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The figures born on this date span two centuries and several varieties of violence, from maritime predation to ideologically driven mass murder. Benito de Soto, the Spanish pirate hanged at Gibraltar before his twenty-fifth birthday, belonged to one of the final generations of Atlantic pirates operating in an age when that world was rapidly closing. Nearly two centuries later, Benjamin Nathaniel Smith carried out a racially motivated shooting spree across Illinois and Indiana over the Fourth of July weekend in 1999, targeting Jewish, Black, and Asian communities before taking his own life. The others catalogued here operated in the criminal margins of late-twentieth-century America and Scandinavia — organized outlaw culture, serial violence — each leaving a distinct and documented record of harm.

March 22, 1959 - Lucious Boyd

Boyd's confirmed crimes span a relatively brief window, yet the pattern they suggest — two murders within two weeks, and a cloud of suspicion extending across at least ten other cases — indicates a sustained and largely undetected period of violence. DNA technology, decades after the fact, has begun to close some of those gaps, connecting him to victims whose cases had gone cold. The full scope of his actions may never be entirely known.

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March 22, 1962 - Michael Ljunggren

His tenure as the first national president of the Bandidos in Sweden placed him at the organizational center of one of Scandinavia's most violent organized crime conflicts. The Nordic Biker War between the Bandidos and the Hells Angels resulted in bombings, shootings, and civilian casualties across Denmark, Sweden, and Norway throughout the mid-1990s. Ljunggren did not survive it — his death in 1995 came during the height of the conflict he helped shape.

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March 22, 1978 - Benjamin Nathaniel Smith

Smith carried out his attacks over a holiday weekend, targeting victims across two states in a methodical progression that left two people dead and nine wounded before he turned the gun on himself. His actions were directly tied to his membership in the World Church of the Creator, a white supremacist organization whose ideology explicitly framed racial and ethnic minorities as targets. The span and coordination of the violence — three days, multiple cities, victims selected by identity — distinguished the rampage from more impulsive acts of hate-motivated violence.

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March 22, 1805 - Benito de Soto

His career was brief but brutal — spanning roughly two years of Atlantic operations before capture and execution at twenty-four. De Soto commanded the Defensor de Pedro during a period of disrupted maritime order following South American independence, when weakened naval oversight created openings for opportunistic violence at sea. The attacks on the Morning Star and the Topaz were distinguished by their exceptional ferocity, drawing enough attention to bring swift judicial response from both British and Spanish authorities.

Read more …March 22, 1805 - Benito de Soto

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