Günther Rall was born in March 1918 in Gaggenau, Germany, the second child of a merchant and his wife. He grew up during the turbulent years of the Weimar Republic, a period of political instability that followed Germany’s defeat in the First World War. But the defining force in his life would come in 1933 … Read more

On an isolated wooded road east of St. Albans, Vermont, in the summer of 1874, a young schoolteacher vanished between two farmhouses. Within days, searchers found her battered body hidden beneath a fallen birch tree, her head fractured by heavy blows, her clothing arranged with strange care. The murder of Mariette Ball would haunt the … Read more

In July 1995, Patricia Ellen Novak vanished during her usual 6:00 a. m. walk along the lakefront trail in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin. She had made that walk for four years without incident. That morning, her golden retriever Chester came home alone, his lead trailing on the ground, unclipped from the collar as though deliberately released. … Read more

On June 9, 1906, in a fashionable Paris apartment on Avenue Victor Hugo, Anna Eugenia Clark, twenty-eight, gave birth to a daughter. The attending physician announced the birth of a girl. Standing by the window in his morning coat was William Andrews Clark, sixty-seven, one of the wealthiest men in America. The child was named … Read more

On the evening of November 2, 1930, fifteen-year-old Bertha Hood kissed her mother’s cheek, waved to her father, and stepped out of her family’s farmhouse in Wise County, Virginia, carrying a kerosene lantern. She told her parents she would be home by nine o’clock, after the evening prayer meeting at the Freewill Baptist Church, about … Read more

Three weeks. That was the terrifyingly thin margin between the first televised royal wedding in history and the birth of a child who could have brought the monarchy to its knees. For forty-five years, Polly Fry was a ghost in her own life, raised as the daughter of a wealthy chocolate heir while in reality … Read more

On the 26th of January, 1978, a blizzard buried Chicago under two feet of snow, shut down the expressways, and stranded half a million commuters. Schools closed, businesses locked their doors, and the National Guard rolled armored vehicles down Lake Shore Drive. In a small apartment in the Wrigleyville neighborhood, a 32-year-old IBM systems engineer … Read more

On May 2nd, 1950, seven-year-old Tanya Sabo stood before the French ambassador in London, dressed in her finest frock with a bow in her hair. The ambassador knelt and pinned a medal to her small chest: the Croix de Guerre, a mark of bravery. Tanya was already familiar with such moments. She had met King … Read more

On a Tuesday morning in November 1994, a woman disappeared from the kitchen of her small rented home in Harlow Creek, Oregon, leaving a pot of oatmeal boiling on the stove. Her name was Diane Pruitt. She was 34 years old, a mother of one, and she had never once left her eight-year-old daughter, Callie, … Read more