 – John DeLorean is acquitted of all eight charges of possessing and distributing cocaine.source
• 1984September 16 – Edgar Reitz's film series Heimat begins release in Germany.source
• 1984September 29 – In the early morning, police in Sicily apprehend 366 people they suspect to be involved in the activities of Cosa Nostra.source
• 1984October 19 – Polish secret police kidnapped and assassinated Father Jerzy Popiełuszko, a Catholic priest who supported the Solidarity movement. His body was found in a reservoir 11 days later on October 30.source
• 1984December 20 – Disappearance of Jonelle Matthews from Greeley, Colorado. Her remains were discovered on 23 July 2019, located about 15 mi southeast of Jonelle's home. The cause of death "was a gunshot wound to the head".source
• 1984December 22 – Four African-American youths (Barry Allen, Troy Canty, James Ramseur, and Darrell Cabey) board an express train in the Bronx borough of New York City. They demand five dollars from Bernhard Goetz, who shoots them. The event starts a national debate about urban crime in the United States.source
• 1985February 9 – U.S. drug agent Kiki Camarena is kidnapped and murdered in Mexico by drug traffickers; his body is later discovered on March 5.source
• 1985March 16 – Lebanon hostage crisis: US journalist Terry Anderson is taken hostage in Beirut; he remains a prisoner until December 4, 1991.source
• 1985May 11 – The FBI brings charges against the suspected heads of the five Mafia families in New York City.source
• 1985May 26 – Young driver Danny Sullivan beats veteran Mario Andretti to win the 1985 Indianapolis 500.source
• 1985June 6 – The remains of Josef Mengele, the physician notorious for Nazi human experimentation on inmates of Auschwitz concentration camp, buried in 1979 under the name of Wolfgang Gerhard, are exhumed in Embu das Artes, Brazil.source
• 1985July 1 – The Convention on the Transfer of Sentenced Persons enters into force.source
• 1985September 23 – Italian crime reporter Giancarlo Siani is killed by the Camorra.source
• 1985October 7 – The cruise ship Achille Lauro is hijacked in the Mediterranean Sea by four heavily armed Palestinian terrorists. One passenger, American Leon Klinghoffer, is killed.source
• 1985December 27 – American naturalist Dian Fossey is found brutally murdered in Rwanda.source
• 1985DNA is first used in a criminal case.source
• 1986February 10 – The Maxi Trial (Italian: Maxiprocesso) begins in the bunker room of the Ucciardone prison (Palermo). It will be the largest trial against the Sicilian Mafia.source
• 1986February 27 – The United States Senate allows its debates to be televised on a trial basis.source
• 1986February 28 – Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme is shot to death on his way home from the cinema in Stockholm, Sweden.source
• 1986March 26 – An article in The New York Times charges that Kurt Waldheim, former United Nations Secretary-General and candidate for president of Austria, may have been involved in Nazi war crimes during World War II.source
• 1986April 17 – Lebanon hostage crisis: British journalist John McCarthy is kidnapped in Beirut (he is released in August 1991) and three others are killed in retaliation for the bombing of Libya.source
• 1986May 27 – Islamic scholars Isma'il and Lois Lamya al-Faruqi are murdered in their home in Wyncote, Pennsylvania, drawing attention due to their academic prominence and the brutality of the attack.source
• 1986July 7 – Australian drug smugglers Kevin Barlow and Brian Chambers are executed in Malaysia.source
• 1986August 19 – Two weeks after it was stolen, the Picasso painting The Weeping Woman is found in a locker at the Spencer Street Station in Melbourne, Australia.source
• 1986November 18 – Greater Manchester Police announce that they will search for the bodies of 2 missing children (who both vanished more than 20 years ago) after the Moors murderers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley confess to 2 more murders.source
• 1986December 20 – Three African Americans are assaulted by a group of white teens in the Howard Beach neighborhood of Queens, New York. One of the victims, Michael Griffith, is run over and killed by a motorist while attempting to flee the attackers.source
• 1986Opus Pro, a Latvian hard rock group, is established.source
