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Edited by Mrph1 on Jul 29th 2024 at 3:09:00 PM
Isn't The Fountainhead that one Rand novel where the architect protagonist blows up a building (a house?) because some other guy messed with the plans for it?
So, let's hang an anchor from the sun... also my TumblrNah its a book.
The Fountainhead. Rand has really awful protagonists.
"That's right mortal. By channeling my divine rage into power, I have forged a new instrument in which to destroy you."Look up William E. Hickman. Then try not to puke.
Here's a Medium article on it:
Medium: William E. Hickman: The Killer Who Inspired Ayn Rand
The school official asked him which daughter — Parker had two. The young man said Mr. Parker had asked for the younger one.
This answer was confusing — the daughters, Marjorie and Marion, were twins, both 12 years old. So the young man corrected himself, instead asking for the “smaller” one.
Perhaps sensing the school officials might not believe his story, the young man told them they could call Parker’s bank, and they would confirm that he worked there. Apparently this was enough to set their minds at ease. They pulled little Marion out of class and allowed her to leave with the mysterious young man.
But the truth was, Parker, a wealthy bank owner, had not been in an accident. When Marion didn’t return home from school, the Parkers launched a search for her, but turned up nothing. They reported her missing the next day.
Soon after, they received a telegram addressed from Pasadena. It was a ransom note. In it, the kidnapper wrote, “Do positively nothing till you receive special delivery letter,” and demanded $1,500 — more than $22,000 in today’s money.
Through further telegrams, an exchange was set up for Parker to deliver the ransom and receive his daughter. However, the kidnapper caught sight of police watching the drop-off site, and the exchange never occurred.
Throughout the next day, Dec. 17, several more ransom letters arrived by telegram, signed “Death,” “Fox,” and “Fate.” In one, the kidnapper wrote, “Get this straight. Your daughter’s life hangs by a thread and I have a Gillette ready and able to handle the situation.” Another was a hand-written letter from Marion herself, begging her father to pay the ransom and let her come home.
The kidnapper instructed Parker to get $1,500 in $20 gold certificates and meet him at the corner of West Fifth Street and South Manhattan Place at 7 p.m.
Once there, Parker saw a man in a Chrysler coupe pull up next to him. Parker said the man, whose face was mostly hidden behind a bandanna, pointed a sawed-off shotgun at him and said, “You know what I’m here for. No monkey business.”
When Parker asked to see his little girl, the man pointed to the car. Inside, bundled up to her neck with blankets, was Marion. Parker said the man told him that Marion was sleeping, but her eyes were open. He called out to her, but she didn’t respond, so Parker assumed she’d been chloroformed.
Parker handed over the gold certificates. The man immediately put the car in gear, speeding forward about 200 yards. He then pulled over, yelled, “Here’s your daughter!” and pushed Marion out of the car before speeding off.
Parker, believing the nightmare was finally over, ran to his daughter. But what he found was far worse than anything he could have imagined.
It was immediately clear that Marion was dead. Her eyes had been held open with wire. Once Parker opened the bundle of blankets surrounding her, he discovered that it only contained her head and torso. She had been decapitated, dismembered, and disemboweled — her limbs and organs would be found the next day, wrapped in newspaper, scattered around Elysian Park. Clothing and towels had been stuffed inside her torso.
An autopsy revealed that she had been dead for about 12 hours. It also revealed a crucial piece of evidence: one of the towels that had been stuffed into her body was marked with the Bellevue Arms Apartments logo.
Police questioned several tenants there, including one named Donald Evans. He allowed them to search his apartment, but they found nothing suspicious. Afterwards, Evans would leave his apartment, never to return.
Meanwhile, the police launched a massive manhunt, mobilizing over 20,000 officers and American Legion volunteers. A reward of $50,000 — later increased to $100,000 — was offered for the identification and capture of the murderer.
Reporters from all over the country came to Los Angeles to cover what was dubbed “the most horrible crime of the decade,” only two years after the Leopold and Loeb case. People were so frightened, many stopped sending their children to school. It was reported that “Californians forgot Christmas” because they were so terrified by this case. Mexico closed its US border so the “Fox” wouldn’t escape into their country.
People were so outraged, innocent people were victimized in the name of catching the killer. One man who matched the killer’s description was arrested seven times in one day. Another was beaten by an angry mob, then taken into police custody for his own protection. While in his cell, he hanged himself.
