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"Tarcutta is a town in south-western New South Wales, Australia. The town is south-west of Sydney, east of the Hume Highway, It was proclaimed as a village on 28 October 1890. As of 2016, the town had a population of 446. It serves a local farming community relying for its prosperity mainly on sheep and cattle, and the interstate truckies who use the town as a halfway change-over point in the trade between the state capital cities of Sydney and Melbourne. History The Tarcutta area was first visited by the European explorers Hume and Hovell as they passed through on their way from Sydney to Port Phillip in the Colony of Victoria. On 7 January 1825, near the present site of Tarcutta, they met a group of Wiradjuri aborigines. A decade after this first European contact around 1835-37, "Hambledon", a U-shaped slab house was built at Tarcutta. It was the first inn and post office to be built between Gundagai and Albury. Tarcutta Post Office opened on 1 January 1849. Gold was mined in the area round Tarcutta. By the 1880s Tarcutta locals were actively lobbying for a rail branch line from Wagga Wagga to Tumbarumba via Tarcutta, and in 1917 the Tumbarumba branch line became a reality. A section of the line sustained major flood damage in 1974, and the remainder of the line was closed in 1987. The Tarcutta bypass is west of the village, linking-up to the freeway to the north of the village and south of the village. It was opened to traffic on 15 November 2011. Trucking industry Tarcutta is situated halfway between Sydney and Melbourne on the Hume Highway, and has long been popular in the trucking industry as a stopping and changeover point for drivers. The local park houses the National Truck Drivers' Memorial to the truck drivers who have died on the infamous local stretch of the Hume Highway, as well as around the country. The country singer, Slim Dusty, endorsed the memorial with a plaque. A commemorative event is held annually in October. The local café, which has sustained generations of truckies, has also been the source of inspiration for some of Australia's recent modern poets, Les Murray and Bruce Dawe. Murray wrote "The Burning Truck" while visiting the café in 1961 and Dawe immortalised the eatery in a couple of lines in his poem "Under Way". The poem reads in part: 'there would be days / banging open and shut like the wire door of the cafe in Tarcutta / where the flies sang at the windows'. There had been extensive political arguing since 1999 between Federal and State Governments over funding and where to site a proposed Tarcutta truck changeover facility. It was finally decided to place it off the main street and the project which was completed early 2007 was jointly funded at a cost of $6.5m. Truck drivers are required to stop for 30 minutes every five hours. Heritage listings Tarcutta has a number of heritage-listed sites, including: * Tarcutta Street: Hambledon Homestead Other features Tarcutta is also the birthplace of former Grand Slam champion tennis player Tony Roche. A left-hander, Roche had a successful singles and double career and won 12 Grand Slam men's doubles tournaments. Located nearby is the Tarcutta Hills Reserve, owned and managed by Bush Heritage Australia. This reserve provides an important remnant of white box woodland with a relatively untouched grassy understory: a last refuge for the squirrel glider, endangered birds like the swift parrot, and as many as 11 other threatened wildlife species. The site is listed on the Register of the National Estate. In 1969, the Tarcutta Rugby League side became the Group 13 Rugby League premiers. Their superior season also saw them crowned as the Clayton Cup winners for 1969. Climate Original truckie memorial at site of current memorial. References External links *Tarcutta Railway Station *Tarcutta Hills Reserve *National Truck Drivers' Memorial Category:Towns in New South Wales Category:Hume Highway Category:Mining towns in New South Wales "
"Robert Kenneth Ressler (February 15, 1937 – May 5, 2013) was an FBI agent and author. He played a significant role in the psychological profiling of violent offenders in the 1970s and is often credited with coining the term "serial killer", though the term is not far from a direct translation of the German term "Serienmörder" coined in 1930 by Berlin investigator Ernst Gennat. After retiring from the FBI, he authored a number of books on serial murders, and often gave lectures on criminology. Early life Robert Ressler grew up on North Marmora Avenue in Chicago, Illinois and graduated from Schurz High School, Class of 1955. He was the son of Joseph, who worked in security and maintenance at the Chicago Tribune, and Gertrude Ressler. At an early age Robert became interested in killers, as he followed the Tribune's articles on "The Lipstick Killer". Ressler claims that he was more fascinated than afraid of this notorious killer, as other killers fascinated