• 1987January 16 – León Febres Cordero, president of Ecuador, is kidnapped for 11 hours by followers of imprisoned general Frank Vargas, who successfully demand the latter's release.source
• 1987January 20 – Terry Waite, the special envoy of the Archbishop of Canterbury in Lebanon, is kidnapped in Beirut (released November 1991).source
• 1987May 11 – Klaus Barbie goes on trial in Lyon for war crimes committed during World War II.source
• 1987July 3 – Greater Manchester Police in England recover the body of 16-year-old Pauline Reade from Saddleworth Moor, after her killers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley help them in their search, almost exactly 24 years since Pauline was last seen alive.source
• 1987July 4 – A court in Lyon sentences former Gestapo boss Klaus Barbie to life imprisonment for crimes against humanity.source
• 1987August 14 – All the children held at Kai Lama, a rural property on Lake Eildon, Australia, run by the Santiniketan Park Association, are released after a police raid.source
• 1987August 17 – Rudolf Hess is found dead in his cell in Spandau Prison. Hess, 93, is believed to have committed suicide by hanging himself with an electrical flex. He was the last remaining prisoner at the complex, which is soon to be demolished.source
• 1987August 19 – ABC News' chief Middle East correspondent Charles Glass escapes his Hezbollah kidnappers in Beirut, Lebanon, after 62 days in captivity.source
• 1987September 4 – In a village in Rajasthan, an 18-year-old widow, Roop Kanwar is burned alive on her husband's funeral pyre, in a banned practice known as Sati. Though the woman's father-in-law is arrested by authorities, thousands of Hindu pilgrims travel to the cremation site in support of the act.source
• 1987October 23 – British champion jockey Lester Piggott is jailed for three years after being convicted of tax evasion.source
• 1987November 8 – Enniskillen bombing: Twelve people are killed by a Provisional Irish Republican Army bomb at a Remembrance Day service at Enniskillen.source
• 1988February 17 – U.S. Lieutenant Colonel William R. Higgins, serving with a United Nations group monitoring a truce in southern Lebanon, is kidnapped (and later killed by his captors).source
• 1988March 16 – Iran–Contra affair: Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North and Vice Admiral John Poindexter are indicted on charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States.source
• 1988April 16 – Israeli commandos kill the PLO's Abu Jihad in Tunisia.source
• 1988October 12 – Walsh Street police shootings: Two Victoria Police officers are gunned down, execution style, in Australia.source
• 1988December 16 – Perennial U.S. presidential candidate Lyndon LaRouche is convicted of mail fraud.source
• 1989January 29 – The two longest-imprisoned German WWII war criminals in Western Europe, Ferdinand aus der Fünten and Franz Fischer (collectively known as The Breda Two), were released from Dutch prison.source
• 1989February 17 – South African police raid the home of Winnie Mandela and arrest four of her bodyguards.source
• 1989March 3 – Jammu Siltavuori abducts and murders two eight-year-old girls in the Myllypuro suburb of Helsinki, Finland.source
• 1989April 6 – National Safety Council of Australia chief executive John Friedrich is arrested after defrauding investors to the tune of $235,000,000.source
• 1989April 19 – Central Park jogger case: Trisha Meili is seriously assaulted and raped whilst jogging in New York City's Central Park; the convictions of five teenagers for the crime are vacated in 2002 (the jogger's identity remains secret for years, hence she is referred to as the "Central Park Jogger").source
• 1989May 4 – Oliver North is convicted in the United States on charges related to the Iran–Contra affair. His conviction is vacated on appeal in 1991.source
• 1989July 18 – Actress Rebecca Schaeffer is murdered by an obsessed fan Robert John Bardo, leading to stricter stalking laws in California.source
• 1989July 26 – A federal grand jury indicts Cornell University student Robert Tappan Morris for releasing a computer virus, making him the first person to be prosecuted under the United States' 1986 Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.source
