top of page
Richard Speck: The Chicago Nurse Murders and What Happened to Him in Prison
On the night of July 13, 1966, sixty years ago this summer, a man broke into a townhouse on Chicago's South Side where nine student nurses were sleeping. By morning, eight of them were dead. The ninth survived only because she rolled under a bed and stayed completely still for hours, counting the minutes until she was sure he was gone. The killer was Richard Speck, and his case didn't end with his 1967 conviction. Twenty-five years later, a secretly filmed prison tape would s
Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs: The Banned 1943 Cartoon Historians Still Argue Over
In January 1943, Warner Bros. released a seven-minute cartoon built around a swing band, a jitterbugging prince and an almost entirely Black voice cast, and it still divides the very people who study cartoons for a living. Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs gets ranked among the best animated shorts ever made by the animators who worked in that era. It's also been formally banned from American television since 1968. Both things are true, and neither cancels the other out. Quick
Madeleine and Mary Collinson: Playboy's First Identical Twin Playmates
In October 1970, Playboy put two identical faces on its cover instead of one and called them "twice blessed." Madeleine and Mary Collinson had been in Britain for barely eighteen months, hadn't landed a single credited film role yet, and still spoke English with accents thick enough that Hammer would later dub over both of them. None of that mattered. The magazine had never run a joint pairing of identical twins as its Playmates of the Month before, and more than fifty years
Dolly Oesterreich and Otto Sanhuber: The Lover Who Lived in Her Attic for 10 Years
In 1913, a Milwaukee housewife named Dolly Oesterreich answered her front door in nothing but stockings and a silk robe, greeted the 17-year-old repairman her husband had sent to fix her sewing machine, and started an affair that would eventually see him move into her attic full time. He lived there, on and off, for roughly a decade, fed and supplied with library books by the woman he called his sole reason for living, while her husband complained for years about strange nois
Margot Kidder and Playboy: Why She Posed Naked, Then Wrote the Words Herself
Three years before she became Lois Lane, Margot Kidder posed for Playboy. That part isn't unusual. What she did with the deal is. She told the magazine's editors she'd do the shoot on one condition: they let her write the words that ran next to the pictures. What she handed in wasn't a flattering bit of copy about herself. It was a blunt, funny, occasionally brutal essay about how Playboy itself had made her feel like a failure as a teenage girl. A quick note before we get in
Lili Elbe: The Real Story Behind The Danish Girl, and the Surgery That Actually Killed Her
In August 2026, Santa Fe Opera put on an American premiere that Hollywood never quite managed to get right. The opera is called Lili Elbe, it's scored by a Grammy winning composer, and its libretto was written by a working neuroradiologist who spends his days reading brain scans and his evenings, it turns out, correcting the historical record. His reason for writing it was blunt: he'd seen The Danish Girl and decided Lili's actual life deserved better than the film gave it. H
How Bo Derek Never Waited Around for Hollywood to Define Her
Bo Derek is mostly remembered for a slow-motion beach run and a head full of cornrows that took over the country in 1979. What gets missed is how much of that image was her own doing. Nobody handed her a persona and told her to live up to it. She built it herself and made her peace with it before anyone else got a say. "What I did as soon as I became famous is, I objectified myself," she said years later. "I thought, well, if this is what it is, I'm going to do it." That's no
Fawzia and Fathia of Egypt: Two Royal Sisters, Two Marriages, One Murder
Two daughters of the same palace, raised by the same mother, ended up living out two completely different answers to the same question: what was an Egyptian princess actually allowed to want? Princess Fawzia did what a king's sister was supposed to do. She married a foreign crown prince for the good of the country and became one of the most photographed women on the planet in the process. Her younger sister Fathia did the opposite. She fell for a mid-ranking Egyptian civil se
What Is the Mabinogion? Inside Wales's Oldest Myths, Manuscripts and Heroes
The Mabinogion is Wales's great collection of medieval prose tales, eleven stories of shapeshifting kings, cursed queens, talking heads and giants with impossible demands, and it's one of the strangest survival stories in British literature. The stories themselves are older than Britain's oldest surviving copies of them by centuries, the modern title everyone uses for the collection was basically a mistake, and buried inside one of its tales is the same fighting dragon that e
Savitri Devi: The Woman Who Believed Hitler Was a Hindu God
Most people who built their whole worldview around Adolf Hitler at least had the excuse of being German. Savitri Devi didn't have that excuse. She was born in France to a Greek father and a British mother, converted to Hinduism in her twenties, married an Indian nationalist and spent the rest of her life insisting that Hitler had been an avatar of the god Vishnu, sent to earth to fight off a cosmic dark age. She also wrote one of the more widely read animal rights books of th
Frank Meadow Sutcliffe: The Whitby Photos That Got Him Excommunicated
Frank Meadow Sutcliffe spent close to fifty years quietly photographing a small Yorkshire fishing town, and in the process built one of the most complete visual records of Victorian working life anywhere in Britain. He also managed, with a single photograph of children playing in a harbour, to get himself excommunicated by his own church. A few years later, a wrecked Russian ship he photographed near Whitby's harbour would go on to shape one of the most famous horror novels e
Mari Lwyd: The Welsh Horse Skull Tradition a Preacher Tried to Kill
