On the 27th of December 1982, a fifteen-year-old boy from Auburn, Maine, died a short drive from the town where he grew up. His name was Phil Williams Jr. He had been a student at a private school in the pinewoods of Poland, Maine, a place that promised desperate parents it could rescue their children. … Read more

The flat stone sat at the center of the circle of trees, and Ortwin Le Merle stood at its edge for what he later estimated to be two hours. The marks carved into the stone were not letters. They were not symbols. They were not writing. They were eyes. Not pictures of eyes. Eyes. Carved … Read more

Reinhard Heydrich lay dying in a Prague hospital, sepsis spreading through his body from grenade fragments lodged deep in his tissue. The assassination attempt on May 27th, 1942, had seemed to fail at first. After the initial attack, Heydrich had even stood and fired at his assailants before collapsing. He lingered for eight days, his … Read more

In 2019, a collector sorting through a box of uncatalogued photographs at an estate sale in Providence, Rhode Island, came across a formal sepia portrait from the early 1900s. It showed a woman in a dark Victorian dress seated in an ornate wooden chair, holding what appeared to be an infant wrapped in white christening … Read more

On February 22, 2026, Mexican special forces, supported by US Army units and CIA intelligence, located Nemesio Oseguera Cervantes, known as El Mencho, in a compound near Tapalpa, Jalisco. The most wanted man in Mexico and one of the most wanted criminals in the United States was seriously wounded in the operation and died while … Read more

At 2:45 in the afternoon of July 12, 1979, three men in ski masks burst through the front of Joe and Mary’s Italian-American restaurant at 205 Knickerbocker Avenue in Bushwick, Brooklyn. They did not stop at the counter. They moved straight through the dining room and out into the garden patio in back, where Carmine … Read more

On a Monday morning in March of 1980, the principal of Marcos de Niza High School in Tempe, Arizona, arrived to find that one of his teachers had not come home. Linda Cass, a 36-year-old art instructor who had taught at the school for nine years, had stayed late on the previous Friday to hang … Read more

On the 8th of September 2001, a Saturday, Windows Millennium Edition hit a wall its own engineers had seen coming for months. Any System Restore checkpoint saved after that date would not bring a machine back. Users could open the wizard, choose a restore point, watch the screen go dark for the restart, and the … Read more

In the fall of 1990, Victor Allan Tench gave the police an alibi that seemed impossible to break. He said he had spent the night of October 11th at the Frontier Club Casino in Elco, Nevada, from 8:00 p. m. to 2:00 a. m. , playing the dollar slots along the east wall, drinking two … Read more