• 1989July 27 – In the largest prison sentence to date, Thai financial scammer Mae Chamoy Thipyaso and her accomplices are each sentenced to 141,078 years in prison.source
• 1989July 31 – In Lebanon, Hezbollah announces that it has hanged U.S. Marine Lt. Col. William R. Higgins in retaliation for Israel's July 28 kidnapping of Hezbollah leader Abdel Karim Obeid. The same day, the United Nations Security Council passes United Nations Security Council Resolution 638, condemning the taking of hostages by both sides in the conflict.source
• 1989August 5 – Park Avenue Joe is finally declared the winner after finishing in a dead heat with Probe in the Hambletonian Stakes for parimutuel and prize money purposes, based on the two heat and runoff format, based on average finish.source
• 1989August 19–21 – In response to the murder of a judge, a provincial police chief, and presidential candidate Galán, the authorities of Colombia arrest 11,000 suspected Colombian drug traffickers.source
• 1989August 20 – In Beverly Hills, California, Lyle and Erik Menendez shoot their wealthy parents to death in the family's den.source
• 1989August 23 – Murder of Yusef Hawkins in a shooting in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn, New York, sparking racial tensions between African Americans and Italian Americans.source
• 1989September 14 – Standard Gravure shooting: Joseph T. Wesbecker, a pressman on disability for mental illness, enters his former workplace in Louisville, Kentucky, kills eight people and injures twelve before committing suicide after a history of suicidal ideation.source
• 1989September 19 – Burkinabé ministers Jean-Baptiste Boukary Lingani and Henri Zongo executed following their arrest the previous day.source
• 1989October 15 – Walter Sisulu is released from prison in South Africa.source
• 1989November 16 – Six Jesuit priests are murdered by U.S. trained Salvadoran soldiers.source
• 1989November 30 – Deutsche Bank board member Alfred Herrhausen is killed by a bomb in Bad Homburg (the Red Army Faction claims responsibility for the murder).source
• 1989December 6 – École Polytechnique massacre (or Montreal Massacre): Marc Lépine, an anti-feminist gunman, murders fourteen young women at the École Polytechnique de Montréal.source
• 1989December 23 – Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu are captured in Târgoviște.source
• 1989December 25 – Trial and execution of Nicolae and Elena Ceaușescu: Deposed Romanian leader Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife are summarily tried and executed outside Bucharest.source
• 1990January 18 – McMartin preschool trial: Peggy McMartin Buckey and Raymond Buckey are acquitted of 52 charges related to alleged ritual abuse taking place at their daycare in Manhattan Beach, California.source
• 1990January 22 – US graduate student Robert Tappan Morris is convicted of releasing the Morris worm onto the internet.source
• 1990February 11 – Nelson Mandela is released from Victor Verster Prison, near Cape Town, South Africa, after 27 years behind bars.source
• 1990March 1 – Steve Jackson Games is raided by the U.S. Secret Service, prompting the later formation of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.source
• 1990March 9 – Police seal off Brixton in South London after another night of protests against the poll tax.source
• 1990March 15 – Iraq hangs Iranian journalist Farzad Bazoft for spying. Daphne Parish, a British nurse, is sentenced to 15 years' imprisonment as an accomplice.source
• 1990March 20 – Ferdinand Marcos's widow, Imelda Marcos, goes on trial for bribery, embezzlement, and racketeering.source
• 1990April 6 – Robert Mapplethorpe's "The Perfect Moment" show of nude and homoerotic photographs opens at the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center, in spite of accusations of indecency by Citizens for Community Values.source
• 1990April 7 – Iran–Contra affair: John Poindexter is found guilty of 5 charges for his part in the scandal; the convictions are later reversed on appeal.source
• 1990April 14 – Junk bond financier Michael Milken pleaded guilty to fraud-related charges. He agreed to pay US$500 million in restitution and was sentenced on November 21 to 10 years in jail.source
• 1990April 20 – 17-year-old Christopher Kerze goes missing in Eagan, Minnesota. He remains missing .source