On Dec. 20, the police got a breakthrough. The killer’s getaway car — recently stolen from San Diego — was discovered abandoned. Fingerprints were taken from the door, and the process of manually matching them began.
However, it did not take long to match the prints to a 19-year-old man named William Edward Hickman. Hickman had been an employee of Parker’s — until he had been caught with $400 worth of stolen and forged checks.
He had been arrested and sentenced to probation; afterwards he had moved back to his native Kansas City, Missouri, for a time, before returning to Los Angeles. Specifically, to the Bellevue Arms Apartments — under an assumed name.
Police rushed back to “Donald Evans’” apartment, now abandoned. Upon closer inspection, they found bloody footprints, partially burnt letters that appeared to be drafts of the ransom letters, and clippings of the crime. In addition, a janitor reported that on the night of the 16th, he had witnessed “Evans” carrying several bundles out to his car, and the next day, cleaning the seats of his car.
Soon a report came in of another stolen car, a green Ford Hudson. The man who had taken it matched Hickman’s description.
Based on reported sightings, police determined he was heading north. True to their prediction, a gas station attendant in Portland, Oregon, reported that he had seen Hickman in his green Hudson. He told police that Hickman was headed east.
Next, one of the $20 gold certificates surfaced in Arlington, Oregon, near the town of Pendleton.
On Dec. 22, Pendleton Police Chief Tom Gurdane and Oregon Highway Patrolman Cecil Lieuallen set out to find Hickman. Based on where he had been sighted, they knew he would have to be traveling on one of only a few roads.
Sure enough, on Old Oregon Trail Road outside the eastern Oregon town of Echo, a green Hudson passed them. Its driver looked, in the officers’ words, “squirrelly.”
The officers gave chase, and after only two miles, Hickman pulled over. Inside his car were two hitchhikers. Hickman, who still had $1,400 of the ransom money, surrendered without incident.
News of his arrest traveled quickly, and reporters descended on the small county jail where he was being held. Hickman did not seem nervous at all; in fact, he relished his newfound fame, and even asked if he might become as well-known as Leopold and Loeb.
While still in the Umatilla County jail, he confessed to reporters. At first, he claimed he had only been an accomplice to two brothers who actually committed the murder. However, police quickly realized the brothers couldn’t have done so — they had both been incarcerated for months.
Hickman was extradited to Los Angeles. While in jail there, he confessed to yet another murder committed during an armed robbery of a drugstore a few years earlier. In fact, he and an accomplice had committed several armed robberies.
Over the course of the next few days, police were able to coax Hickman into confessing. He said that when he first took Marion, he had no intention of killing her. “Marion and I were good friends, and we had a good time when we were together,” he said. “I really liked her.” He said that the decision to kill her had come upon him suddenly, for no reason. He confessed that while the girl was blindfolded and tied to a chair, he came up behind her with a towel and strangled her. Once he thought she was dead, he undressed her (except for her underwear) and took her body to the bathtub.
There, he hung her upside down, cut a hole in her jugular, and let her blood drain out. He dismembered her, then disemboweled her, during which, he said, her body jerked so violently it almost came out of the tub — implying that Marion may have still been alive. After wrapping her limbs and organs in newspaper, he stuffed her head and torso in a suitcase, loaded them into his car, then went to see a movie. However, he said, he couldn’t concentrate, so he returned to his apartment.
Realizing that her father might want to see her before handing over the ransom, he used make-up to make the girl’s face seem alive, then tied wire around her head to hold her eyelids open. He placed her head on top of her torso and wrapped them together in blankets before heading out to collect the ransom.
Hickman pled not guilty by reason of insanity — the first defendant in the state of California to do so.
Hickman’s trial began Jan. 25, 1928. Huge crowds thronged the steps of the courthouse, in what had been described as a “lynch mob.” One account said there was nearly a riot when it was revealed that the judge had given the reserved seats in the courtroom to his cronies and friends of his wife.
Reporters from all over the country — including famed writer Edgar Rice Burroughs (the creator of Tarzan and John Carter of Mars) — were in attendance. The trial made front-page headlines in nearly every paper. Millions of Americans followed the weeks-long trial closely — including one recent immigrant named Ayn Rand.
