She was a tall, leggy redhead who went through lovers like most people go through toothpaste. Just two things stood in her way from becoming a model, an actress, or climbing the social ladder to a place of wealth and prominence. That’s why her two young children turned up dead in the summer of 1965, prosecutors said.

She wept at her sentencing. Just a little bit harder than she’d wept at her children’s funerals.

Crimmins served five years of a 25-year sentence before she was paroled amid a storm of controversy. Crimmins married one of her ex-lovers – the man who bankrolled her defense. She can be spotted these days sailing from a Long Island marina on a yacht dubbed "Missy" – her dead daughter’s name.

He murdered Kitty Genovese. Her neighbors murdered civic pride.

Mosley repeatedly stabbed Genovese, killing her in the doorway of a bookstore on Austin Street in Kew Gardens.

"Oh my God," she screamed. "Please someone help me." Thirty-eight people witnessed Kitty’s murder, peering from behind closed blinds or through layers of curtains. One man called police – after he called a friend to ask for advice. He left his apartment and crossed over a roof to ask if he could make a call from a neighbor’s phone. He didn’t "want to get involved" by using his own phone. He made the call a full half-hour after Mosley began his vicious attack on Kitty.

Mosley was tried, convicted and sentenced to die in the electric chair. His sentence was commuted when the state banned capital punishment.

Mosley applied, in 1996, for a new trial, claiming his attorney failed to properly represent him in the Genovese murder. His request was denied, he remains behind bars – for life.

Who doesn’t know the Son of Sam? He liked pretty, young women with long hair. And he thought the women of Queens were the "prettiest" of all. To kill, that is.

The 24-year-old Yonkers resident claims a 6,000-year-old demon named Sam spoke to him through a neighbor’s dog. Sam told him to kill young women.

He started to kill in the Bronx on July 29, 1976. His weapon of choice? A 44-caliber bulldog revolver. Six weeks later, he struck again – in Queens this time – wounding two young women. But it was on Jan. 29, 1977 that Berkowitz achieved star status by killing four women in two separate attacks in Forest Hills.

"I am the ‘Monster’ – ‘Beelzebub’ – the chubby behemouth," he wrote in a letter to police.

"I love to hunt. Prowling the street looking for fair game – tasty meat. The women of Queens are prettyist of all.

"I live for the hunt – my life. Blood for papa."

He was nailed by a parking ticket, placed on his car by a cop on the night of July 31, 1977. Detectives traced the ticket, staked-out Sam’s home and waited.

Berkowitz smiled and giggled as police led him into custody. "I’m Son of Sam," he said. He pleaded guilty to six counts of murder, seven of attempted murder and a hoard of other charges.

He has found God in prison, where he preaches and offers interviews with the press. Berkowitz might as well pray. He is serving 547 years behind bars, with no prayer of a chance of parole.

It was a tragic combination of errors, Harrison 25, was escorted from his Riker’s Island jail cell on the morning of Nov. 13, 1989 to meet with Queens prosecutors at the Queens District Attorney’s office in Kew Gardens to discuss a plea bargain on a murder charge. Harrison had information the prosecutors wanted, and they met with him to offer a deal for his testimony.

While at the DA’s office, Harrison was cuffed by one hand onto a rail inside a locker room. By twisting his body, Harrison was able to reach a locker – and a gun that was left there by a detective from the DA’s squad.

When it came time to leave, police at the courthouse failed to search Harrison well enough to find the weapon. Harrison was then cuffed with his hands in the front. When Detectives Keith Williams and Richard Guerzon placed him in Guerzon’s grey Nissan, he sat alone in the back seat, while the detectives sat up-front.

Headed back to Rikers Island after the plea deal went sour, Harrison was particularly edgy, violent. He reached for the gun and fired at Guerzon and Williams. Guerzon caught two shots behind his right ear. Williams took one shot in the right side of his head, one in the spine near his waist and one in the spine at his back. The two men died instantly, in a pool of shared blood. The car veered onto the side of the road on the westbound Grand Central Parkway, near the 94th Street exit.

Harrison bolted from the car on foot, bumping into cars as he fled out the 94th Street exit, still handcuffed.

Within moments, a sea of blue filled the parkway and spilled onto local streets. Detectives hit the streets hard, searching with help from NYPD bloodhounds and helicopters that whirred overhead the Astoria neighborhood of his escape.

Harrison was recaptured the same evening at the East New York home of a girlfriend. He was charged with the murders – and a host of lesser charges connected with the crime.

The murders of Dets. Richard Guerzon and Keith Williams were the first double police shootings in more than a decade.

She came to Flushing seeking sanctuary from the law.

Glenda Brawley refused to answer a Grand Jury subpoena in 1988 that would have placed her on the hot seat in an upstate courtroom, facing questions about the alleged abduction/rape of her 16-year old daughter, Tawana – as told to authorities by Tawana.

Tawana set the wheels of justice spinning when she accused a trio of white men with kidnapping her and subjecting her to a ritual of sexual abuse, racial and emotional "torture."

