History

On the morning of June 28, 1914, a car carrying the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne made a wrong turn onto a narrow Sarajevo street. The driver, Leopold Lojka, had been following the car ahead, and now he found himself in front of a delicatessen where a nineteen-year-old tuberculosis patient named Gavrilo Princip stood waiting. … Read more

June 14th, 1986, 2:13 p. m. , Oak Park, Illinois. Anthony Spilotro climbed into his brother Michael’s Lincoln Continental. He had already removed his jewelry, his wallet, everything that identified him. Michael had told his wife, Ann, that if he wasn’t back by 9:00, it was no good. He kissed his daughter, Michelle, goodbye at … Read more

In October 1900, a framer stood on a platform above the Saint John River in Carleton County, New Brunswick, and drove a wooden peg into a hole he had bored through two crossed planks of white pine, down into the timber below. The peg was a tree nail. About an inch in diameter and eight … Read more

August 24, 1902, broke clear and warm over the Traunsee. The morning sun threw a hard, bright light across the water and against the windows of the villa where the Duchess of Württemberg lay dying. She was thirty-two years old. She had given birth for the seventh time less than eight months earlier, and her … Read more

In the spring of 1943, a lieutenant by the name of Salman Buland walked out of his tent in the jungles of eastern New Guinea, picked up a wrench, and did something that could have ended his naval career. He went to an American aircraft graveyard, removed a cannon from the nose of a dead … Read more

On the night of July 30, 1963, Stephen Ward sat alone in a friend’s flat in Chelsea and wrote his last letters. He was a man who had sketched Prince Philip, treated Winston Churchill, and charmed the highest circles of British life. To the public, he had become a monster. To the establishment, he had … Read more

The stone chimney still stands at the highest point in Oakland County, a single column of masonry rising from the forest floor. Around it, low foundations trace the outlines of rooms that have not held a roof since January 1999. Rusted fixtures protrude from the earth. Trees grow through what was once a floor. This … Read more

The cavernous space of the Rockland Palace on that sweltering Saturday night was a pressure cooker. The heavy summer air outside had baked Harlem all day, and now the neighborhood itself seemed to hold its breath, a city standing on the edge of a blade. But inside the arena, the world had been shrunk to … Read more

In the spring of 1911, a family of three arrived at an isolated property deep in the hills of Harlan County, Kentucky. Within eighteen months, that family was shattered, their lives altered forever. What happened inside that house remains one of the most troubling cases ever reconstructed, not because of what was found, but because … Read more