In 1885, a wealthy 48-year-old Kansas businessman named James Reeves Walcott traveled to New Orleans for the World’s Cotton Centennial Exposition and …
In the summer of 1885, the citizens of Emporia, Kansas, found themselves at the center of a scandal that would grip the entire nation. A prominent businessman, James Reeves Walcott, had died of arsenic poisoning exactly one month after marrying a beautiful young bride less than half his age. The bride, sixteen-year-old Minnie Wallace, stood … Read more
In 1887, Deputy U.S. Marshal Dan Maples was shot dead, and suspicion fell on Ned Christie, a member of the Cherokee National Council who insisted he had been conducting tribal business elsewhere…
Deputy U. S. Marshal Peyton Tolbert had come prepared for a siege. His men dragged an army cannon up the rugged hills of the Cherokee Nation, hauling alongside it crates of dynamite and heavy wooden shields. Ahead of them, perched on a cliff and protected by natural rock formations, stood the Cherokee Castle—a fortress of … Read more
In 1811, with no machine on earth capable of breaking stone, thousands of men sat along a line stretching from Cumberland, Maryland toward the Ohio Ri…
On the 29th of March, 1806, President Thomas Jefferson signed a short act of Congress that quietly reshaped the future of the United States. It authorized the building of a road—not just any road, but the very first road the federal government of the young republic would ever build with its own money. It would … Read more
When British troops entered Bergen-Belsen on April 15, 1945, they found 13,000 unburied corpses and roughly 60,000 skeletal survivors. Among the SS staff still at her post was Irma Grese, a…
On December 13, 1945, a 22-year-old woman walked to the gallows at Hameln Prison in Lower Saxony and spoke a single word, “Schnell,” quickly. Then it was over. Irma Grese was dead, hanged by the British hangman Albert Pierrepoint for war crimes committed at Auschwitz-Birkenau and Bergen-Belsen. But the story did not end with her … Read more
On December 9, 1902, Louise, Crown Princess of Saxony, walked out of Dresden while pregnant and left her five young children behind. She claimed her father-in-law had prepared rooms for her in…
In December 1904, Dresden police surrounded a palace to keep one woman out. She had slipped back into the city, hoping to reach the Taschenbergpalais in the old town, and the three boys and two little girls she had not held in two years. She never got through the door. Officers stopped her and put … Read more
When British troops entered Bergen-Belsen on April 15, 1945, they found tens of thousands of unburied corpses and survivors barely alive—and among the SS personnel still present was Irma Grese, a…
On December 13th, 1945, at Hameln prison in the British zone of occupied Germany, a 22-year-old woman was led to the gallows by the British executioner Albert Pierrepoint. In her final moments, witnesses reported, she said only one word: “Schnell. ” Quickly. She showed no remorse, offered no last statement acknowledging what she had done, … Read more
On May 1st, 1945, the day after Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun killed themselves in the Berlin bunker, Magda Goebbels prepared her six children for what she told them was a vaccination. The morphine…
The single gunshot echoed through the concrete corridors of the Führerbunker at approximately 3:30 in the afternoon of April 30th, 1945. For a few minutes, no one moved. Then Hitler’s valet, Heinz Linge, accompanied by SS adjutant Otto Günsche, opened the door to the small sitting room. They found Adolf Hitler and Eva Hitler—the woman … Read more
In May 1996, Dale Tryon fell twenty-five feet from a third-floor window of an exclusive rehab clinic in Surrey, fracturing her skull and shattering her spine. The Australian baroness survived,…
She told anyone who would listen the same thing. From her hospital bed, paralyzed from the waist down, with a fractured skull and a shattered spine, Dale Tryon insisted she had not jumped. Someone had pushed her. “Someone is trying to kill me,” she said to friends and family, again and again. The authorities dismissed … Read more
In spring 1943, German pilots spotted an American fighter above the French coast and laughed over their radios, calling it a flying milk bottle—so fat…
In the spring of 1943, German fighter pilots sighted an unfamiliar American aircraft over the coast of France for the first time. The machine was large, heavy, and blunt-nosed. Through their radios, they laughed and told one another that the Americans had built a bomber and simply forgotten to install a bomb bay. They nicknamed … Read more
In 1887, four men had vanished into the hills around Crooked Creek, Kentucky, and Sephrona Crayle had married every one of them. Obadiah Mossbridge disappeared checking a fence; his lantern was…
The bend in Crooked Creek had always been deeper than it should have been. That was the first thing Mercer Tindale noticed, standing on the shoulder of rock above the water with his leather book in one hand and a revolver in his coat pocket that he had already decided would be no use to … Read more