In the summer of 1996, investigators in Idaho Falls had something most departments never get in a cold case: a full DNA profile of the man who killed …
In the summer of 1996, investigators in Idaho Falls held something most departments can only dream of in a homicide case: a complete, usable DNA profile from the man who murdered eighteen-year-old Angie Dodge. They also had his residential address. He lived directly across the street from her apartment. Five days after her death, police … Read more
In 1697, a 15-year-old boy took the crown from the altar and placed it on his own head, refusing to swear any oath to the laws of Sweden. Carl XII had…
In November 1718, a small circle of Swedish officers stood in a freezing trench beneath the walls of the Norwegian fortress of Fredriksten, watching their king do what he had always done. Charles XII climbed to the most exposed point of the forward line, leaned his chin on his hands, and stared out into the … Read more
On March 6, 1959, nine-year-old Candy Rogers left her Spokane apartment carrying seven boxes of Campfire Girls mints, knocking on neighborhood doors s…
On November 19, 2021, the Spokane Police Department stepped before the cameras to announce that the sixty-two-year-old murder of Candace “Candy” Rogers had been solved. The name they released was John Ray Hoff, a man who had been dead since 1970. The case had begun with a nine-year-old girl walking out her front door to … Read more
In 1942, soldiers in the Yukon lit cans of gasoline under the transmissions of 17-ton bulldozers to keep the lubricant from freezing solid. If the flames died overnight, a machine worth over a…
In the Yukon Territory in 1942, soldiers placed open tin cans filled with gasoline underneath the transmissions of 17-ton Caterpillar D8 bulldozers and lit them on fire. That was the official maintenance procedure. If the flame went out overnight, the lubricant inside the gearbox froze solid, and a machine worth more than a million dollars … Read more
On December 12, 1968, six months after Senator Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated, his widow Ethel gave birth to their eleventh child, a daughter name…
Ethel Kennedy stood at the center of America’s most famous political dynasty, a woman of steel and relentless faith who became its matriarch the moment she married Robert F. Kennedy. Widowed at forty with eleven children and a nation watching, she refused to let tragedy define her family. She turned her home into a battlefield … Read more
In 1875, a fifteen-year-old girl faced a professional sharpshooter in Cincinnati after he wagered $100 that he could beat any local marksman. Frank Butler hit twenty-four of twenty-five targets,…
When Annie Oakley’s husband, Frank Butler, gave up eating in the days after her death in November 1926, those close to him understood what was happening. He had spent his entire adult life devoted to her, first as her rival, then as her partner, and finally as her manager. Her passing left a void he … Read more
In 1909, a former lawman known as Deacon Jim Miller was pulled from his cell in Ada, Oklahoma, by a masked mob and dragged to an abandoned horse barn behind the jail. Three other condemned men…
A journalist dipped his pen in the inkwell before dawn in a town called Ada, in the hills of Oklahoma, in 1909. He sat trying to find words for what had happened in the darkness behind the jail, in an abandoned horse stable. Four men had been dragged there before sunrise, and it was said … Read more
In 1980, a woman’s body was found in the woods off Eklutna Lake Road near Anchorage, so decomposed that investigators could not identify her. They reconstructed her face and called her “Eklutna…
He was moving them alive out to a remote stretch of the Knik River, releasing them into the wilderness only to hunt them down, gun them down, and bury them where they fell. Between 1971 and 1983, Robert Hansen, known later as the Butcher Baker, carried out a string of killings across Alaska. He would … Read more
In 1935, Princeton University commissioned Russian sculptor Sergei Konenkov to create a bust of Albert Einstein. When the 56-year-old physicist visited the studio, he met the sculptor’s wife,…
The letter sat on Margarita Konenkova’s dressing table, a thick envelope addressed in a handwriting she had come to know as well as her own. Inside, Albert Einstein had done something extraordinary: he had written to her husband, Sergei, claiming that Margarita was seriously ill. The great physicist had gathered letters from his doctor friends, … Read more
In December 1963, the Studebaker Corporation shut down its South Bend plant, throwing more than 10,000 people out of work. Then workers learned the pension fund was nowhere near enough to cover…
On a cold day in December 1963, in South Bend, Indiana, the Studebaker Corporation shut down its main manufacturing plant. More than ten thousand workers lost their jobs. But the greater blow came when the company terminated its pension plan and the fund proved nowhere near large enough to cover its obligations. Roughly 3,600 older … Read more