Marcel Petiot posed as a Resistance doctor offering escape from Nazi-occupied Paris. Instead he lured Jewish refugees to his murder house on Rue Le Sueur and killed them for their money.

In June 1962, photographer Bert Stern shot Marilyn Monroe across two separate sessions at the Hotel Bel-Air for Vogue. Six weeks later, she was dead. The story behind The Last Sitting.

During World War II, American troops collected skulls, teeth, and bones from Japanese war dead as trophies. Here's the disturbing history of how it happened, and why it was allowed.

Les Apaches were Paris's most feared and most fashionable criminal subculture, from around 1900 to WWI. Here's the full story of who they were, how they operated, and why they're still remembered.

Known as Casque d'Or, Amélie Élie was a Parisian gigolette whose love life sparked a bloody feud between two of the city's most feared Apache gangs, made her a media sensation, and eventually inspired a celebrated 1952 film.

Before Easy Rider made him famous, Dennis Hopper spent six years shooting everyone from Andy Warhol to Martin Luther King Jr. His photographs from 1961 to 1967 are some of the most candid documents of 1960s America ever taken.

Jimmy Savile abused at least 500 victims over five decades, from BBC studios to NHS wards to a secure psychiatric hospital. This is how he did it, and how so many people let it happen.

Hugh Nini and Neal Treadwell spent 25 years collecting over 4,000 secret photographs of men in love from the 1850s to 1950s. Their book Loving is one of the most quietly radical history projects in recent memory.

She appeared on 200 Vogue covers, posed nude for the greatest photographers of the era, and hung off the Eiffel Tower without a harness. Then she became a sculptor and never looked back.

Íngrid Olderöck was the most feared woman in Pinochet's secret police. A self-declared Nazi, first female paratrooper in Latin America, and DINA's most notorious torturer, her story is one of the darkest from Chile's dictatorship.

Kashmir is one of Led Zeppelin's most hypnotic songs, built on a strange guitar tuning, recorded in a remote country house, and lyrically inspired by a drive through the Sahara. Here's the full story.

King Adolf Frederick of Sweden reportedly demolished lobster, caviar, champagne, and 14 cream buns before dying in 1771. But did the semlor actually kill him? The truth is weirder than the legend.

The Casati Stampa case had everything: wealth, scandal, obsession, diaries and murder. One of Italy’s strangest and most disturbing true crime stories unfolded in Rome in 1970.

Everyone knows the Ponzi scheme. Almost nobody knows the rest: the skin he donated to save a stranger, the wife who stayed 20 years, the charisma that made Boston love a fraudster, and the long ruin that followed.

: From a Viking killed by a dead man’s tooth to the world’s richest Roman choking on gold, these are history’s most satisfying karmic endings. Buckle up.

George "Buzz" Beurling shot down 31 enemy planes over Malta, got fired for shooting at his own commanding officer, and died on a covert arms run to Israel at 26. Canada's most celebrated fighter ace had a life stranger than any war film.

Tom Simpson was Britain’s first World Champion road cyclist and the most complete rider of his generation. In 1967, he rode himself to death on Mont Ventoux during the Tour de France. This is the full story.

Ian Curtis's epilepsy medication likely worsened his depression. His manager kept booking shows. His bandmates didn't know how bad it was. A fresh look at the six weeks that ended Joy Division

John Rogan stood 8 feet 9 inches tall, was the son of enslaved sharecroppers, refused every sideshow offer, and died in 1905 with his grave sealed in concrete. Here is the story nobody tells.

In 1986, Jim Henson wrote two letters to be read after his death. Four years later he was gone at 53. Here's the story of the man behind the Muppets, and the words he left for those who loved him.

Six days in a Stockholm bank vault in 1973 gave the world a new psychological term. But the woman it was named after says she was never ill. She was just trying to survive.

In 1955, Nobel laureate John Steinbeck wrote a witty letter to Marilyn Monroe asking for an autograph for his teenage nephew. The letter sold for $3,520 at auction in 2016 but nobody knows if Monroe ever replied.

In 1906, a sealed Parisian magazine called Le Stéréo-Nu brought erotic stereoviews to a mass audience. Behind the camera was Jean Agélou, whose most famous model went on to sit for Modigliani and marry a celebrated Japanese painter.