When we think of the 60s, we imagine the heady time of beatniks and hippies, the peaceful protest era with Woodstock and The Beatles rising into popularity and taking over the world with their songs of love and weird, psychedelic trips in lyrical form.
It was a groovier time, but that doesn’t make its murderers any more colorful and pleasant. There are plenty of evil people, regardless of the period, and there’s little more disturbed and hypocritical than an infanticidal killer.
A killer of children, ones too young to even understand the concept of such violence. Worse yet, when it’s their mother.
Alice Crimmins was one such mother.
A New York woman who, for one reason or another, thought it would be easier to kill her two children than live any kind of life with them.
And worst of all, she even had the gall to play the part of the concerned mother who reported them missing, almost as if to brag about it.
10 /10 Lower Middle Classy
Alice Crimmins was one of the most infamous figures of her day in the way of suspicious activity. Before that, she was a mother and a wife and a decent-looking one.
She spent a lot of time on her appearance in particular. Coming from a more impoverished background, she married Edmund Crimmins and lived in Kew Gardens Hills in Queens, New York.
They had two children, Eddie Jr. and Alice Marie, also known as Missy.
9 /10 Garden Variety Tragedy
Their Garden Level (ground level) apartment overlooked the more straightforward outside lots of the 1965 Queens borough.
On July 14, 1965, the police rushed to the scene as Alice reported her children were missing. Investigators initially suspected one of two main possibilities.
The kids could have just walked right outside, into the street, and gotten lost. Or more sinisterly, the back door could have been quietly opened, and a kidnapper could be at large.
Their suspicions were laid to rest when they found young Missy, age 4, dead of strangulation that very day. Five days later, they found Eddie Jr., dead of unknown causes.