History

In February 2024, a DNA sample delivered the answer that had eluded investigators for nearly four decades. The genetic profile belonged to a 65-year-old man named Elroy Harrison, and it matched forensic evidence in two unsolved murders committed three years apart in neighboring Virginia counties. On March 5, 2024, deputies arrived at his trailer on … Read more

He was twenty-four years old, and he had just been asked not to tell anyone what he had built. Not to destroy it, not to bury the paperwork, just to keep it to himself. The company he worked for made something that almost every household on Earth bought, used up, and bought again. Its yellow … Read more

On the afternoon of July 20, 1944, a briefcase packed with plastic explosives sat beneath a heavy oak table inside a wooden hut in East Prussia. Minutes later, it detonated, tearing through Adolf Hitler’s map conference and killing four men outright. The man who had planted it was already racing for an airfield, convinced that … Read more

In 1939, MGM placed an advertisement in the Hollywood Reporter asking a simple question: “Have you a Tarzan Junior in your backyard? ” The studio was searching for a boy to play Boy, the adopted son of Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O’Sullivan in its popular Tarzan film series. More than 300 children auditioned for the … Read more

On a cold Thursday afternoon in November 1993, Angie Housman stepped off her school bus in St. Ann, Missouri, a quiet suburb where parents let their children walk eight houses home without a second thought. The 9-year-old had brown hair, a smile her teachers remembered for years, and a habit of walking up to strangers … Read more

May 6th, 1978, was a Saturday, and a sunny one. Madeline Lanaro was driving her old Mustang north along Highway 5A outside Merritt, British Columbia, with some of her children in the car. Up ahead, pedaling toward the same home, was her 12-year-old daughter, Monica Jack, on a new bicycle. Forty years later, under oath, … Read more

At 11:47 on the night of May 14, 1946, a single corridor light threw a stripe of jaundiced yellow across the concrete floor of Block D in Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary. In that stripe, curled into himself like a wounded animal, lay Ben Johnson, thirty-one years old, a musician, a quiet man who had never raised … Read more

On a quiet morning in March 2020, police responded to what seemed like a routine welfare check in a Nashville suburb. What they found was anything but routine. Holly Williams and her partner, Bill Lanvy, were discovered brutally murdered inside a parked vehicle near a construction site. There were no witnesses, no signs of a … Read more

In April 1985, a Buckingham Palace spokesman stood before the British press and delivered two sentences that should not have been able to exist in the same statement. The first: Princess Michael confirmed tonight that it is true that her father was a member of the SS. The second, immediately following it: the news came … Read more