Glenda fled to the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Flushing when she learned of the Grand Jury subpoena. She holed-up inside the church for several days before surrendering on the arm of activist Al Sharpton.

Brawley was found in contempt of court after failing to testify on the allegations made by Tawana. She was fined $250 and sentenced to 30 days in jail.

A federal probe subsequently ruled the charges false – the facts proved Tawana Brawley lied, the feds said.

He was a bookmaker, a loan shark, a Wiseguy – and the mastermind behind the Dec. 11, 1978, $6 million heist at Lufthansa Airlines at JFK International Airport.

Burke saw to it that the gangsters who pulled off the crime were prepped for the heist by a Lufthansa freight manager, Louis Werner.

Werner saw his part in the robbery as a way to clear his gambling debts with mob bosses. He fed Burke and his "crew" inside information on the Lufthansa freight operation and he laid-out freight rooms, who worked where and when employees arrived and went home. He also clued the gangsters in to a silent wall alarm located inside the safe. It never went off, as the thieves made off with the largest heist of its kind in US history.

As FBI agents, police and investigators hit the street running, 13 Wiseguys disappeared mysteriously – all of whom were involved in the heist. And as the gangsters turned up in rivers and on meat hooks, other Wiseguys began to worry. And talk.

Their conversations led investigators to Burke. Soon, the cops had wiretaps containing Burke toasting the success of the robbery. They even linked Werner to the heist and put him behind bars.

Three years after the robbery, Wiseguy Henry Hill began to worry that he would end up on a meat hook as Burke’s next victim. Hill grew a beard and spilled his guts as a federally-protected witness. With his testimony, Burke went to jail for two of the 13 murders. And he put "real" bad guy Paul Vario away for six years for helping to plan the heist.

Hill’s story proved fascinating to the public and turned up as a bestseller that was turned into the movie, "Goodfellas."

The gangsters never budged on one point – the cash and jewels taken during the robbery were never found.

He was the inspiration for the movie "Goodfellas" and his testimony before a federal jury put two of the country’s most infamous Wiseguys behind bars.

Hill gave up two key mob underbosses to the feds – key figures in the 1978 Lufthansa Airlines heist at Kennedy Airport.

Thirteen Wiseguys disappeared before Hill gave up Jimmy "The Gent" Burke and Paul Vario in the $6 million heist – the largest theft in American history.

Hill grew a beard and disappeared into the federal witness protection program. The loot disappeared, too.

She was bored with her husband, Albert, and so consoled herself through a series of affairs. One man in particular tickled her fancy – Judd Gray, a girdle salesman from New Jersey.

Ruth tried to "eliminate" Albert. She poisoned him nine times. Nine times he lived. She fed him mercury tablets for a cough. Albert didn’t die – he said he felt better instead.

Albert finally did die. He was found in bed at the couple’s Queens Village home on March 20, 1927, his nostrils stuffed with chloroform-soaked cotton, picture wire pulled to a cinch around his neck.

Ruth cried when she spoke to detectives about the "foreigner" who broke into the home, killed Albert and fled with cash and jewelry. The detectives didn’t buy the story. Maybe because they found the jewels hidden under Ruth’s bed. Or was it the $96,000 life insurance policy Ruth had on Albert. She would get the cash only if poor Albert died a violent death.

After the trial, Ruth and the girdle salesman relocated to Sing Sing, where Ruth became one of the first women to die in the electric chair. A front-page newspaper photo showed Ruth belted in the chair at the moment jail supervisors pulled the switch.

The newspaper headline said it all – DEAD!!

A little of each of us died that night. Yet only two people thought enough of the incident to call 911.

A frigid cold blasted through the streets of Queens in the early morning hours of Feb. 26, 1988. The eerie silence that had blanketed the borough’s side streets was shattered that night, broken by the piercing sound of five shots that exploded into the darkness.

Just four days past his 22nd birthday, rookie Police Officer Eddie Byrne worked a midnight tour out of the 103rd Precinct in Jamaica. Byrne was assigned to sit in a marked police car guarding the home of a man who had told police all he knew about the drug dealers in his South Jamaica neighborhood. His home had been firebombed, his life threatened.

At abvout 3:20 a.m., Byrne gave into the boredom of the night, and nodded off for a few seconds. Byrne’s assassins – two of them – slid out of a yellow car into the dark street. The assassins glanced at one another. "Now," they said.

Byrne could not have seen the men as they approached. A dog cage blocked his view. All at once, one of the men was standing at theh passenger door of Byrne’s car. He pulled the hood from his sweatshirt away from his head, looked at Byrne and shouted. Eddie never stood a chance.

The gunman held the revolver just eight inches from Byrne’s head and pulled the trigger. A copper-jacketed .38 caliber bullet tore into the left side of Byrne’s face, right above his eyebrow. The flash was so hot, it burned the young cop’s eyelids.

The gunman showed no mercy. Officers who responded to the scene didn’t recognize Byrne. No one, with any amount of experience, had ever seen anything like this before. The shots that ended Eddie Byrne’s life shattered the innocence of the "borough of bedrooms."