Somewhere in south Wales, most likely between Christmas and Twelfth Night, a dead horse might knock on your door. Its skull has been stripped, dried and mounted on a pole, its eye sockets are stuffed with baubles or old bottle bottoms, and someone is crouched underneath a sheet controlling its jaw so it can snap at you while its friends sing for their supper. If you can out-rhyme it, it leaves. If you can't, it comes inside. This is the Mari Lwyd, and it's one of the stranges
Keith Moon's Death: What Really Happened the Night He Died
The story everyone tells about Keith Moon's death is that the wildest drummer in rock finally partied himself into the ground. It's a tidy ending for a man who drove cars into swimming pools and blew up drum kits on live television. It's also not really what happened. On the night he died, Moon was closer to sober than he'd been in years, he'd just turned down a plate of birthday cake for a man who'd been dead for two decades, and the drug that killed him wasn't there to fuel
Terry Waite, John McCarthy and Brian Keenan: The Beirut Hostage Crisis
Between 1982 and 1992, roughly a hundred foreign nationals were seized off the streets of Beirut and held hostage by Shi'ite militant factions during Lebanon's civil war, mostly journalists, academics, diplomats and aid workers taken simply because of the passports they carried. At least ten of them died in captivity. Three of the best known were British and Irish: John McCarthy, a young television journalist; Brian Keenan, a teacher from Belfast; and Terry Waite, the Archbis
Gladys Pearl Baker: The Troubled Mother of Marilyn Monroe
Everyone knows the Marilyn Monroe origin story by now. The orphan who bounced between foster homes, invented herself out of nothing and became the most famous woman on the planet. Except it wasn't quite true. Marilyn wasn't an orphan. Her mother was alive the entire time, and for most of Marilyn's life, she was locked away in one institution after another, fighting a disease nobody around her fully understood. That woman was Gladys Pearl Baker, and her story is a lot stranger
Rita Renoir: The Striptease Artist Who Ended Up Starring in Picasso's Play
Most strippers who worked the golden age of French cabaret got a nickname, a good pension and maybe a paragraph in somebody else's memoir. Rita Renoir got called a surrealist. Not as a compliment tossed off by a besotted customer, either. She spent years as the headline act at the Crazy Horse in Paris, then somehow ended up on stage in a circus tent on the Riviera, squatting under stage lights in a play written by Pablo Picasso, surrounded by a psychedelic rock band and a ver
Denham Fouts: The Best-Kept Boy in the World
Truman Capote once joked that if Denham Fouts had accepted Adolf Hitler's advances, the Second World War might never have happened. It's the kind of outrageous claim that sums up Fouts perfectly: a man who left behind almost nothing of his own making, and yet somehow ended up at the centre of some of the twentieth century's most extraordinary company. He never published a novel, painted a canvas or held a job for more than a few months. Instead, he became a muse to Capote, Ch
Ludger Sylbaris: The Prisoner Who Survived The Mount Pelée Eruption
On the morning of 8 May 1902, a Caribbean city of roughly 28,000 people was wiped off the map in under three minutes. The eruption of Mount Pelée remains the deadliest volcanic disaster of the twentieth century, and by most tallies only two or three people inside the city survived it directly. One of them owed his life entirely to a drunken brawl. A local troublemaker named Ludger Sylbaris had been thrown into a windowless stone cell the night before, as punishment for a figh
Kurt Daluege: The Nazi Police Chief Behind the Lidice Massacre
Kurt Daluege isn't as widely remembered as Himmler, Heydrich or Eichmann, but he built the machinery a lot of their worst crimes ran on. As chief of Nazi Germany's Order Police for seven years, he turned a uniformed constabulary into an instrument of occupation, deportation and mass shooting. Then, in the summer of 1942, acting in Reinhard Heydrich's place, he gave the order that erased an entire Czech village from the map and sent its surviving children to a gas van. This is
Fanny Kaplan: The Woman Who Tried to Assassinate Lenin
On an August evening in 1918, a half blind woman with a Browning pistol stepped out of a Moscow crowd and fired three shots at the man who'd just seized control of Russia. Four days later she was dead, shot in the back of the head in a Kremlin car park with truck engines running to drown out the sound, her body burned in an iron barrel and never buried. No trial. No grave. To this day, historians still argue about whether she was even the one who pulled the trigger. This is t
Ursula Andress Wasn't Ashamed of Nudity, She Just Hated Being Reduced to a Body
Every list of the sexiest moments in movie history starts the same way. Ursula Andress walks out of the Caribbean Sea in a white bikini in Dr. No and cinema is never quite the same again. It's such a famous image that it's easy to assume it tells you everything about how she felt about her own body. It doesn't. The real story, the one about what she actually said and did about nudity for the next sixty years, is a lot stranger and a lot more interesting than one costume. A Ch
The Death of Lord Mountbatten: Royal Power, India and the Bomb That Killed Him
On the bank holiday morning of 27 August 1979, Lord Mountbatten walked down to a small harbour in County Sligo to go lobster potting, the same routine he'd followed every summer for thirty years. He climbed aboard a wooden boat called Shadow V with his family and a local teenage deckhand, and within minutes of pulling away from the pier, a bomb hidden in the engine compartment the night before tore the boat apart. Mountbatten was 79. He'd spent six decades as one of the most
The Murders of Alison Parker and Adam Ward
On the morning of 26 August 2015, WDBJ7 reporter Alison Parker was doing exactly what she did most mornings, standing outside a lakeside tourist spot in Virginia, interviewing a local chamber of commerce official for a routine early segment. Twenty four years old, engaged to be married, two years into the job she'd wanted since school. Viewers watching their local news that morning saw her shot dead on live television by a man who used to work alongside her. Quick Answers Who
bottom of page