Rand had been working in Hollywood at the time of the murder and trial, and like most people, was transfixed by the case; she wrote about it in her journals several times. However, unlike most people, she did not see Hickman as a monster.
Unlike the small-minded masses, Rand saw in Hickman the perfect Neitzchean “superman” — “a man with no regard whatever for all that society holds sacred, with a consciousness all his own.” When she read this quote by him in the newspaper — “I am like the state: what is good for me is right,” — she wrote in her journals that this was “the best and strongest expression of a real man’s psychology I ever heard.”
In fact, her only criticism was reserved for the public, because they, “mediocre” as they were, rushed to judgement. “The first thing that impresses me about the case,” Rand wrote, “is the ferocious rage of the whole society against one man.”
“It is not the crime alone that has raised the fury of public hatred,” she wrote, apparently unbothered by his actual crime. “It is the case of a daring challenge to society.” In her journals, she criticized the press for attempting to “degrade” Hickman in their coverage. “It was as though it infuriated them to see strength, pride and courage in this criminal and to see that they could not break him,” she wrote. “It seemed to be the mob’s subconscious fury at the sight of such virtues in its enemy.”
To be fair, Rand’s devotees will point out that she didn’t approve of him murdering anyone, and in fact she lamented that he, such “a brilliant, unusual, exceptional boy” had gone down such a “purposeless” path. Yet her otherwise worshipful praise of him indicates that her disapproval of his murders was more of a pro-forma statement than an actual moral stance. Hickman would serve as the inspiration for Danny Renahan, the main character in Rand’s unfinished novella, The Little Street. Renahan would be, Rand wrote, “a Hickman with a purpose. And without the degeneracy. It is more exact to say that the model is not Hickman, but what Hickman suggested to me.”
The same narcissistic, sociopathic traits that defined Hickman are central to the main characters in Rand’s other novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged — protagonists with “the spirit of Argon and the nature of a medieval feudal lord … Imperious. Impatient. Uncompromising. Untamable. Intolerant. Unadaptable. Passionate. Intensely proud. Superior to the mob… an extreme ‘extremist.’ … No respect for anything or anyone.” Regardless of his “superiority,” it took the jury only 43 minutes to find Hickman guilty and sentence him to death. The verdict was met with cheers.
While on death row, Hickman — in what must have been deeply disappointing to Rand — converted to Catholicism and wrote letters of apology to the families of his victims. On Oct. 19, 1928, surrounded by a standing-room-only crowd, he was hanged at the gallows at San Quentin prison. However, he did not die quickly. He slipped when the trap door opened and hit his head while falling. An autopsy would reveal that his neck did not break; rather, he had slowly strangled — much the same way Marion Parker had.
Edited by M84 on Mar 29th 2021 at 10:46:12 PM
Disgusted, but not surprisedI am a bit confused. How did someone simply mentioning Snyder lead to discussing a really bad book and it's author which has nothing to do with the MCU?
Edited by Bullman on Mar 29th 2021 at 9:55:14 AM
Fan-Preferred Couple cleanup threadThey let him join X-Force once. Of course, that version of the team was so fucked up that Wade was The Heart.
Disgusted, but not surprisedWell they do welcome Apocalypse with open arms and Mr "ha ha stole an X gene" Sinister
Forever liveblogging the AvengersWade isn't a mutant, he was artificially given Wolverine's healing factor. He's officially a mutate. It's just the Fox movies where he's a mutant for simplicity.
Edited by lbssb on Mar 29th 2021 at 8:37:01 AM
Disney100 Marathon | DreamWorks MarathonThe X-Men have absolutely no problems making use of Wade's abilities like when Wolverine brought him on X-Force cause he could pay him off.
It makes their continued dismissal of him monumentally hypocritcal, especially since Krakoa allows the likes of Apocalypse, Gorgon, and Mister Sinister who actually worked with the Nazis once.
Wade is no worse morally than Wolverine himself but the fact hes personally annoying makes him worse than the actual Nazi.
Edited by slimcoder on Mar 29th 2021 at 9:09:23 AM
"I am Alpharius. This is a lie."

I read The Fountainhead back in middle school for a book report because I thought the art deco cover looked cool.
I deeply regret it.
Edited by M84 on Mar 29th 2021 at 2:33:00 AM
Disgusted, but not surprised