In June 1543, a sixteen-year-old girl arrived in Kraków to become Queen of Poland. She could not speak a word of Polish. Elizabeth of Austria, the eldest daughter of Ferdinand of Habsburg, had been betrothed to Sigismund Augustus since she was eight months old, a marriage arranged to shift the balance of a war her … Read more

Field Unit Two of Section 22, an Australian signals detachment working under American air command in the Southwest Pacific, had solved a puzzle that had been nagging at the Allies for months. Japanese aircraft kept arriving in the right piece of sky at the right moment to meet the bombers, and now the Australians knew … Read more

The New York attorney was one of the best in the city, and Jackie Kennedy had retained him for one reason: to end her marriage. It was the mid-1950s, before her husband was president, when he was still a senator from Massachusetts, and she had reached her breaking point. The affair she had just learned … Read more

A nineteen-year-old flower maker named Matilda Scheurer lay in a London hospital in November 1863, convulsing so violently that her screaming carried through the walls. Green liquid poured from her mouth. Her hands and feet blackened as the tissue died. The doctors recorded every stage of her agony, and for once, newspapers paid attention, not … Read more

On the night of October 15th, 1946, hours before he was scheduled to mount the gallows, Hermann Göring bit down on a cyanide capsule and died. He was fifty-three years old. The suicide infuriated the Allied authorities, who found the man who had been in many ways the face of the Nazi regime at Nuremberg … Read more

The answer came over the phone, quiet and final, in the form of a DNA profile. Dennis Fitzgerald had carried this file for ten years, checking in on it when nothing else demanded his attention, keeping the promise he’d made to Norma’s sisters that the case would not disappear. Now the lab in 2002 had … Read more

On the night of October 16th, 1929, Charles Luciano stood at the corner of 50th Street and 6th Avenue in Manhattan. He was 31 years old, a mid-level lieutenant in the organization of Giuseppe “Joe the Boss” Masseria. The New York underworld was fracturing around him. A violent power struggle known as the Castellammarese War … Read more

The smell hit first: solder and dust and warm vacuum tubes, something electrical that had no name but that every boy who ever walked through the door recognized instantly. The man behind the counter looked up and nodded. The aisles were narrow, the shelves ran to the ceiling, and somewhere in the back, behind the … Read more

In October 1981, Gloria Graham lay in a hospital bed in Lancaster, England, knowing she was dying. The cancer that had first been diagnosed seven years earlier had returned with devastating speed, and the woman who had once stood on the Academy Award stage collecting an Oscar now asked only that her former lover, Peter … Read more