What happened on this day in history?

You're getting the full story for this one, courtesy of History.com. 1905, when fingerprint evidence is used to solve a British murder case for the first time. It's quite interesting and funny (like how the expert trying to help the defense also tried to help the prosecution).

The neighbors of Thomas and Ann Farrow, shopkeepers in South London, discover their badly bludgeoned bodies in their home. Thomas was already dead, but Ann was still breathing. She died four days later without ever having regained consciousness. The brutal crime was solved using the newly developed fingerprinting technique. Only three years earlier, the first English court had admitted fingerprint evidence in a petty theft case. The Farrow case was the first time that the cutting-edge technology was used in a high-profile murder case.

Since the cash box in which the Farrow’s stored their cash receipts was empty, it was clear to Scotland Yard investigators that robbery was the motive for the crime. One print on the box did not match the victims or any of the still-tiny file of criminal prints that Scotland Yard possessed. Fortunately, a local milkman reported seeing two young men in the vicinity of the Farrow house on the day of the murders. Soon identified as brothers Alfred and Albert Stratton, the police began interviewing their friends.

Alfred’s girlfriend told police that he had given away his coat the day and changed the color of his shoes the day after the murders. A week later, authorities finally caught up with the Stratton brothers and fingerprinted them. Alfred’s right thumb was a perfect match for the print on the Farrow’s cash box.

The fingerprint evidence became the prosecution’s only solid evidence when the milkman was unable to positively identify the Strattons. The defense put up expert Dr. John Garson to attack the reliability of the fingerprint evidence. But the prosecution countered with evidence that Garson had written to both the defense and prosecution on the same day offering his services to both.

The Stratton brothers, obviously not helped by the discrediting of Garson, were convicted and hanged on May 23, 1905. Since then, fingerprint evidence has become commonplace in criminal trials and the lack of it is even used by defense attorneys.

Sticking with Wrestlemania - 7 years ago The Undertaker defeated Shawn Michaels in a no disqualification, no countout match. With the loss, Shawn Michaels was forced to retire.

Sticking with Wrestlemania - 7 years ago The Undertaker defeated Shawn Michaels in a no disqualification, no countout match. With the loss, Shawn Michaels was forced to retire.

Good times.

On March 30, 1981, President Ronald Reagan was shot in the chest outside a Washington DC hotel by John Hinckley Jr.

Reagan survived and surprisingly, Hinckley Jnr. got away with attempted murder of a president on an insanity plea. "Not guilty by reason of insanity". Crazy, He has though spent the majority of his life since then in a mental hospital but is occasionally allowed out under supervision as his mental health is "improving". Probably nothing really wrong with him in the first place.

March, 30th, 1867 – U.S. Secretary of State William H. Seward negotiated the purchase of Alaska for US$7.2 million from Russia.

Good times.

1889, 31st March, the Eiffel Tower was officially opened in Paris. It caused a lot of controversy as people thought it would be an eyesore. Today it is classed as a world landmark. Funnily, the elevator wasn't working when they opened it, so to raise the French flag on the top after the official opening, they had to walk to the top.

Some trivia - the Eiffel Tower was almost demolished when the International Exposition’s 20-year lease on the land expired in 1909, but its value as an antenna for radio transmission saved it.

March, 31st.

1985 - Wrestlemania 1 takes place from, Madison Square Garden, New York City, New York. The main event was Hulk Hogan and Mr. T vs Rowdy Roddy Piper and Mr. Wonderful Paul Orndorff

1996 - Wrestlemania XII takes place from the Arrowhead Pond in Anaheim, California. now known as the Honda Center. The Main Event was for the WWF Title, Bret Hart, the champion vs Shawn Michaels, in a 60 minute iron match.

2008 - Wrestlemania XXIV takes place from  the Florida Citrus Bowl in Orlando, Florida, now known as Camping World Stadium.

2005 Pope John Paul II Died

An important moment in history:

Just after 6 p.m. on April 4, 1968, Martin Luther King Jr. is fatally shot while standing on the balcony outside his second-story room at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee.

During the several weeks after this, the rifle, eyewitness reports, and fingerprints on the weapon all implicated a single suspect: escaped convict James Earl Ray. In May 1968, a massive manhunt for Ray began. On June 8, Scotland Yard investigators arrested Ray at a London airport. He was trying to fly to Belgium, with the eventual goal, he later admitted, of reaching Rhodesia. Rhodesia, now called Zimbabwe. He pleaded guilty to the murder in order to avoid the electric chair - which seems odd to me as you'd kill a guy that denies it, but let him live if he admits it - does not make sense to me. Anyway, he died in 1998.

