SANTA FE, N.M. — Investigators are treating the deaths of two-time Academy Award-winning actor Gene Hackman and his wife, Betsy Arakawa, as suspicious after the couple was found decomposed inside their sprawling New Mexico home, a discovery that has stunned federal agents and left authorities scrambling to determine how one of Hollywood’s most private legends … Read more
In late August 1942, at Burg el Arab, about thirty miles west of Alexandria, a cluster of caravans and tents sat half-buried under the desert wind. The Mediterranean showed as a thin gray line on the horizon. Inside one caravan, by the yellow light of a kerosene lamp, a short man with sharp features in … Read more
On the night of January 5, 2015, a 67-year-old woman collapsed in a restaurant in West Hollywood. Her fiancé knelt on the floor and began CPR while they waited for paramedics to arrive. She was rushed to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where she was pronounced dead at 10:20 that evening. Her name was Francesca Hilton, the … Read more
On the night of June 5, 1944, a German radio intercept team in northern France picked up a coded BBC broadcast and recognized exactly what it meant. The Allied invasion of Europe was coming within 48 hours. The officer in charge passed the warning up the chain, and the entire 15th Army went on full … Read more
On October 20, 1944, American troops stormed ashore at Leyte Gulf in the Philippines, fulfilling General Douglas MacArthur’s promise to return. The invasion was the gateway to Luzon and ultimately Japan itself, and it forced the Imperial Japanese Navy into a desperate gamble. With the Philippines lost, Japan would be cut off from the oil … Read more
In January 1945, in eastern France near the German border, General George S. Patton received a three-page intelligence report about a German POW camp that had just been overrun. The language was clinical, but the numbers were devastating. The camp held 380 American prisoners. Their average weight at liberation was 94 pounds. A year earlier, … Read more
In 1873, four men—Obadiah Quinneville, his brother-in-law Esau Vandermolen, Tobias Scothrop, and Lemuel—rode into a small village hidden in a bowl of land between three ridges in the Appalachian Mountains. They had been sent by the Holston River Land Company to survey a tract of land that appeared on no official map. The village was … Read more
In 1972, the United Nations appointed its fourth secretary-general. He was Austrian, a seasoned diplomat who had spent decades building a reputation as one of the most capable international statesmen of his generation. His name was Kurt Waldheim, and for the next decade he led the most powerful international institution on earth. What the United … Read more
On September 2, 1944, in a small farmhouse just behind the lines in northern Belgium, Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery stood over a paper map of Northwestern Europe. A single bare light bulb lit the room. In one hand he held a freshly sharpened pencil, in the other a cup of tea long gone cold. … Read more
On the evening of October 15, 1946, Hermann Göring sat on the edge of his cot in cell block C of Nuremberg prison, eating black bread. In two hours, the International Military Tribunal would read his sentence. Everyone in courtroom 600 already knew what it would be. Göring knew. The guards knew. The prosecutors had … Read more