Hot evidence in a cold case New evidence in a 130-year-old unexplained death? It’s unusual, but it can happen. In the case of the mysterious death of Bavaria’s King Ludwig II, the new evidence takes the form of Dr. Gudden’s death mask. Munich’s...
You don’t need a pistol to rob a bank. A pen will do nicely, too. As the American Civil War drew to a close, a 19th-century forgery conspiracy proved that point quite nicely. Dressed as elegant businessmen, the crooks robbed banks with pen and paper...
Watergate burglary of the 19th century It was 2:00 a.m. on December 14, 1874 when the burglar alarm went off. None of the residents in Holmes van Brunt’s house on Long Island could have known that the clanging alarm would earn its place in the...
As the executioner’s sword lobbed the man’s head off in an arching crimson spray, the crowd lunged forward. It wasn’t the sensationalism of a violent death that drew all the people clutching their white handkerchiefs. It was the blood. Bubbling from...
Someone pounding on the car windows tore her out of her sleep. Angie* had tired out and left the pub early. She and her buddies had driven there in her friend’s car, but Angie didn’t want them all to leave just because of her. So her friend gave...
A dead man drinking a cocktail The blood drained from my upper body. Dr. X stood before me, a cocktail in one hand, very much alive. But Rick had told me he’d died earlier in the year. Without question, one of the most awkward social situations...
When bargeman Charles Humphreys and his mate leaned over the gunwale to hook the floating parcel and pull it aboard, the last thing they expected to find inside was a dead baby. Humphreys had been navigating his barge upstream on the River...
Betrayed by her boots When she pulled the trigger, the last thing Nancy Clem thought about was her boots. In 1868, she and an accomplice murdered Jacob and Nancy Jane Young in a riverside park northwest of Indianapolis. They’d owed the couple...
A daring jump The night lights of Vienna swayed 12,500 feet beneath him as Gerald Blanchard perched at the airplane hatch. Once the Schönbrunn Palace came into sight, he signaled the pilot to slow down. Then Blanchard adjusted his parachute one last...
What would you do if you had clues to a murder no one else knew about? And what if you knew the authorities wouldn’t believe you? Would you still try to preserve your information? Even worse, if the case involved the murder of a U.S. president, your...
Recent Comments