• 1990April 21 – Japanese Yoshio Tani, M.Sc. murders gold merchant Turkka Elovirta and businessman Juhani Komulainen in Siuntio, Finland, having convinced them to buy a nonexistent 500 kilogram stash of Nazi gold.source
• 1990April 22 – Lebanon hostage crisis: Lebanese kidnappers release American educator Robert Polhill, who had been held hostage since January 1987.source
• 1990April 30 – Lebanon hostage crisis: Lebanese kidnappers release American educator Frank H. Reed, who had been held hostage since September 1986.source
• 1990May 2 – In London, a man brandishing a knife robs a courier of bearer bonds worth £292 million.source
• 1990July 2 – A U.S. District Court acquits Imelda Marcos on racketeering and fraud charges.source
• 1990August 12 – In South Africa, fighting breaks out between the Xhosa people and the Zulu people; more than 500 people are killed by the end of August.source
• 1990September 12 – A judge in Australia orders the arrest of media tycoon Christopher Skase, former owner of the Seven Network, after he fails to give evidence in a liquidator's examination of failed shipbuilding company Lloyds Ships Holdings, an associate of Skase's Qintex Australia Ltd.source
• 1990October 12 – A leader of the right-wing Pamyat organization is arrested in the Soviet Union for spreading antisemitic hatred.source
• 1990October 12 – German interior minister Wolfgang Schäuble is shot at during an election campaign event. He survives but will require a wheelchair for the rest of his life.source
• 1990November 5 – Rabbi Meir Kahane, founder of the far-right Kach movement, is shot dead after a speech at a New York City hotel.source
• 1990November 20 – Andrei Chikatilo, one of the Soviet Union's most prolific serial killers, is arrested in Novocherkassk.source
• 1991March 3 – A video captures the beating of motorist Rodney King by Los Angeles police officers. Four Los Angeles police officers are indicted on March 15 for the beating.source
• 1991March 14 – The Troubles: After 16 years in prison for allegedly bombing an English public house in a Provisional IRA attack, the "Birmingham Six" are freed when a court determines that their conviction was unsafe and unsatisfactory.source
• 1991June 16 – Father's Day bank massacre: Four security guards are shot to death during a bank robbery at the United Bank Tower in Denver, Colorado, United States. The former police officer subsequently charged with the crime is acquitted, and the case remains unsolved.source
• 1991July 9 – Iran–Contra affair: Alan Fiers agrees to plead guilty to two charges of lying to the U.S. Congress. Later on September 16, D.C. Judge Gerhard Gesell issues a ruling clearing Col. Oliver North of all charges.source
• 1991July 22 – U.S. boxer Mike Tyson is arrested and charged with the rape, three days earlier, of Desiree Washington, a Miss Black America contestant, in Indianapolis, Indiana.source
• 1991September 24 – Lebanon hostage crisis: Lebanese kidnappers release Jackie Mann after more than two years of captivity.source
• 1991September 29 – Salvadoran Civil War: An army colonel of the Atlácatl Battalion is found guilty of the 1989 murders of six Jesuits.source
• 1991October 16 – Luby's shooting: 23 people are killed at a Luby's restaurant in Killeen, Texas after George Hennard drives his truck through the establishment and begins firing at diners. It becomes the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history and wouldn't be surpassed until the Virginia Tech shooting.source
• 1991October 21 – Lebanon hostage crisis: Jesse Turner, a mathematics professor who has been held hostage for more than four years, is released.source
• 1991November 18 – Lebanon hostage crisis: Kidnappers in Lebanon set Anglican Church envoy Terry Waite and academic Thomas Sutherland free.source
• 1991December 4 – John Leonard Orr, one of the most prolific serial arsonists of the 20th century, is arrested in California.source
• 1992April 9 – A jury in Miami, Florida, convicts former Panamanian ruler Manuel Noriega of assisting Colombia's cocaine cartel.source
• 1992May 7 – In the Sydney River McDonald's murders in Nova Scotia, Canada, three McDonald's employees are killed and a fourth is left permanently disabled during a botched robbery.source
• 1992May 23 – Capaci bombing: A Mafia bomb on the autostrada in Sicily kills five people, including Italian anti-Mafia judge Giovanni Falcone.source
