History

The clinking of glasses and the murmur of a holiday party in Suite 1219 of the Grand St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco turned suddenly to chaos on the evening of September 5, 1921. A young woman, known in the picture houses for her beauty, had collapsed in agony. Within days she was dead, and … Read more

The man in the cell did not ask to be let out. That was the detail Amos Renfrew could not get past, the one he wrote down three times as if he could not trust his own pen. Ephraim Calder, chained to his own wall in his own jail, gray with cold and hunger, near … Read more

November 1944. A German field hospital operating in a commandeered schoolhouse east of the River Saar. Surgeon Heinrich Vollmer, the senior officer, stood at a zinc basin in what had once been a locker room, washing another man’s blood from his forearms in cold water because the water heater had been broken for nine days. … Read more

On a winter night in the late 1870s, somewhere in Nevada’s silver country, a man emerged from a mine unable to feel his hands. He had spent sixteen hours in the dark, his back knotted with pain from his shoulders to the base of his spine, and he still had to walk home, with another … Read more

He had taken her to the quiet outskirts of Paris, away from the film studios and the bright, dangerous world that had once been her life. He told her how much hairspray to use and how modest her dresses had to be. At parties he watched her, studied her conversations, and closed whatever distance she … Read more

The Queen Mother outlived the woman she could not forgive by sixteen years, and she never spoke the name aloud when she could avoid it. When Wallis Simpson died in Paris in the spring of 1986, Elizabeth did what she had done for half a century: she stayed away and let the family bury the … Read more

In January of 897, workmen inside St. Peter’s Basilica pried the lid off a stone sarcophagus, lifted out what remained of a man named Formosus, and carried him across Rome to stand trial. A teenage boy was waiting for him in the great hall of the Lateran, and his instructions were simple: stand beside the … Read more

The two Caterpillar D8 bulldozers came at each other through the timber from opposite directions, each one shoving a corridor of jackpine and spruce ahead of its blade. When they finally met near Beaver Creek in the Yukon Territory, the operators killed their engines, climbed down off the tracks, and shook hands over the cable-operated … Read more

On May 23, 1934, Alvin Karpis was hiding in Toledo, Ohio, with a woman named Dolores Delany, living what passed for a quiet life on his share of the Bremmer ransom: two hundred thousand dollars. It was the second kidnapping they had pulled off, coming a year after they had snatched William Hamm Jr. for … Read more