In January 1879, two brothers from Springfield, Missouri, set out to survey a remote stretch of the Ozark Mountains. Thomas and William Hargrove were educated amateur geologists, well supplied and…
In the winter of 1879, two brothers from Springfield, Missouri set out to map the remote limestone formations of Shannon County. Thomas Hargrove, thirty-two, and his brother William, twenty-eight, planned a three-week geological survey. Neither man returned. The search parties that followed found a region that did not want them looking, and the few fragments … Read more
On August 12, 2000, a hospice nurse found 87-year-old Loretta Young dead in her Los Angeles bedroom, a rosary in her right hand and a small black-and-white photograph in her left. The photograph…
On the afternoon of August 12th, 2000, a hospice nurse walked into a bedroom in Los Angeles and found an 87-year-old woman dead in her bed, clutching a rosary in one hand and a small black-and-white photograph in the other. She had been the most beautiful brunette in Hollywood, the winner of an Academy Award, … Read more
In October 1988, inside a crowded Baghdad reception honoring Egypt’s first lady, Uday Hussein approached a man who had served his father for years as personal aide and food taster. Kamel Hana…
On the evening of October 18, 1988, Baghdad was in a celebratory mood. The long and brutal war with Iran had ended that August, and the Iraqi government was hosting a grand reception in honor of Suzanne Mubarak, the wife of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. The hall was filled with government officials, security officers, and … Read more
On November 22, 1985, David Tye and Brian Ognjan, two 27-year-old mechanics and best friends since their Boy Scout days, climbed into a black Ford Bronco packed with hunting rifles and headed…
The scream that tore through the November night was not the sound of an animal. It was human, and it was pleading. Barb Boudreau heard it from inside her small house, just a few hundred yards down the dirt road from Linkner’s Lounge. She heard the shouts, the cries for help, the sickening rhythm of … Read more
In 1981, chef Jimmy Lambatos opened a Denver sandwich shop with a conveyor toaster oven nobody else in the sub business used. The heat released oils locked inside the meats and cheeses, fused the…
November 27, 2006. Bob Baber walked into a Quiznos restaurant in Whittier, California. Everyone who knew him called him Bob. He had invested his life savings in 1998 to open two Quiznos franchises in Long Beach, and for a few years it had worked. He had signed the agreements, hired staff, opened the doors, shown … Read more
In 1961, drivers outside Dubois, Pennsylvania, kept reporting the same thing: lights moving room to room inside Thompson’s House, a farmhouse that had sat empty for three years. The property had…
In the autumn of 1961, residents of Clearfield County, Pennsylvania, began reporting unsettling disturbances emanating from what locals had come to know simply as Thompson’s House. The isolated farmstead, situated approximately twelve miles northeast of the town of DuBois along a forgotten stretch of what was once Route 219, had stood empty for the better … Read more
In 1959, a small Los Angeles office with eight employees and $250,000 in startup capital quietly opened for business. It was American Honda, and it wasn’t trying to sell motorcycles to people who…
Cushman Motorworks built scooters tough enough to survive a parachute drop behind enemy lines. But they couldn’t survive a 49cc engine from Japan that cost $295 and weighed less than a golden retriever. That’s the short version. The longer version begins in a machine shop in Lincoln, Nebraska, where two cousins built an engine so … Read more
In 1902, a Cleveland woman stepped out of a carriage at Andrew Carnegie’s mansion, spent thirty minutes inside discussing a maid who never existed, then told the lawyer beside her that she was the…
On the day before Thanksgiving, 1904, a bank president of sixty went down on his knees on a Cleveland carpet and begged a woman to give him back his honor. Cassie Chadwick could not give it to him, because she had never had it. And neither, any longer, did he. For seven years the men … Read more
In September 1943, the Italian liner Conte Verde had been anchored in Shanghai’s Whangpoo River for three years, a floating hotel across from the Sha…
The Conte Verde had been a fixture on the Shanghai waterfront for three years, a big white Lloyd Triestino liner moored directly opposite the Shanghai Club, so familiar that no one paid her much attention. Built for the passenger run between Italy and the Far East, she had carried Jewish refugees out of Trieste to … Read more
In 1896, a young woman stepped off a ship in Coleraine, Australia, carrying almost no English and a handful of face cream jars her mother had used against the Polish cold. Helena Rubinstein had…
The day they buried Horace Titus, his mother was still alive. That is the sentence that has to stand at the center of any honest account of Helena Rubinstein, because everything she built, the fortune the newspapers could not count, the salons on three continents, the name that still sits on shelves sixty years after … Read more