“There’s no way we can survive.” It was November 18, 1978, and cult leader Jim Jones needed to convince over 900 of his followers that they needed to die. As he pressured members of the Peoples Temple to drink cyanide-laced punch, they screamed, wept and argued. Slowly, they ...read more
A striking portrait hung on the wall of the campaign headquarters for George H.W. Bush’s 1988 presidential run. It wasn’t a slick painting of the vice-president, who hoped to become the next Republican in the White House. Rather, it was a mug shot, a grainy photo of a black man ...read more
The Great Depression was a time of great economic and social change that affected many parts of American life—including Halloween. Parents, concerned about their sons running amok on All Hallows' Eve, organized “haunted houses” or “trails” to keep them off the streets. Halloween ...read more
One September morning in 1976, a bomb blew up a car as it was driving up Embassy Row in Washington, D.C. When police arrived at the scene, they found a human foot in the road, and a man lying on the pavement who was missing half his legs. Minutes later, he was dead. That man was ...read more
Nearly as long as people have been recording history, they have documented sexual assaults. From the writings of ancient Greece to the Bible to the letters of early explorers, sexual violence has long been a brutal part of the human story. Some assaults have even changed the ...read more
A housewife and salesman have an affair, then hatch a plot to kill her husband and claim insurance money on his death. If this sounds like a film noir plot, that’s because it is; it’s the plot of James Cain’s 1943 hardboiled crime novella Double Indemnity and the 1944 film ...read more
In July 1931, the Danish freighter Pennsylvania wrecked on the coast of the island of Swona, in the North Sea of Scotland. The captain, wary for good reason, refused a local lifeboat’s assistance and waited to have his crew rescued by a Copenhagen boat. Once the crew left, ...read more
In the aftermath of Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker’s bloody two-year crime spree, the U.S. government put more than a dozen of their family members and friends on trial for helping the couple out. During his closing argument, prosecutor Clyde O. Eastus made a surprising ...read more
It’s a scene worthy of any Nordic Noir: On a quiet Tuesday morning this week, thieves made off with a selection of Swedish crown jewels, housed in an ancient cathedral—then made their getaway on bicycles and a speedboat. Strängnäs is a small town west of the country’s capital. ...read more
One night in October 1983, two white men waited outside a local dance club near Sunny Side, Georgia for a black man, Timothy Coggins. Coggins was young, exuberant, loved to dance—and was known to date white women. When Coggins emerged, according to court testimony, they lured him ...read more
For the White Bronco—perhaps the most infamous vehicle of the late 20th century—it’s been a long, strange trip since the freeway chase that riveted the world. It was midday on Friday June 17, 1994, and Los Angeles police authorities were waiting for Orenthal James “O.J.” Simpson ...read more
When the jury acquitted Lorena Bobbitt of all criminal charges in a Virginia courtroom on January 21, 1994, even her supporters couldn’t help but gasp aloud. Seven months earlier, she had severed her husband’s penis with a knife as he slept. Now, after seven hours of ...read more
Growing up in the 1930s in segregated coal mining country in West Virginia, Doris Payne played a game she called “Miss Lady.” She’d don a hat and purse, and imagine herself living a life far from her own impoverished circumstances. This ability to cast herself as someone else ...read more
Even by today’s standards, The State of Illinois v. “Peachy” Quinn Harrison would be considered newsworthy. The prerequisite elements for a “high-profile” trial were all there: a well-liked and promising young man stabbed to death by a neighbor with whom he had grown up; a ...read more
The Great Depression (1929-1939) was the worst economic downturn in modern history. The preceding decade, known as the “Roaring Twenties,” was a time of relative affluence for many middle- and working-class families. As the economy boomed, new innovations allowed for more leisure ...read more
During the Great Depression, with much of the United States mired in grinding poverty and unemployment, some Americans found increased opportunities in criminal activities like bootlegging, robbing banks, loan-sharking—even murder. Organized Crime in the Prohibition Era The ...read more
On January 27, 2018, a truck driver plowed into a UNESCO World Heritage site in Peru. The mysterious ancient site consists of lines drawn in the dirt, meaning it was pretty easy for the truck to damage it. Roughly 2,000 years ago, members of a pre-Inca civilization carved the ...read more
In his 2018 State of the Union speech, Donald Trump repeatedly referenced a specific gang, MS-13, by name. These mentions were intended to justify his administration’s anti-immigration policies. Though MS-13 originated among Salvadoran immigrant communities in L.A., most of its ...read more
When Susan B. Anthony took the stage at New York’s Cooper Union on the night of December 1, 1868, the activist—already famous for helping organize the first groups of American women’s rights agitators—could spot some of the suffrage movement’s leading lights in the audience. ...read more
The Kitty Genovese murder in Queens, New York, in 1964 is one of the most famous murder cases to come out of New York City and into the national spotlight. What propelled it wasn’t the crime or the investigation, but the press coverage that alleged the murder had many witnesses ...read more
2017 may well become known as the year of #MeToo. But the women standing up today are in fact part of a long history of activists fighting sexual harassment. And one of the activists more commonly associated with another movement was a key figure in early attempts to rectify ...read more
To understand why Charles Manson has remained such a riveting figure in American popular culture for five decades, it helps to go back to mid-April 1969, when Manson, then 34, called his three dozen or so followers together on the isolated Spahn Ranch outside Los Angeles. It was ...read more
In 1971, cult leader Charles Manson was sentenced to death for murdering two people and orchestrating the killings of seven others in August of 1969. But why, if he received the death penalty all those years ago, did he spend his life in jail, dying of natural causes in 2017? It ...read more
For nearly five decades, police and amateur sleuths have sought the identity of the Zodiac—and never come close to making an arrest. The serial killer who murdered at least five people, taunted police and terrorized Bay Area residents in the 1960s and 1970s apparently vanished ...read more