So, why was this an important day in history? Well quite simply, it changed America and affected shifts in black leadership during the following four decades. He was famous when he lived, but became even more so in death.

Got a few interesting ones today:

1614

Pocahontas, daughter of the chief of the Powhatan Indian confederacy, marries English tobacco planter John Rolfe in Jamestown, Virginia. The marriage ensured peace between the Jamestown settlers and the Powhatan Indians for several years.

1994

Modern rock icon Kurt Cobain commits suicide on this day in 1994. His body was discovered inside his home in Seattle, Washington, three days later by Gary Smith, an electrician, who was installing a security system in the suburban house. Despite indications that Cobain, the lead singer of Nirvana, killed himself, several skeptics questioned the circumstances of his death and pinned responsibility on his wife, Courtney Love.

1955

Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill, the British leader who guided Great Britain and the Allies through the crisis of World War II, retires as prime minister of Great Britain.

1896 First modern Olympic Games are played

On April 6, 1896, the Olympic Games, a long-lost tradition of ancient Greece, are reborn in Athens 1,500 years after being banned by Roman Emperor Theodosius I. At the opening of the Athens Games, King Georgios I of Greece and a crowd of 60,000 spectators welcomed athletes from 13 nations to the international competition.

April 10:

1710 – The Statute of Anne, the first law regulating copyright, comes into force in Great Britain.
1815 – The Mount Tambora volcano begins a three-month-long eruption, lasting until July 15. The eruption ultimately kills 71,000 people and affects Earth's climate for the next two years.
1925 – The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is first published in New York City, by Charles Scribner's Sons.

1861 - The Civil War begins.

The bloodiest four years in American history begin when Confederate shore batteries under General P.G.T. Beauregard open fire on Union-held Fort Sumter in South Carolina’s Charleston Bay. During the next 34 hours, 50 Confederate guns and mortars launched more than 4,000 rounds at the poorly supplied fort. On April 13, U.S. Major Robert Anderson surrendered the fort. Two days later, U.S. President Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation calling for 75,000 volunteer soldiers to quell the Southern “insurrection.”

1970 Appollo 13 returned to earth.

1790 Benjamin Franklin dies.

Damn, never knew about this. Took days to put out the fires it created and killed hundreds of thousands of people.

1906 The Great San Francisco Earthquake
At 5:13 a.m., an earthquake estimated at close to 8.0 on the Richter scale strikes San Francisco, California, killing hundreds of people as it topples numerous buildings. The quake was caused by a slip of the San Andreas Fault over a segment about 275 miles long, and shock waves could be felt from southern Oregon down to Los Angeles.

In the face of significant aftershocks, firefighters and U.S. troops fought desperately to control the ongoing fire, often dynamiting whole city blocks to create firewalls. On April 20, 20,000 refugees trapped by the massive fire were evacuated from the foot of Van Ness Avenue onto the USS Chicago.

By April 23, most fires were extinguished, and authorities commenced the task of rebuilding the devastated metropolis. It was estimated that some 3,000 people died as a result of the Great San Francisco Earthquake and the devastating fires it inflicted upon the city. Almost 30,000 buildings were destroyed, including most of the city’s homes and nearly all the central business district.

On April 19, 1861, the first blood of the American Civil War is shed when a secessionist mob in Baltimore attacks Massachusetts troops bound for Washington, D.C. Four soldiers and 12 rioters were killed.

1841, Edgar Allen Poe’s story, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, first appears in Graham’s Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine. The tale is generally considered to be the first detective story ever published.

753 B.C. Rome was founded
According to tradition, on April 21, 753 B.C., Romulus and his twin brother, Remus, found Rome on the site where they were suckled by a she-wolf as orphaned infants. Actually, the Romulus and Remus myth originated sometime in the fourth century B.C., and the exact date of Rome’s founding was set by the Roman scholar Marcus Terentius Varro in the first century B.C.

So yesterday was the birth date of one of Englands most favoured writers who became famous worldwide. 1564, 23rd April, William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-on-Avon. I should add that whilst no one knows for sure his exact birth date, the 23rd April is widely regarded as the day. Church records show that he was baptised on April 26, and three days was a customary amount of time to wait before baptising a newborn back in those days.

Yesterday was also the death of William Shakespeare, who died on his birthday aged 52 in 1616.