• 1992July 10 – In Miami, former Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega is sentenced to 40 years in prison for participating in the illegal drug trade and racketeering.source
• 1992July 19 – Via D'Amelio bombing: A car bomb placed by the Sicilian Mafia (with the collaboration of Italian intelligence) kills judge Paolo Borsellino and five members of his police escort.source
• 1992July 22 – Near Medellín, Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar escapes from his luxury prison, fearing extradition to the United States.source
• 1992September 1 – In Beijing, police arrest Shen Tong for his role in organizing the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989.source
• 1992September 12 – In Peru, police arrest Abimael Guzmán, the leader of the Shining Path guerilla movement, who has evaded capture for 12 years.source
• 1992September 28 – Law enforcement officials in the United States, Colombia and Italy announce that they have arrested more than 165 people on money laundering charges related to cocaine trafficking.source
• 1992October 7 – In Peru, Shining Path leader Abimael Guzmán is convicted of treason and sentenced to life in prison.source
• 1992December 22 – The Archives of Terror are discovered by Martín Almada in Asunción, detailing the fates of thousands of Latin Americans who have been secretly kidnapped, tortured and killed by the security services of Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay in Operation Condor.source
• 1992December 28 – Actress Daniella Perez is murdered in Rio de Janeiro, after being stabbed 18 times with scissors by actor Guilherme de Pádua and his then-wife Paula Thomaz. The crime shocked Brazil, due to both the victim and the murderer being romantic partners in the telenovela De Corpo e Alma, which aired on TV Globo.source
• 1993January 5 – US$7.4 million is stolen from the Brink's Armored Car Depot in Rochester, New York, in the fifth largest robbery in U.S. history.source
• 1993January 22 – Hungarian politician Istvan Csurka, of the Hungarian Democratic Forum, calls on the nation to rally against an alleged anti-Hungarian conspiracy led by Jews, liberals, Communists, and Westerners.source
• 1993January 24 – In Turkey, thousands protest against the murder of journalist Uğur Mumcu.source
• 1993February 12 – Murder of James Bulger: Two-year-old James Bulger is abducted from New Strand Shopping Centre by two ten-year-old boys Robert Thompson and Jon Venables, who later torture and murder him.source
• 1993February 22 – United Nations Security Council Resolution 808 is voted on, deciding that "an international tribunal shall be established" to prosecute violations of international law in Yugoslavia. The tribunal is established on May 25 by Resolution 827.source
• 1993March 11 – Janet Reno is confirmed by the United States Senate and sworn in the next day, becoming the first female Attorney General of the United States.source
• 1993April 21 – The Supreme Court in La Paz, Bolivia, sentences former dictator Luis Garcia Meza to 30 years in jail without parole for murder, theft, fraud and violating the constitution.source
• 1993April 30 – Tennis player Monica Seles – at this time the top-ranked player in women's tennis – is stabbed during a match at the 1993 Citizen Cup in Hamburg, Germany.source
• 1993June 1 – Large protests erupt against Slobodan Milošević's regime in Belgrade; opposition leader Vuk Drašković and his wife Danica are arrested.source
• 1993July 29 – The Israeli Supreme Court acquits accused Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk of all charges and he is set free.source
• 1993November 30 – U.S. President Bill Clinton signs the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act.source
• 1993December 2 – Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar is gunned down by police.source
• 1993December 7 – In Garden City, New York, six people are murdered and 19 injured in the Long Island Rail Road massacre, a racially motivated mass shooting perpetrated by Colin Ferguson, a black Jamaican immigrant.source
• 1993December 10 – id Software releases the first-person shooter game Doom.source
• 1994February 12 – Edvard Munch's painting The Scream is stolen in Oslo (it is recovered on May 7).source
