Alaska’s ’70s ‘Butcher Baker’ serial killer
ANCHORAGE, Alaska -- Convicted Alaska serial killer Robert Hansen, who abducted women and hunted them down in the Alaska wilderness in the 1970s as Anchorage boomed with construction of the trans-Alaska oil pipeline, died Thursday. He was 75.
Hansen died at Alaska Regional Hospital after being in declining health for the past year, Alaska Department of Corrections spokesman Sherrie Daigle said. The state medical examiner will determine the cause of death, Daigle said.
Hansen was convicted in 1984 after confessing to killing 17 women, mostly dancers and prostitutes, during a 12-year span. Hansen was convicted of just four of the murders in a deal that spared him from having to go to trial 17 times.
The Anchorage baker also confessed to raping another 30 women in that time.
Hansen was serving a 461-year sentence in Alaska at the time of his death. He had been incarcerated at a state prison in Seward and was moved May 11 to the Anchorage Correctional Center to receive medical attention.
Hansen, who got the nickname "the Butcher Baker," owned a bakery in a downtown minimall in the 1970s and 1980s. He lived across town with his wife and children, who knew nothing of his other life.
Irish premier key in N. Ireland peace
The Associated Press
DUBLIN -- Albert Reynolds, the risk-taking Irish prime minister who played a key role in delivering peace to Northern Ireland but struggled to keep his own governments intact, died Thursday after a long battle with Alzheimer's disease. He was 81.
His eldest son, Philip, said he died around 3 a.m. at his Dublin home, where in recent years he required 24-hour care.
Reynolds, a savvy businessman from rural County Roscommon who made millions running rural dance halls and a pet-food company, led two feud-prone coalition governments from 1992 to 1994.
During his turbulent tenure, Reynolds made peace in neighboring Northern Ireland his top priority. With British Prime Minister John Major at his side, he unveiled the Downing Street Declaration, a 1993 blueprint for peace in the predominantly British Protestant territory. To drive it forward, he successfully pressed the outlawed Irish Republican Army to call a 1994 cease-fire.
Yet within months of that peacemaking triumph, Reynolds was forced to quit as leader of Ireland's centrist Fianna Fail party after his coalition partners in the left-wing Labor Party withdrew from the government in protest over his dismissive management style.
American cardinal, Vatican's governor
The Associated Press
DETROIT -- Edmund Szoka, an American cardinal who served as governor and financial administrator of the Vatican and was a confidant of St. John Paul II, has died at age 86.
Szoka died of natural causes Wednesday night at Providence Park Hospital in Novi, Mich., the Archdiocese of Detroit said in a statement Thursday.
Szoka received his first assignment as a priest in 1954, as associate pastor of a parish in Michigan's rural Upper Peninsula.
By the early 1990s, he was the Vatican's point man for finance. And by the end of that decade, he was running one of the world's smallest countries: Vatican City.
In between, Szoka honed his administrative skills as the first bishop of the Diocese of Gaylord and, later, archbishop of Detroit.
Szoka's leadership of the Detroit archdiocese was highlighted by Pope John Paul II's 1987 visit to Michigan. Szoka also endured criticism for closing more than 30 small parishes in Detroit. John Paul II made him a cardinal in 1988.
Szoka grew close to the Polish-born John Paul II, spending Christmas and Easter dinners with him, prayed for the pontiff at his deathbed and led a rosary in St. Peter's Square the night he died.
In 1990, Szoka became president of the Prefecture for the Economic Affairs of the Holy See, which audits Vatican accounts, approves or disapproves budgets and handles major financial transactions such as buying and selling property.
Pope Benedict XVI accepted Szoka's resignation a day after his 79th birthday in 2006.
Metro on 08/22/2014