In June 1908, a young Austrian woman named Sadie Schoen was hauled into a New York City police station and photographed twice, once facing the camera, once in profile. The charge on her card read simply: swindling. Her case is one of the ones that gave a later exhibition of these photographs its title, "Pretty Girl Charged With Clever Swindle," a phrase that says as much about how the era's press covered women's crime as it does about Schoen herself. Beyond that card, history

In the summer of 1951, a bus driver named Harvey Clark tried to move his wife and two kids into a rented apartment in Cicero, Illinois. He never spent a single night there. Instead, for the better part of a week, thousands of his new neighbours turned up outside the building to riot, and it took the National Guard, tear gas and fixed bayonets to bring the town back under control. It remains one of the largest and most well documented race riots in American history, and it hap

If you've ever sat through a forensics class, you've probably heard the story. Two prisoners, same name, same face, same measurements, at the same federal penitentiary in Kansas in 1903. Only their fingerprints told them apart, and that one mix-up supposedly killed off the Bertillon system and ushered in the age of fingerprinting. It's a great story. It's told in textbooks, FBI materials, and true crime blogs to this day. The trouble is, when you actually dig into the documen