him in his later years with the FBI. Ressler attended two years at a community college before joining the U.S. Army and was stationed in Okinawa. After two years in the army Ressler decided to enroll in the School of criminology and police administration at Michigan State University. He graduated with a bachelor's degree and started graduate work but only finished one semester before going back into the army as an officer, having also completed an ROTC program at Michigan State. Military career Ressler served in the U.S. Army from 1957 to 1992 as a provost marshal of a platoon of MPs in Aschaffenburg, as he states in his autobiography Whoever Fights Monsters. He was in charge of solving cases such as homicides, robberies, and arson. After four years in Germany, Ressler decided to leave the position and was reassigned as the Commander of a Criminal Investigation Division (CID) at Fort Sheridan. He then went back to Michigan State to finish his master's in police administration, paid for by the army, in exchange for two more years of service after graduation. After he got his degree, he served a year in Thailand and a year in Fort Sheridan, where he finished out his career with the army as a major, and moved on to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). FBI career Ressler joined the FBI in 1970 and was recruited into the Behavioral Science Unit that deals with drawing up psychological profiles of violent offenders, such as rapists and serial killers, who typically select victims at random. Between 1976 and 1979, Ressler helped to organize the interviews of thirty-six incarcerated serial killers in order to find parallels between such criminals' backgrounds and motives. He was also instrumental in setting up Vi-CAP (Violent Criminal Apprehension Program). This consists of a centralized computer database of information on unsolved homicides. Information is gathered from local police forces and cross-referenced with other unsolved killings across the United States. Working on the basis that most serial killers claim similar victims with a standard method (modus operandi) it hopes to spot early on when a killer is carrying out crimes in different jurisdictions. This was primarily a response to the appearance of nomadic killers who committed crimes in different areas. So long as the killer kept on the move, the police forces in each state would be unaware that there were multiple victims and would just be investigating a single homicide each, unaware that other police forces had similar crimes. Vi-CAP would help individual police forces determine if they were hunting for the same perpetrator so that they could share and correlate information with one another, increasing their chances of identifying a suspect. He worked on many cases of serial homicide such as Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, Richard Chase and John Joubert. Life after retirement Ressler retired from the FBI in 1990 and authored a number of books about serial murder. He actively gave lectures to students and police forces on the subject of criminology and in 1993, was brought in to London to assist in the investigation into the murders committed by Colin Ireland. In 1995, Ressler met South African profiler Micki Pistorius at a conference in Scotland and she invited him to review her investigation of the "ABC Murders", so-called because of their location in the Johannesburg suburbs of Atteridgeville, Boksburg, and Cleveland. A man named David Selepe had died in police custody while being investigated as a suspect for the Cleveland murders, prior to the discovery of the Atteridgeville and Boksburg crimes, and the authorities feared that they had killed an innocent man while the real culprit was still at large. Ressler believed that Selepe was indeed responsible for the Cleveland murders, either alone or with an accomplice, and that the Atteridgeville and Boksburg murders had been committed by the same offender, but that this killer was not involved in the Cleveland murders. He also pointed out that the Atteridgeville-Boksburg murderer was gaining confidence with each killing and would contact the media. As predicted, serial killer Moses Sithole called the South African newspaper The Star to claim responsibility for the Atteridgeville and Boksburg murders, some time after Ressler left the case.Pistorius, Micki (2012) Catch me a killer. Penguin UK, 209 pages.Murray, William (2009) Serial Killers. Canary Press, 192 pages. Ressler's visit to Ciudad Juárez in Mexico to investigate the still-active feminicides occurring there served as inspiration for the character Albert Kessler in Roberto Bolaño's novel 2666. Death Ressler died at his home in Spotsylvania County, Virginia on Sunday May 5, 2013, from Parkinson's disease. He was 76 years old. He is survived by his wife Helen Graszer Ressler, his son Lt. Col. Aaron R. Ressler, daughters Allison R. Tsiumis and Betsy S. Hamlin, three grandchildren and three step