In 1949, a ten-year-old British girl stood on a Disney soundstage in a blue dress, hanging from wires to act out Alice tumbling down the rabbit hole. NaN
The voice that had once promised to be curiouser and curiouser was now calling out names on an elementary school attendance sheet. Decades after she had fallen down a rabbit hole and flown to Neverland, Katherine Beaumont was doing something far quieter: teaching children in a Los Angeles classroom. The girl who had given voice … Read more
In April 2014, Mark Shand stepped outside a New York hotel for a celebratory cigarette and never came back. Hours earlier, the brother of Camilla Parker Bowles had pulled off the greatest triumph…
On a windy night in April 2014, outside a luxury New York hotel, Mark Shand stepped out for a celebratory cigarette and never returned. He had just concluded the most successful night of his life, raising millions for the elephants he adored, standing at the absolute summit of his career. A single clumsy slip on … Read more
In August 1859, Savannah’s Bryan Street auction house fell into an unnatural silence as a woman named Celia stepped onto the platform. She was young, literate, skilled as a midwife and herbalist,…
The auctioneer’s gavel cracked like a gunshot, and the room exhaled. A woman worth two hundred dollars had just sold for ten, and every planter in Savannah’s largest auction house had sat on his hands until a stranger from Charleston raised his paddle. The stranger, a thirty-four-year-old newcomer named Thomas Cornelius Pete, had arrived three … Read more
In 1958, a 25-year-old enforcer walked into Bumpy Johnson’s Royal Diner on Lenox Avenue with four armed men, certain the aging Harlem kingpin was finished. He delivered a speech about old men and…
The rain that fell on Chinatown that late November afternoon in 1958 was not the same rain that fell on Harlem. It was colder here, somehow, meaner. It came off the harbor in thick, punishing sheets, drowning the narrow streets in a gray, suffocating mist that smelled of salt water, fish oil, and the particular … Read more
In the winter of 1457, a 13-year-old girl lay dying in childbirth at Pembroke Castle. Margaret Beaufort was small for her age, her body not yet developed enough to deliver the child trapped inside…
The midwife’s hands were slick with blood as she worked to save the life of the thirteen-year-old girl writhing on the bed. For hours the child had screamed as her underdeveloped body tried to do something it was never meant to do at such an age. The baby was stuck. The mother was dying. And … Read more
In 1170, four knights loyal to Henry II crossed the winter channel and entered Canterbury Cathedral with their swords drawn, believing the king’s angrNaN
In December 1170, four knights loyal to King Henry II crossed the threshold of Canterbury Cathedral with swords drawn. They had heard the king rage about a troublesome priest, took his words as an order, and rode through the winter to find Archbishop Thomas Becket near the steps to the choir. The first blow glanced … Read more
In 1926, crowds pressed into a Hollywood funeral to glimpse the woman the world had already named too beautiful to live. She was Barbara Lamar, dead aNaN
Barbara Lamar died in the winter of 1926, and Hollywood went quiet with a strange and heavy sorrow. Crowds pressed close to see her pale figure beneath glass, whispering the name that had become more legend than truth. She was twenty-nine years old, and the world had long called her the girl too beautiful to … Read more
In 1793, King Louis XVI was executed and buried in a plain grave at Paris’s Madeleine cemetery, with quicklime poured over his body. His wife, Marie Antoinette, followed him to the guillotine nine…
In the depths of the Basilica of Saint-Denis, just outside Paris, one of the most extraordinary royal burial sites in all of Europe lies hidden. For over a thousand years, this ancient church served as the traditional resting place for the kings and queens of France, a silent stone chronicle of an entire dynasty. Among … Read more
In 1986, Sherri Rasmussen, a 29-year-old ICU nursing director, was found shot three times in her Van Nuys apartment. Detectives called it a botched burglary. But her father, Nils, refused that…
On a quiet street in Los Angeles, a surveillance team watched a woman finish her coffee and drop the paper cup into a public trash can. She had no idea that her garbage was about to close a manhunt that had been dormant for twenty-three years. She had no idea that the investigators watching her … Read more
On February 10, 1675, as the sun rose over Lancaster, Massachusetts, Mary Rowlandson watched several houses burn and smoke rise into the sky. Her husband, a minister, was away in Boston. A large…
The shots came at sunrise, and smoke was already curling into the February sky when Mary Rowlandson looked out from her garrison house in Lancaster, Massachusetts. It was the tenth of February, 1675. A large force of Narragansett, Wampanoag, and allied Indians had fallen on the town, thirty-five miles west of Boston, and they were … Read more