In January 1984, a quiet Aurora, Colorado neighborhood was shaken when Bruce, Debra, and eight-year-old Melissa Bennett were found murdered inside the…
On the night of January 15, 1984, Bruce Bennett’s mother stopped by the family home in Aurora, Colorado, to drop off an early birthday gift for her seven-year-old granddaughter, Melissa. It was a short, ordinary visit. When she left, the garage door remained open behind her. By morning, Bruce, his wife Debra, and Melissa were … Read more
On December 18th, 1626, midwives in Stockholm delivered a baby covered in a thick caul, with dark body hair and a cry so deep and strong that they dec…
On a November afternoon in 1657, inside the Palace of Fontainebleau, a former queen sat in one room while her guards butchered a man in the next. The victim, Gian Rinaldo Monaldeschi, had served as her master of the horse. He had also betrayed her, leaking the details of a secret invasion plot to the … Read more
On January 15, 1984, someone left the garage door open at a home on East Center Drive in Aurora, Colorado. Inside, Bruce and Debra Bennett had just mo…
On the night of January 15, 1984, in Aurora, Colorado, a family settled into the quiet routine of a Sunday evening. Bruce Bennett, 27, and his wife Debra, 26, had recently moved into their home on East Center Drive with their two daughters, Melissa, 7, and Vanessa, 3. Melissa was two days from her eighth … Read more
In 1970, Richard Burton—fresh from Cleopatra and at the height of his fame with Elizabeth Taylor—agreed to guest star on Here’s Lucy, playing a plumbe…
In September 1970, millions of Americans tuned in to watch two of the most famous faces of their era share a television screen. Richard Burton, the Welsh actor whose booming Shakespearean voice had made him an international star, was appearing on Here’s Lucy, the sitcom built around Lucille Ball, the red-haired queen of comedy who … Read more
In the winter of 1863, two of James A. Garfield’s children died within weeks of each other. First came three-year-old Eliza Arabella, called Trot, the…
James A. Garfield rose from a log cabin to the White House, the last president to make that climb directly from frontier poverty. He was a self-made scholar, a Civil War general, a man forged by hunger and faith. His presidency lasted only two hundred days before a gunshot in the summer of 1881 cut … Read more
In April 1945, as the Third Reich collapsed, a massive armored train sat hidden inside a railway tunnel near Berchtesgaden, packed with hundreds of paintings by Rembrandt, Rubens, and Van…
On the morning of April 28, 1945, a small unit of Luftwaffe soldiers carried out their orders with terrible efficiency. Using more than eighty aircraft bombs, they reduced Carinhall to rubble, destroying the vast hunting estate that Hermann Göring had built northeast of Berlin. The demolition was deliberate, a final act of erasure ordered by … Read more
In 1812, Lady Caroline Lamb met the infamous poet Lord Byron and called him “mad, bad and dangerous to know.” Within days, she had changed her mind, and their affair became one of the most…
The box arrived at Lord Byron’s residence while he was living abroad, and when he opened it, he found a note from Lady Caroline Lamb professing her continued love for him. Beneath the note lay a lock of hair. It was not hair from her head. It had been plucked from lower on her body, … Read more
On June 27, 1863, an English observer rode eight miles before dawn to find General Longstreet, only to learn he had crossed into Pennsylvania—enemy ground. Longstreet warned that bushwhackers…
At a little before dawn on Saturday, June 27th, 1863, an English observer traveling with the Confederate Army of Northern Virginia found himself without a horse. His companion, a man named Loy, had fallen too ill that morning to ride, so the Englishman took Loy’s mount and set off through the darkness to locate the … Read more
In 2001, historian Roger Ekirch published research showing that before electric light, Americans slept in two distinct shifts. They went to bed shortly after nightfall for three or four hours of…
On September 4, 1882, at approximately three in the afternoon, John Lieb, Thomas Edison’s chief electrician at the Pearl Street station in lower Manhattan, threw the master switch on the world’s first commercially viable central power station. Underground cables carried 110 volts of direct current from six massive coal-fired dynamos, each weighing about 27 tons, … Read more
In 1855, a carpenter in New York’s Schoharie Valley drove a wooden peg through white pine planks, joining three layers of a lattice truss rising above the creek. He was one of many men repeating…
In early spring of 1855, a carpenter in the Schoharie Valley of upstate New York drove a wooden pin through two overlapping planks of white pine, piercing the board beneath them and binding three layers of timber at an intersection that was one of hundreds of similar crossings repeating across the surface of the truss … Read more