In November 1950, Eleanor Price and Tom Weller left the Red Creek Tavern in Yazoo County, Mississippi, and drove into the fog along Old Beulah Road. They were never seen alive again. The case went cold for nearly six decades. Then modern forensics, a dredging project, and one family member’s persistence pulled the truth out … Read more
Gen. George S. Patton, the most feared commander in the U. S. Army, stood in his command tent in Sicily on July 22, 1943, staring at a report that would have ended most officers’ careers. Maj. Gen. Terry Allen’s 1st Infantry Division had disobeyed a direct order again, pushing twelve miles beyond the halt line … Read more
In May 1945, in Bavaria, Germany, a surrender ceremony had been underway for twenty minutes. Major General Otto Schrieber, commander of the 6th Infantry Division, stood at the processing table. Behind General George S. Patton, 3,000 American soldiers stood in formation, watching. The morning was cold and overcast, the kind of Bavarian spring day that … Read more
On December 7, 1972, an excavator working on a building site on Invalidstrasse in West Berlin cut into the ground and stopped. It had opened two skeletons lying in a shallow grave, about twelve meters from the spot where an elderly postal worker had told police nine years earlier that Soviet soldiers had once forced … Read more
In March 1945, in a smoky interrogation room somewhere in occupied Germany, three high-ranking Wehrmacht officers sat across from American intelligence personnel. Their uniforms had been stripped of Nazi insignia, but they still carried the arrogance of men who had spent years believing they belonged to a superior military machine. The lead interrogator, a tired … Read more
For 46 years, the man who killed Linda Voss lived just 11 miles from where he left her. He raised a family in Ainsworth, Nebraska. He ran a hardware store. He shook hands with half the county at church potlucks every summer. All the while, a single strand of hair sat sealed in a small … Read more
On April 11, 1945, a United States Army sergeant named Edwarderovic was among the first American soldiers to cross the gate of Buchenwald. He had fought in North Africa, landed in Normandy, and advanced through the hedgerows of France and the forests of Belgium. He believed he had seen everything war could show a man. … Read more
On February 9, 1999, a fresh layer of snow covered a neighborhood in Newman Lake, Washington. More than three and a half inches had fallen the day before. When a fire broke out at a home on North Blue Skies Road, no one realized the snow would become part of an attempt to conceal one … Read more
In June 1944, just weeks after D-Day, a group of high-ranking British officers gathered in an officers' club in southern England. The room was thick with cigarette smoke and expensive scotch. A handful of American liaison officers sat nearby, trying to enjoy their drinks and mind their own business. The British officers, mostly colonels and … Read more
On the night before Hermann Göring was to be hanged in Nuremberg, the highest-ranking Nazi official escaped the noose by swallowing a cyanide capsule. His wife, Emmy, did not witness that moment. She had already spent months after the war moving between internment camps with their young daughter, Edda, while the world dismantled the life … Read more