YONKERS, N.Y. — She was a victim of serial killer Robert Shulman, a postal worker from Hicksville, Long Island convicted of killing and dismembering five women in the 1990s using barbells and a baseball bat. But no one knew her name — until now.
Det. John Geiss, of the Yonkers Cold Case Squad, told PIX11 News on Monday Meresa Hammonds was the victim found in a Yonkers dumpster on June 27, 1992. She was a mother of two sons who was living in New Jersey. She was 31 years old.
For 29 years, Hammonds was listed as missing.
Now, using genetic genealogy, police have confirmed she was one of the serial killer’s victims.
Shulman once said he used to smoke crack with his victims at his apartment in Patchogue, black out, and then wake up to find them dead in bed.
The Italian bureau of prisons has launched an investigation into how two Americans were able to gain access to a high-security Italian prison to terrify a convicted hacker.
ROME—One of QAnon’s wildest conspiracy theories claimed that the U.S. presidential election had been stolen from Donald Trump with the help of two small-time Italian hackers who had somehow hijacked a satellite in order to change the results being counted on American voting machines.
It is now clear that this bizarro theory was not confined to the darker corners of the QAnon conspiracy network. The power of the U.S. State Department may have been pushed into action trying to prove that this was how President Biden stole the election.
A two-year BBC investigation into Black Axe – a Nigerian student fraternity which evolved into a dreaded mafia-group – has unearthed new evidence of infiltration of politics, and a scamming and killing operation spanning the globe.
Warning: Contains detailed graphic accounts of violence
During quiet moments, after he has finished lecturing for the day, Dr John Stone has flashbacks. It’s not the blood or the sound of the gunshots that haunt him. It’s the begging. The way people beg for mercy when they die. Begging him. Begging God.
“It’s so painful,” he says, shaking his head with a shudder. “The families of the dead, they will curse you. A curse will be upon your life.”
Dr Stone teaches political science at the University of Benin, in southern Nigeria. But for decades he was a senior member of Black Axe – a Nigerian mafia-style gang tied to human trafficking, internet fraud and murder. Locally, Black Axe are referred to as a “cult,” a nod to their secret initiation rituals and the intense loyalty of their members. They are also infamous for extreme violence. Images of those who cross their path – dead bodies mutilated or showing signs of torture – regularly surface on Nigerian social media.
Dr Stone admits he took part in atrocities during his years as an “Axeman”. At one point during our interview, recalling the most efficient means of killing, he leaned forward, squeezed his fingers into the shape of a gun and pushed them to the forehead of our producer. In Benin City, he was known as “a butcher”.
Image caption,Dr Stone, a former Axeman, is now a vocal critic of the gang
The horror of these years has scarred him. Today, Dr Stone is remorseful for his past and a vocal critic of the gang he once served. He is one of a dozen Black Axe sources who have decided to break their oaths of silence and reveal their secrets to the BBC, speaking to international media for the first time.
For two years BBC Africa Eye has been investigating Black Axe, building a network of whistle-blowers, and uncovering several thousand secret documents – leaked from the gang’s private communications. The findings suggest that over the past decade, Black Axe has become one of the most far-reaching and dangerous organised crime groups in the world.
In Africa, Europe, Asia and North America, Axemen are in our midst. You may even have an email from them in your inbox.
Our investigation began with a death threat – a spidery, hand-written letter, delivered to a BBC journalist in 2018. It was dropped by a motorbike rider on to the windscreen of the reporter’s car. Weeks earlier, the journalist had been digging into the illegal opioid trade in Nigeria and had met a number of Black Axe members face to face. Later, a second letter was handed to the man’s family. Someone had been tracking him and had found his home.
Did the threat come from Black Axe? How powerful is this crime network, and who is behind it?
Our search for answers led us to a man who claimed he had hacked tens of thousands of secret Black Axe documents – a huge cache of private communications, from hundreds of suspected members. The messages, which span 2009 to 2019, include communications about murder and drug smuggling. Emails detail elaborate and lucrative internet fraud. Messages plan global expansion. It was a mosaic of Black Axe criminal activity spanning four continents.
The Department of Veterans Affairs will be able to invest more in maternity care for female veterans and the federal government will be required to study the health of active-duty and former service members who have had babies or are trying to get pregnant after Congress passed legislation Tuesday.
The Protecting Moms Who Served Act, passed by the House in a 414-9 vote and now heading to President Joe Biden for a signature, allows the VA to spend $15 million to improve coordination between the VA hospitals that treat female veterans and the community facilities that provide their obstetrics care.
Aspiration is among a group of companies that provide banking and financial services, and promise to help the environment. But so far its marketing is greener than its reality.
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You can save the planet with a swipe of your bank card. That’s the enticing proposition made by a company called Aspiration, which promises to take the leftover change from customers’ purchases and use it to plant trees around the world. Aspiration is on track to spend $149 million this year marketing that message, according to its financial documents, considerably more than the revenues the company expects to take in.
“Clean rich is the new filthy rich,” Aspiration proclaims on billboards across New York, Texas and California. Other ads, ubiquitous on social media, feature images of Aspiration’s debit card, which depicts a green treescape and is made from recycled plastic. The likes of Leonardo DiCaprio, Orlando Bloom, Robert Downey Jr. and Drake have invested in the company. Aspiration has received enthusiastic press coverage (with the exception of a critical dissection by New York University marketing professor Scott Galloway). And the company won further headlines in September for its reported $300 million, 23-year sponsorship deal with the Los Angeles Clippers, which will feature Aspiration’s name on signs inside the Clippers’ new arena, give the company a role in sustainability initiatives and put its logo on the jersey of every Clippers player.