grandchildren. Model for fictional characters A screenplay adapted from his colleague's John E. Douglas' book Mindhunter: Inside the FBI's Elite Serial Crime Unit was picked up by Netflix. Mindhunter stars Holt McCallany, who plays the character Special Agent Bill Tench, a lead character based on Ressler. Books * Sexual Homicide: Patterns and Motives (with John E. Douglas, Ann Wolbert Burgess) (1988) * Whoever Fights Monsters: My Twenty Years Tracking Serial Killers for the FBI (with Tom Shachtman) (1992) * Justice Is Served (with Tom Shachtman) (1994) * I Have Lived in the Monster (with Tom Shachtman) (1998) See also * Crime Classification Manual * FBI method of profiling * Forensic psychology * Investigative psychology * Offender profiling References External links Robert K Ressler interview at www.sci-fi-online.com * Robert Ressler obituary at Forensic Behavioral Science International * Obituary Category:1937 births Category:2013 deaths Category:Burials at Arlington National Cemetery Category:Federal Bureau of Investigation agents Category:Offender profiling Category:Michigan State University alumni Category:United States Army officers Category:Deaths from Parkinson's disease "
"Grady Louis McMurtry (October 18, 1918 – July 12, 1985) was a student of author and occultist Aleister Crowley and an adherent of Thelema. He is best known for reviving the fraternal organization Ordo Templi Orientis, which he headed from 1971 until his death in 1985. Early life and career He lived in various parts of Oklahoma and the Midwest, and graduated from high school in Valley Center, Kansas in 1937. He then moved to Southern California to study engineering at Pasadena Junior College, where he made friends with some students at the nearby California Institute of Technology. Among them was Jack Parsons, who shared his enthusiasm for science fiction, and who introduced him to Thelema. In 1941 McMurtry was initiated into the Minerval and I° of Ordo Templi Orientis (O.T.O.), a secret society headed at the time by Aleister Crowley. In February 1942, two months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, McMurtry's entire Reserve Officers Training Corps class was called to active duty, and he served as an officer in Ordnance. He took part in the invasion of Normandy, the liberation of France and Belgium, and the occupation of Germany. He was recalled to active duty to serve in the Korean War, eventually reaching the rank of major. He was recalled again for another tour of duty in Korea in the early 1960s. Six months prior to completing 30 years of Reserve service, he was mustered out as a lieutenant colonel during a RIF (Reduction In Force) and lost what would have been an earned pension. He continued his academic studies as a civilian between tours of duty at the University of California, Berkeley, where he completed his A.B. in political science in 1948 and an M.A. in the discipline in 1955. His thesis for the latter degree examined the parallels between magic and Marxism. In a 1970 conversation with Jacques Vallée (who was flummoxed by McMurtry's lengthy military career), McMurtry identified as a political liberal. He noted his opposition to Richard Nixon's Middle East policies and characterized himself as "a poet who happened to fight in two wars." During World War II, especially when he was stationed in England in 1943 and the first half of 1944, McMurtry was able to meet with and become a personal student of Aleister Crowley, who elevated him to IX° of O.T.O., giving him the name Hymenaeus Alpha (which enumerates to 777) in November 1943. In September and November 1944 (and once again in June 1947), he received letters from Crowley referring to him as Crowley's "Caliph" (or successor). When McMurtry returned to California after the war he was appointed Crowley's O.T.O. representative in the United States (April 1946), subject only to the authority of Crowley's viceroy and heir apparent, Karl Germer. Crowley died in December 1947, and Germer was recognized as the head of O.T.O. At the time the only functioning Thelemic O.T.O. body in the world was Agape Lodge in Southern California, which was headed for a time by McMurtry's friend Jack Parsons. McMurtry planned to start a lodge in Northern California, but his deteriorating relationship with Karl Germer (based on Germer's refusal to initiate new members) put an end to his plans. He tried to organize other O.T.O. members in California to lobby Germer to change his policy, but the situation came to a head at a meeting in 1959 in which Dr. Gabriel Montenegro (Germer's representative) "ordered" McMurtry to cease his efforts. This order was reiterated in writing in November 1960. McMurtry unwillingly complied with the order, and he was disillusioned enough by this turn of events that he ended his direct involvement with O.T.O. In 1961 he moved to Washington, D.C., where he soon became completely out of touch with other O.T.O. members. Re-establishing O.T.O. On October 