On the morning of July 18, 1989, a doorbell rang at a Los Angeles apartment. Rebecca Schaeffer, the 21-year-old star of the sitcom “My Sister Sam,” answered. She was waiting for script pages for a “The Godfather Part III” audition. The person at her door was not a studio courier. Robert Bardo, an obsessed fan, … Read more
In May 1945, Germany surrendered and the war in Europe ended. But for roughly 5,000 American soldiers, the war was not over. They had been prisoners in German camps, liberated by Soviet forces, and were now being held in Soviet-controlled territory. According to the Yalta agreement, they should have been returned to American control immediately. … Read more
In April 1945, outside Munich, a mess sergeant faced a problem he had never encountered before. He had just served lunch to 200 German prisoners of war: standard American rations of bread, soup, and canned meat. The food was good, better than what most Germans were eating at the time. But the prisoners were not … 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 and formalize the terms with the local German commander. The ceremony was supposed to be routine, one of hundreds taking place across Germany as the war drew to a close. The German … Read more
On November 25, 1963, two women in black veils stood a few feet apart behind the coffin of a murdered president. One was 34, the widow, holding her small daughter's gloved hand. The other was 73, the president's mother. To the cameras and the enormous crowd, they were one family bound by the same unbearable … Read more
On April 29, 1945, American soldiers entered the gates of the Dachau concentration camp in Germany. What they found stopped them cold. There were piles of bodies, thousands of skeletal prisoners barely alive, and gas chambers still warm from use. The smell of death was everywhere. In one corner of the camp, about 50 SS … Read more
A traveling photographer left his profession changed after being hired in the autumn of 1897 to photograph the surviving members of an isolated family in a West Virginia hollow, and he never looked into a mirror again for the remaining 39 years of his life. Casemir Ostrov, 36 years old and working with the newer … Read more
For roughly a thousand years, a British royal wedding functioned less as a love match than as a treaty with better catering. It sealed alliances and produced a legally unimpeachable heir on schedule. What the groom privately wanted rarely appeared in the paperwork. That gap between duty and desire produced some of the strangest marriages … Read more
On July 22, 1969, a young woman in a pale coat and dark glasses walked down the aisle of St. Vincent's Church in Plymouth, Pennsylvania, toward a closed casket. The woman in the casket was 28 years old. She had died four days earlier, in the water inside a car driven by the man walking … Read more
In March 1976, inside Kensington Palace, Princess Margaret answered a telephone and learned from her private secretary that her husband wanted out. The news did not come from Tony Armstrong-Jones himself, but through an intermediary, formalized before it had been spoken. Margaret was 45 and had been married for nearly 16 years. By later account, … Read more