A 62-year-old Kentucky grandmother is believed to have killed 19 federal revenue agents and fed their remains to her prize hogs after they burned down her moonshine still with her grandson inside. The case remains one of the most disturbing unsolved disappearances in American law enforcement history. Martha Blackwood, known throughout the mountains as Martha … Read more
A ten-year-old girl who was the sole breadwinner for her family was shot dead by her father while she slept, then doused in gasoline and set on fire. The girl was Judith Barsi, a rising child star whose voice would become iconic in two animated films released after her death. Judith was born on June … Read more
Paul Anka was just a teenager from Ottawa when he wrote “Diana” at 15, a heartbreak anthem that made him a star overnight. By 18, he had written hits for others and toured the world. But the song that defined his career—and another man’s legacy—was “My Way,” which he adapted from a French tune and … Read more
On May 9, 1945, in the Bavarian town of Bad Tölz, General der Panzertruppe Hermann Balck sat across a field table from an American colonel and waited. He had been waiting for three days. He was not held in a prisoner cage or a transit compound behind wire fencing. He was housed in a requisitioned … Read more
In April 1945, a German town had just surrendered to the Third Army. General George S. Patton was there to inspect the surrender, walking through the town square and meeting with the local German commander to formalize the terms. The Wehrmacht officer was a colonel, tall and gray-haired, a career soldier who had fought on … Read more
Major Richard “Dick” Winters, the celebrated commander of Easy Company, 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division, personally intervened to prevent a legal crisis that could have buried the publication of “Band of Brothers,” the landmark oral history that would go on to define how the world remembers the men who fought in World War … Read more
On December 11th, 1964, Sam Cooke, the man whose warm, intimate voice had carried him from gospel churches to the top of the pop charts, was shot and killed at a Los Angeles motel. He was 33 years old. The motel manager, Bertha Franklin, said she fired in self-defense, and a coroner’s jury accepted that … Read more
In May 1945, the war in Europe was over. Inside a secret Allied interrogation center known as Ashan, the highest-ranking survivors of the Third Reich were gathered. Field marshals and generals, the architects of the German war machine, sat in simple chairs and smoked American cigarettes. Among them were Gerd von Rundstedt, Albert Kesselring, and … Read more
Tony Sirico walked onto the set of The Sopranos in a tracksuit and gold chains, ready to play Paulie Walnuts. But for Sirico, this was not acting. He had lived that life. Born Gennaro Anthony Sirico Jr. on July 29, 1942, in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, he grew up in an Italian working-class neighborhood where everyone knew … Read more
On November 15, 1997, in a private London hospital room, a woman lay dying. She was 49 years old and had spent 18 months in a wheelchair, paralyzed after a fall from the window of a rehabilitation clinic. Plastic surgery had been performed days earlier to treat infected bed sores. The infection had entered her … Read more