25, 1962 Germer died from prostatic cancer at the age of 77, without naming a successor as head of O.T.O. His widow, who was not a member of O.T.O., retained material possession of the O.T.O.'s extensive archives. Though individual members carried on with their spiritual activities, the central organization, for all intents and purposes, ceased to function. There were a few individuals, notably Kenneth Grant of Britain, Hermann Metzger of Switzerland, and later, Marcelo Ramos Motta of Brazil, who claimed succession to Germer. McMurtry was unaware of any of these developments until 1968, when he received a letter from Phyllis Seckler, a fellow Agape Lodge O.T.O. initiate. Seckler's letter was to inform McMurtry that the archives in Germer's widow's care (including Aleister Crowley's library) had been burglarized the previous year by persons unknown. When he became aware of the situation he decided to take charge of what remained of O.T.O. In 1969 he left his job at the United States Department of Labor and returned to California to investigate the burglary. Though the crime was never officially solved, McMurtry felt that it had probably been carried out by a group, falsely claiming affiliation with O.T.O., that called itself the "Solar Lodge". McMurtry had moved into Seckler's home in Dublin, California, and soon they were married. At this time, McMurtry decided to restore the Order by invoking his emergency orders from Crowley which gave him authority (subject to Karl Germer's approval) to "take charge of the whole work of the Order in California to reform the Organization", and he assumed the title "Caliph of O.T.O.," as specified in Crowley's letters to McMurtry from the 1940s. His witnesses were Dr. Israel Regardie (1907–1985) and Gerald Yorke, who both offered their support. Along with Seckler and two other surviving members, Mildred Burlingame and Helen Parsons Smith, he slowly began performing O.T.O. initiations again. They also eventually succeeded in their efforts to find a publisher for the Thoth tarot deck designed by Aleister Crowley. O.T.O. was registered with the State of California on December 28, 1971 as a legal organization. In 1974 McMurtry and Seckler separated, and he moved to Berkeley, California. Germer's widow died in 1975, and in 1976 the surviving members of O.T.O. were enabled by court order to claim the still considerable archives. In October 1977 McMurtry founded Thelema Lodge in Berkeley to serve as the headquarters of his resuscitated O.T.O. Many initiations were performed, and a weekly celebration of the Gnostic Mass was soon established in the San Francisco Bay area. McMurtry, and other initiators chartered by him, established O.T.O. groups in many other areas in the United States and internationally. By 1985 O.T.O., by its own report, had more than seven hundred members in several different countries. In that year McMurtry, in failing health, successfully sued Motta in United States district court over the possession of the O.T.O. trademarks and copyrights. He died in a Martinez, California convalescent hospital on the day that the U.S. court clerk released the text of the decision that set the seal on McMurtry's efforts to reestablish O.T.O. Since then O.T.O. had, by its own report, grown to over three thousand members in more than forty countries, although numbers have declined significantly over the last decade. Bibliography *The O.T.O. Newsletter Vol. I, Nos.1-4, May 1977 - March 1978 *Transcript of an interview with McMurtry about his early life, serialized in the Thelema Lodge Calendar, November 2000 - September 2001 *A comprehensive collection of 134 poems was published as "The Poetry of Grady Louis McMurtry" Red Flame No. 1, September 2001 References Further reading *"Hymenaeus Alpha: In Memoriam" in The Equinox Vol. III, No. 10, March 1986 *Transcript of U.S. District Court Proceedings, D.C. No. 83-5434-CAL, GRADY McMURTRY, et al., Plaintiffs- Appellees, v. SOCIETY ORDO TEMPLI ORIENTIS, et al., Defendants-Appellants. *Biography Abstract of McMurtry by Nathan W. Bjorge, serialized in the Thelema Lodge Calendar, September 1999 *In The Name of The Beast, A two volume Biography of Grady Louis McMurtry, a disciple of Aleister Edward Crowley' Vol.One 1918-1962. Vol.Two 1962-1985, by J. Edward Cornelius (Red Flame, A Thelemic Research Journal 2005) External links * "On Knowing Aleister Crowley Personally" by Grady Louis McMurtry * "On Technical Information and On Curriculum" a series of essays by McMurtry * Luminist Archive collection of McMurtry articles Category:1918 births Category:1985 deaths Category:People from Craig County, Oklahoma Category:United States Army officers Category:American army personnel of World War II Category:American army personnel of the Korean War Category:University of California, Berkeley alumni Category:Members of Ordo Templi Orientis Category:American Thelemites Category:People from Dublin, California Category:20th-century American poets "