Edda Göring was born in Berlin on June 2, 1938, the only child of Hermann Göring and his second wife, Emmy. Her father was then one of the most powerful figures in Nazi Germany, and her birth was treated as a national event. The Reich received some 600,000 messages of congratulation from around the world. … Read more
A discarded coffee cup at a Washington casino finally gave investigators the break they needed in a murder that had gone unsolved for nearly half a century. The case involved 20-year-old Jody Loomis, an engaged artist who was shot to death in 1972 while riding her bike to visit her horse. Jody Loomis was born … Read more
On the 22nd of February 1918, the badly decomposed body of James Barkley was uncovered beside a creek at the remote Wonnangatta cattle station in the Victorian Alps. The 49-year-old station manager had been shot in the back of the head and partially buried. His murder, along with the later discovery of his suspected killer’s … Read more
On the afternoon of April 14, 1865, a widow named Mary Surratt traveled from her boarding house in Washington to a tavern in Maryland, carrying a package for a lodger she trusted. She asked no questions. By nightfall, Abraham Lincoln was dead. That errand appeared ordinary at the time, but it became the detail that … Read more
Hanna Reitsch was born on March 29, 1912, in Hirschberg, then part of the German Empire. She grew up in an upper-middle-class family, with her father a doctor and her mother a member of the Austrian nobility. She had a brother, Kurt, and a sister, Heidi. From the age of four, Reitsch thought of little … Read more
A former Mafia associate who grew up surrounded by the New York underworld has described how the five families used street gangs as recruiting pools, with some crews functioning as unofficial “farm teams” for future made men. Frank Fiordelino, who had two uncles in the Bonanno crime family and later became a government witness in … Read more
In the summer of 1921, two 17-year-old identical twins moved into a New York apartment with a famous name and little else behind it. Their father was an American consul on a government salary, and their pedigree came from their mother’s side—a Union cavalry general who died in Chile and a Chilean grandmother. The newspapers … Read more
In 1929, Joseph Stalin defeated his political rivals and became the principal leader of the Soviet Union. Determined to transform a largely agrarian country into an industrial power, he launched a massive program of forced collectivization. Millions of peasants were compelled to give up their land and join state-controlled collective farms. Those who resisted were … Read more
Vernon Miller was the only positively identified gunman in the Kansas City Massacre, a violent shootout that killed five men in 1933, yet his path to that moment began years earlier in small-town South Dakota. Born in Kimball, South Dakota, on August 25, 1896, Miller moved to Huron in 1914, where he worked as an … Read more
On March 15, 1939, six months after the annexation of the Sudetenland, Nazi Germany invaded and occupied the Czech provinces of Bohemia and Moravia in violation of the Munich Agreement. Adolf Hitler arrived in Prague, and on March 16 he established the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia by proclamation from Prague Castle. Konstantin von Neurath, … Read more