• 1994February 24 – In Gloucester, England, local police begin excavations at 25 Cromwell Street, the home of Fred West, a suspect in multiple murders. On February 28, he and his wife are arrested.source
• 1994April 5 – Kurt Cobain, the lead singer of Nirvana. commits suicide at the age of 27 at his home in Seattle. His body was found three days later.source
• 1994August 18 – Liebeck v. McDonald's Restaurants: a 12-person jury reaches its verdict to award Stella Liebeck $2,860,000 in compensatory and punitive damages, later reduced to $640,000, for burns she received from a spilled hot coffee. McDonald's and Liebeck will later settle out of court.source
• 1994September 16 – Danish tour guide Louise Jensen is abducted, raped and murdered by three British soldiers in Cyprus.source
• 1994October 5 – The day after five members of the Order of the Solar Temple were found dead in Morin-Heights, Quebec, Canada, Swiss police find 48 members of the cult dead, in what was found to be a mass murder-suicide.source
• 1994October 16 – Robbery on the Bank of the Republic: In the Colombian city of Valledupar, a branch of the Colombian central bank Banco de la Republica (Bank of the Republic) is robbed of COP$24,075 million of non emitted bills (some US$33 million); this comes to be known as "El Robo del Siglo" (the bank heist of the century).source
• 1994December 13 – The trial of former president Mengistu begins in Ethiopia.source
• 1994December 13 – Fred West, 53, a builder living in Gloucester, England, is remanded in custody, charged with murdering 12 people (including two of his own daughters) whose bodies are mostly found buried at his house in Cromwell Street. His wife Rosemary West, 41, is charged with 10 murders.source
• 1995March 31 – Murder of Selena: Tejano singer Selena Quintanilla-Pérez is shot and killed by her fan club president Yolanda Saldívar at a Days Inn in Corpus Christi, Texas.source
• 1995May 16 – Following the Tokyo subway sarin attack two months earlier, Japanese police besiege the headquarters of Aum Shinrikyo near Mount Fuji and arrest cult leader Shoko Asahara. Further police operations result in over two hundred arrests and thirteen members of the cult, including Asahara, are sentenced to death.source
• 1995June 2 – Waffen-SS Hauptsturmführer Erich Priebke is extradited from Argentina to Italy.source
• 1995June 6 – The Constitutional Court of South Africa abolishes capital punishment in South Africa in the case of S v Makwanyane and Another.source
• 1995June 22 – Japanese police rescue 365 hostages from a hijacked All Nippon Airways Flight 857 (Boeing 747-200) at Hakodate airport. The hijacker was armed with a knife and demanded the release of Shoko Asahara.source
• 1995September 26 – The trial against former Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, who is accused of Mafia connections, begins.source
• 1995November 16 – A United Nations tribunal charges Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić with genocide during the Bosnian War.source
• 1995December 16 – Iraq disarmament crisis: Iraqi scuba divers, under the direction of the United Nations Special Commission, dredge the Tigris near Baghdad. The divers find over 200 prohibited Russian-made missile instruments and components.source
• 1996May 21 – Seven Trappist monks from the monastery of Thibirine are killed by members of the Armed Islamic Group in Algeria after talks with French government concerning the imprisonment of several GIA sympathisers break down.source
• 1996July 11 – Arrest warrants are issued for Bosnian Serb war criminals Radovan Karadžić and Ratko Mladić by the Russell Tribunal in The Hague.source
• 1996August 26 – David Dellinger, Bradford Lyttle, and nine others are arrested by the Federal Protective Service while protesting in a demonstration at the Kluczynski Federal Building in downtown Chicago during that year's Democratic National Convention.source
• 1996November 19 – Martin Bryant is sentenced to 35 consecutive sentences of life imprisonment plus 1,035 years without parole for murdering 35 people in a shooting spree in Tasmania earlier this year.source
• 1997January 16 – Murder of Ennis Cosby: Near Interstate 405 in Los Angeles, Bill Cosby's son Ennis is shot in the head in a failed robbery attempt.source
• 1997March 9 – American rapper The Notorious B.I.G. is murdered in Los Angeles.source
