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- LOS ANGELES (Reuters) -
Forget
Watergate, the Lindbergh kidnapping or the O.J. Simpson
case.
-
- Americans think the 1963 assassination of President John
F.
Kennedy was the crime that had the most impact on the country in the
last 100 years, according to a new poll by Zogby International, released
Tuesday.
-
- The JFK assassination was ranked as the crime of the
century by
36.5 percent of 1,006 adults interviewed by Zogby for the on-line
service <http://APBNews.comAPBNews.com,
a Web site devoted to crime news.
-
- Twenty-four percent said the
1995 Oklahoma City bombing
in which 168 people died in the worst act of
terrorism ever committed on
American soil was the most important crime
of the century, giving it second
place in the survey.
-
- The 1968
assassination of Martin Luther King Jr -- an
event that triggered riots
as well as profound soul searching -- was in
third place with 11.2
percent of the vote.
-
- The 1994-95 O.J. Simpson murder case, which raised
questions
about the fairness of the American judicial system, was a
surprising fourth
with 9.7 percent of those surveyed saying the
sensational case that was
televised live across the country had the
most impact. (In a controversial
decision, the former football star was
acquitted of murdering his ex-wife
and her friend.)
-
- Meanwhile, 5.3
percent gave fifth place to the Watergate
break-in of 1972 the crime
that led to President Richard Nixon's resignation,
the first time in
American history that a sitting president had ever resigned.
-
- With 1.6 percent of
those surveyed saying it was the
most important crime, the atomic
secrets spy trial of Julius and Ethel
Rosenberg in 1953 was ranked
sixth.
-
- Meanwhile, the crime that was actually dubbed ``The Crime
of
the Century,'' the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh's baby in 1932, ranked
seventh with 1.3 percent of the vote.
-
- The St. Valentine's Day
massacre of gangsters in Chicago
in 1929 ranked eighth with one per
cent of the vote. In ninth place with
.7 percent was serial killer Ted
Bundy's murder spree starting in 1973;
and in 10th place, with .6
percent of the vote, was the assassination of
President William
McKinley, who was killed in 1901.
-
- Marshall Davidson, the chairman
and CEO of APB Multimedia,
said the poll reflected ``the profound
impact that crime has had on the
collective memoryof the American
public. The assassination of JFK and
the tragedy in Oklahoma City,
although separated by 30 years, have profoundly
affected the lives of
countless Americans.''
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