On the 2nd of December 1877, in a room above the establishment at 100 Cross Street in Cleveland, Ohio, a young woman named Mary Kelly lay on a bed. A man who had spent weeks searching for her, a man named Charles McGill, was beside her. She believed he had finally accepted her refusal to … Read more

The letter arrived with a Houston postmark, written in block letters, and it made a demand that was almost too strange to believe. “If you want to know who killed C. Henry and A. Atkinson, it will cost you $100,000. ” The year was 2001. For eleven years, the murders of Cheryl Henry and Andy … Read more

By the summer of 1945, turning flat ground into an American airfield was a process governed by paperwork at every stage. Aerial photographs, drainage surveys, and measurements of the coral beneath the soil all went into a base development plan, assigned a phase and a priority, and handed to engineer battalions with a deadline attached. … Read more

On the evening of April 14, 1865, inside the state box at Ford’s Theater, Mary Todd Lincoln leaned close to her husband and whispered a shy question about what Miss Harris might think if she kept clinging to his arm in public. Abraham Lincoln smiled and replied that she would think nothing of it. Those … Read more

An American submarine commander peers through his periscope at a Japanese merchant ship burning on the horizon. The smoke rises from a spot that, moments before, held steel, oil, and men. The submarine turns away, and the ship slides beneath the surface. Within seconds, nothing remains above the waterline. Then another ship, another periscope, another … Read more

On December 2, 1985, a seventy-one-year-old man died of lung cancer in Mary Immaculate Hospital in Queens, New York. The nurses knew him as Timothy O’Neil, a quiet, polite patient who caused no trouble and received visitors. The name on his admission records was false. The man was Aniello Dellacroce, underboss of the Gambino crime … Read more

In the summer of 1889, while Paris glittered beneath the newly lit Eiffel Tower and thirty-two million visitors crowded the Exposition Universelle, a small twenty-year-old woman bought a heavy wooden trunk on Euston Road in London and shipped it home to Paris to help kill a man. Her name was Gabrielle Bompard, and the murder … Read more

In 1950, Sam Walton walked away from the store he had built from nothing. The landlord, impressed by the young retailer’s success at the Ben Franklin variety store in Newport, Arkansas, refused to renew the lease and took over the business himself. Walton had turned that small shop into a thriving enterprise, but he had … Read more

In the summer of 1951, the small French town of Pont-Saint-Esprit woke to a nightmare. A man leaped from a second-story window, screaming that tigers were chasing him. A woman ran through the streets insisting that snakes were crawling inside her stomach. Dozens of people were admitted to psychiatric hospitals in states of violent delirium, … Read more