Some crimes are so heartbreaking or shocking that they change laws, change society or even earn the label Crime of the Century. But the stories that made headlines in decades past aren't necessarily remembered today.

I'm Amber Hunt, a journalist and author,

and in each episode of this show,

I'll examine a case that's maybe lesser known today

but was huge when it happened. This is crimes of the centuries. Oh, When David Ranta was introduced to the world as the man police suspected of killing a prominent

Brooklyn rabbi, he was described as a 35-year-old unemployed drug addict with a criminal record.

Most people who read that description not at a long.

An unemployed drug addict sounds the type all right.

And they were relieved.

Every violent crime is horrific. And they were relieved.

Every violent crime is horrific, but what Rabbi Chaskel Wirtzberger had endured was especially

heartbreaking.

This was a man who had survived a World War II concentration camp,

who came out the other side of that nightmare to settle in New York in 1949

and overcome the trauma he had endured through the faith that

guided him the rest of his life. He met and married his wife Rivka and the two moved

into the Independence Towers, a housing project in 1965, where they stayed for 25 years.

Then came February 8th, 1990.

Wirtzberger had left his home, as he did almost every morning,

shortly before 6 a.m. to go to the temple to turn up the heat so the synagogue would be comfortable for incoming

worshippers.

After the rabbi had climbed into his 1985 Oldsmobile, a man ran toward his car with a gun in his hand.

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