Utterly interesting

“Surely all respectable and law-abiding citizens are sick of the very name of ruffianism in Birmingham…” – Letter to the Birmingham Daily...

“If you must hang somebody, then let it be me.” — Omaha’s Mayor, just before a lynch mob strung him up. That was Sunday, 28 September...

On a quiet Sunday in October 1983, the Laitner family home in Dore, an affluent suburb of Sheffield, had been filled with joy. They were...

In 1929, long before the Galapagos Islands became synonymous with eco-tourism, conservation cruises, and Instagrammable marine iguanas,...

If you ever find yourself romanticising the glitzy outlaws of the 1920s, spare a thought for Arthur Barry, a polite burglar whose life...

Most career criminals make headlines for their violence or brash defiance. Jeffrey Manchester, however, earned his notoriety by being...

In the autumn of 1998, a tragic act of violence in suburban New York captured the growing tension at the heart of America’s abortion...

It’s often said that Chicago built its empire on the backs of immigrants and the muscle of men willing to do what others wouldn’t dare....

In the early summer of 1982, Roberto Calvi, chairman of Italy’s largest private bank, Banco Ambrosiano, vanished from the intricate world...

In the 1970s, Lawrenceville, Georgia, was hardly the sort of place you’d expect to see splashed across national headlines. It sat about...

On a crisp Saturday morning, 11 December 1926, the quiet farming community of Buda, Texas — some fifteen miles south of Austin —...

In the quiet hours before dawn on 13 June 1977, the peaceful summer routine at Camp Scott in Mayes County, Oklahoma, was shattered by a...

On a warm Sunday afternoon in July 1928, the roar of engines and gunfire shattered the quiet streets of Brooklyn’s Borough Park. A sleek,...

On the morning of Sunday 15 September 1963, an anonymous phone call to the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, delivered a...

“What I want is an off-the-shelf sex partner. Slave. There’s no way around it.” — Leonard Lake It started, as so many grim tales do, with...

In the early summer of 1921, Tulsa, Oklahoma, was a place of contradictions. It was a city on the rise, oil-rich, bustling with new...

In the early years of the Cold War, the CIA dreamed of a Caribbean sweep, one bullet for Trujillo, another for Castro. Only one found its...

In the summer of 1968, as children ran barefoot through the derelict streets of Scotswood, a working-class neighbourhood in Newcastle...

When police raided William Bradford’s Los Angeles apartment in 1984, they weren’t just looking for evidence of two murders. What they...

For more than 30 years, Mary Filan — a widowed 74-year-old woman semi-paralysed from a recent stroke — had lived in Apartment 6B, 143-15...

It’s hard to imagine a man so gifted at delivering joy being consumed by such a grim ending. Phil Hartman wasn’t just another comic in...

In the summer of 2017, the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach — one of the most iconic luxury destinations in America — nearly welcomed a...

"My mom." That’s all eight-year-old Christie Downs needed to say. After surviving a stroke and slowly regaining her ability to speak,...

“Criminals are made, not born.” That was the message painted on a charred wooden sign left behind on the fence of Andrew Kehoe’s farm in...