• 1997March 16 – Sandline affair: On Bougainville Island in Papua New Guinea, soldiers of commander Jerry Singirok arrest Tim Spicer and his mercenaries of the Sandline International.source
• 1997April 14 – Former SS Captain Erich Priebke is retried; on July 22 he is sentenced to fifteen years in prison.source
• 1997June 2 – In Denver, Colorado, Timothy McVeigh is convicted on 15 counts of murder and conspiracy for his role in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.source
• 1997June 10 – Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot orders the killing of his defense chief, Son Sen, and 11 of Sen's family members, before Pol Pot flees his northern stronghold.source
• 1997June 13 – A jury sentences Timothy McVeigh to death for his part in the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.source
• 1997July 13 – The remains of Che Guevara are returned to Cuba for burial, alongside some of his comrades. Guevara and his comrades were executed on October 9 1967 in Bolivia.source
• 1997July 15 – Spree killer Andrew Cunanan shoots fashion designer Gianni Versace dead outside Versace's Miami Beach residence.source
• 1997August 20 – More than 60 are killed, 15 kidnapped in the Souhane massacre in Algeria.source
• 1997October 22 – Danish escaped criminal Steen Christensen robs the Hotel Palace in Helsinki, Finland, killing two police officers while evading capture.source
• 1997November 13 – Ramzi Yousef is found guilty of masterminding the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.source
• 1997November 17 – In Luxor, Egypt, 62 people are killed by 6 Islamic militants outside the Temple of Hatshepsut.source
• 1998January 23 - P.W. Botha appears in front of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission to answer for apartheid-era policies; he refers to the hearing as a "circus".source
• 1998February 26 – Oprah is cleared of slander in an Amarillo court after a highly publicized court battle with Texas beef moguls.source
• 1998April 24 – Rwanda executes 22 Hutus, including Froduald Karamira, for their roles in the 1994 genocide.source
• 1998May 27 – The United States requests that El Salvador reopen its probe into the 1980 murders of U.S. missionaries.source
• 1998July 17 – In Saint Petersburg, Nicholas II of Russia and his family are buried in St. Catherine Chapel, 80 years after he and his family were killed by the Bolsheviks in 1918.source
• 1998September 12 – The Cuban Five intelligence agents are arrested in Miami, and later convicted of espionage. The agents claim they were not spying against the United States Government but against the Cuban exile community in Miami.source
• 1998Jean Kambanda is sentenced to life in prison for his role in the Rwandan genocide.source
• 1998October 10 – Indictment and arrest of Augusto Pinochet: General Augusto Pinochet, Chilean dictator from 1973 to 1990, is indicted for human rights violations he committed in Chile by Spanish magistrate Baltasar Garzón. 6 days later British police place him under house arrest during his medical treatment in the UK. This is a leading case in the law of universal jurisdiction.source
• 1999February 12 – U.S. President Bill Clinton is acquitted in impeachment proceedings in the United States Senate.source
• 1999April 5 – In Laramie, Wyoming, Russell Henderson pleads guilty to kidnapping and felony murder, in order to avoid a possible death penalty conviction for the apparent hate crime killing of Matthew Shepard.source
• 1999April 26 – British TV presenter Jill Dando, 37, is shot dead on the doorstep of her home in Fulham, London.source
• 1999May 27 – The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in The Hague, Netherlands indicts Slobodan Milošević and four others for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Kosovo.source
• 1999May 28 – Two Swedish police officers are wounded by bank robbers armed with automatic firearms, and later executed with their own service pistols in Malexander, Sweden.source
• 1999July 1 – Europol (short for European Police Office) the European Union's criminal intelligence agency becomes fully operational.source
• 1999July 23 – Fourteen Kosovar Serb villagers are killed by ethnic Albanian gunmen in the village of Staro Gračko.source
• 1999October 12 – Murder of Björn Söderberg in Stockholm, Sweden by neo-fascists.source