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Today

1916, Easter Rebellion begins. Easter Monday in Dublin, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, a secret organisation of Irish nationalists led by Patrick Pearse, launches the so-called Easter Rebellion, an armed uprising against British rule. They proclaimed the independence of Ireland, which had been under the repressive thumb of the United Kingdom for centuries, and by the next morning were in control of much of the city. Later that day, however, British authorities launched a counteroffensive, and by April 29 the uprising had been crushed. Nevertheless, the Easter Rebellion is considered a significant marker on the road to establishing an independent Irish republic.

Also, in 1953, the legendary Sir Winston Churchill was got his "sir" as he was knighted by the Queen.

One of the greatest... well, worst really, but it's one that's history making, so maybe it should be one of the greatest fuck ups in Wrestling history. On this day, in the year 2000, David Arquette won the WCW World Heavyweight Championship in a tag match for a singles title featuring 2 non-wrestlers. Was definitely one of the final nails in the coffin for WCW.

17 years ago today at a WCW Thunder taping in Syracuse, New York, David Arquette defeated Eric Bischoff to win the WCW World Heavyweight Championship. Kimberly Page was the special referee.

A bit of an explanation is in order. No, Bischoff was not the WCW world champion; that was Diamond Dallas Page, who won the title a day earlier from Jeff Jarrett. Jarrett took the actor hostage and demanded a tag match with Jarrett and Bischoff taking on DDP and Arquette, with the WCW world title on the line. As Mickey Jay (a second ref as the original Kimberly was out cold from a kiss... or... something) counted the fall for Arquette, it was he that won the title.

To say this is an unmitigated disaster for WCW would be an understatement. It all started with a production meeting where Tony Schiavone jokingly suggested that David Arquette should win the WCW world title. For some reason, the booking powers that be (by that I mean Vince Russo) did not take this as a joke. At least their heart was in the right place... probably.

Ready to Rumble, the WCW movie recently released at the time of the show, wasn’t doing well at the box office (only $12 million in gross through three weeks against a $24 million budget), so the hope was the title change would create some buzz for the promotion and maybe help the movie turn in a profit.

It did create some buzz, just not the good kind. The critical backlash was swift and severe: the movie made just $272,000 in the following weekend, ticket sales for Slamboree came to almost an immediate halt, and Nitro the Monday after the title change lost 600,000 viewers compared to the week prior. Among many wrestling fans, this was a bridge too far, and is often regarded as the tipping point for WCW’s demise, which would come just 11 months later.

Arquette, who reluctantly went along with the plan (he as a wrestling fan knew the backlash was coming), didn’t made a penny off his 12-day run as WCW champion (the eleventh of 25 total title changes in 2000, including vacancies). He donated his earnings to the families of Darren Drozdov, who was paralyzed in 1999, Brian Pillman, and Owen Hart, who died in 1997 and 1999 respectively.

Classy of Arquette to donate his pay to those guys, I never knew that.

Classy of Arquette to donate his pay to those guys, I never knew that.

Same. Very good of him. It doesn't make up for absolute shit booking, but it's still a good piece of news to come from that incident.

On April 26, 1986, the world’s worst nuclear power plant accident occurs at the Chernobyl nuclear power station in the Soviet Union. Thirty-two people died and dozens more suffered radiation burns in the opening days of the crisis, but only after Swedish authorities reported the fallout did Soviet authorities reluctantly admit that an accident had occurred.

They tried denying it happened lol

Some further info on the devastation of it:

In the opening days of the crisis, 32 people died at Chernobyl and dozens more suffered radiation burns. The radiation that escaped into the atmosphere, which was several times that produced by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was spread by the wind over Northern and Eastern Europe, contaminating millions of acres of forest and farmland. An estimated 5,000 Soviet citizens eventually died from cancer and other radiation-induced illnesses caused by their exposure to the Chernobyl radiation, and millions more had their health adversely affected. In 2000, the last working reactors at Chernobyl were shut down and the plant was officially closed.

The biggest on this day in history event:

On this day in 4977 B.C., the universe is created, according to German mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler, considered a founder of modern science. Kepler is best known for his theories explaining the motion of planets.

Also, because tea is life to most British people:

On this day in 1773, the British Parliament passes the Tea Act, a bill designed to save the faltering East India Company from bankruptcy by greatly lowering the tea tax it paid to the British government and, thus, granting it a de facto monopoly on the American tea trade. Because all legal tea entered the colonies through England, allowing the East India Company to pay lower taxes in Britain also allowed it to sell tea more cheaply in the colonies. Even untaxed Dutch tea, which entered the colonies illegally through smuggling, was more expensive the East India tea, after the act took effect.