History

The night of November 12, 1952, was drab and damp in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Patricia Curran, a nineteen-year-old first-year social sciences student at Queen’s University, had played squash that afternoon at the university drill hall and left on the five o’clock bus for her home in the village of Whiteabbey, five miles away. When she … Read more

The telegram reached the palace on a December morning in 1895, and for a moment the household hesitated. The child had been born on the fourteenth, the very anniversary of the death of Prince Albert, the beloved consort of Queen Victoria. For nearly thirty-five years that date had been a day of mourning for the … Read more

In the spring of 1903, a young Canadian food clerk arrived in Chicago with sixty-five dollars in his pocket, having been quietly stripped of his partnership in a Buffalo cheese company by partners who dissolved the firm without his knowledge while he was away supervising their Chicago branch. He was twenty-eight years old, far from … Read more

In the autumn of 1610, the most feared man in northern Europe collapsed onto the stone floor of his own fortress. King Carl IX of Sweden, the ruthless usurper who had publicly beheaded his nation’s elite and built a police state on terror, had been struck down not by an assassin’s blade or a foreign … Read more

In May 2026, police in Connecticut arrested a 62-year-old man named Charles Perry for a murder that had gone unsolved for four decades. The arrest closed a case that had haunted Virginia Beach since 1986, when 22-year-old Roberta “Bobby” Walls was found dead in a field behind an elementary school. For forty years, investigators held … Read more

On the morning of Saturday, December 14th, 1991, a sixteen-year-old girl in a blue drill team uniform drove into the back parking lot of Federal Way High School, south of Seattle, Washington. She was in a hurry. She thought she was late. Her team was supposed to gather at the school and take a bus … Read more

When Ted Kennedy died in August 2009, the last brother of America’s most tragic political dynasty was gone. John and Robert had been assassinated decades earlier, immortalized as martyrs. Ted had become something else: the enduring force who carried the Kennedy mission through fifty years of Senate service, refusing to let grief silence his family’s … Read more

The coastal fog had already begun rolling in over central California when nineteen-year-old Kristen Smart left a party near California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, in the early hours of May 26, 1996. She had been drinking heavily and was unsteady on her feet. A fellow freshman named Paul Flores, who lived in the … Read more

In the winter of 1896, in a Bavarian village so small it never appeared on the proper maps, a thing that had followed Greta Eichelberger for years finally found her. She told the old guide Constantine Marbach so herself, in the cottage at the eastern edge of the black pines, after the strange business with … Read more