Medusa part of their religion. Medusa was beheaded by the hero Perseus, who thereafter used her head, which retained its ability to turn onlookers to stone, as a weapon until he gave it to the goddess Athena to place on her shield. In classical antiquity the image of the head of Medusa appeared in the evil-averting device known as the "Gorgoneion". The three Gorgon sisters—Medusa, Stheno, and Euryale—were all children of the ancient marine deities Phorcys (or "Phorkys") and his sister Ceto (or "Keto"), chthonic monsters from an archaic world. Their genealogy is shared with other sisters, the Graeae, as in
Murder of the Grimes sisters (who had corroborated the Duros's eyewitness statements) were mistaken in their identification of the girls he had been in the company of on December 30, although he was formally charged with the sisters' murders on January 27, 1957, having signed a 14-page confession in which he claimed that he (Bedwell) and a 28-year-old acquaintance of his named William Cole Willingham had indeed been in the company of the Grimes sisters on December 30, having also retained their company until January 7—typically drinking in various West Madison Street skid row saloons. According to Bedwell, after several days in the girls' willing