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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 horrific discovery. Three young girls, Lori Lee Farmer, aged 8; Michele Heather Guse, 9; and Doris Denise Milner, 10, had been raped and murdered, their bodies left in sleeping bags along a trail leading to the camp's shower facilities. The case would go on to grip the state, unravel in the courts, and remain officially unsolved nearly fifty years later. Camp Scott: A Beloved Institution Camp Scott had been run by the Girl Scouts since 1928. Nestled in the forested hills just two miles from the small town of Locust Grove and 50 miles from Tulsa, it was seen as an ideal place for girls to experience nature, camaraderie, and personal growth. It was also isolated, perfect for camping, but, as events would show, vulnerable too. Tent number 7 The 1977 season had only just begun. On Sunday, 12 June, 130 Girl Scouts were welcomed to the camp. That evening, the girls settled into their tents, including Lori, Michele, and Doris, who were placed together in Tent #7 of the Kiowa unit. Their tent was situated farthest from the counsellors' quarters and partially obscured by a nearby shower block. It was also only 86 yards from the staff tent, close enough, one might think, for sounds to travel. First Night in the Woods Doris Milner was new to camp life and one of the few Black girls attending that session. Though nervous at first, she quickly bonded with Lori and Michele. As a storm passed overhead, the three girls shared songs and stories before bed. According to their counsellor, Carla Wilhite, they were “three of the quietest kids,” but their tent was “just as loud and lively” as any. That night, campers and staff reported unsettling activity. At around 1:30 a.m., one counsellor went out to investigate moaning sounds coming from the woods but returned without discovering the source. At 2 a.m., a camper in Tent #7 was startled awake by a beam from a flashlight shining into her face. Around 3 a.m., someone was heard crying, “Momma, Momma.” Nearby, a local landowner noticed unusual traffic on a remote road near the camp between 2:30 and 3 a.m. In hindsight, these eerie details painted a troubling picture. The Grisly Discovery At around 6 a.m. on Monday morning, Carla Wilhite, on her way to the showers, saw a sleeping bag lying in the woods near Tent #7. Inside it was the body of Doris Milner. Believing at first that it was a tragic accident, she rushed to get help. Only when the camp director and nurse unzipped the other sleeping bags did they find Lori and Michele, their small bodies crumpled at the bottom. All three girls had been raped. Doris had been strangled, while Lori and Michele had been bludgeoned to death. Two had been placed inside sleeping bags; one had not. Blood covered parts of the tent, and it appeared that towels and mattresses had been used to wipe it around. Authorities also recovered a large red torch atop the bodies, with a smudged fingerprint on the lens, and a size 9.5 boot print found in the blood. A modified red torch was found at the scene. The camp was evacuated by that afternoon. Buses returned the rest of the children to Tulsa, with parents reunited with their daughters around 2:15 p.m. For the families of the three girls in Tent #7, life would never be the same. A Chilling Warning Ignored Shockingly, this wasn’t the first sign of trouble at Camp Scott that year. In April, just two months before the camp opened, a counsellor’s belongings had been disturbed during training. Doughnuts were stolen, and inside the empty box was a handwritten note that read: “We are on a mission to kill three girls in tent one,” signed, chillingly, “The Killer.” It was treated as a prank and discarded. After the murders, investigators would return to that note with grim suspicion. Gene Hart Enter Gene Leroy Hart Attention quickly turned to a fugitive named Gene Leroy Hart. A local man and member of the Cherokee Nation, Hart had escaped from the Mayes County Jail in 1973. He had been convicted of raping and kidnapping two pregnant women and burglary, and had vanished into the nearby hills. Born and raised less than a mile from Camp Scott, Hart was found a year after the murders hiding at the home of a Cherokee medicine man. His arrest followed what became the largest manhunt in Oklahoma’s history, involving more than 40 FBI agents and costing over a million dollars. A cave two miles from the camp was found containing a flashlight battery, photographs of women (allegedly stolen from Hart’s earlier victims), and glasses believed to belong to one of the camp staff. On the wall of the cave, someone had scrawled, “The killer was here. Bye bye fools. 77-6-17.” Officers gather near Locust Grove while searching for a suspect in the Camp Scott girl scout murders. The Trial and Acquittal Hart’s trial began in March 1979 and lasted several weeks. The prosecution pointed to evidence like the eyeglasses, hair found on duct tape at the scene, and items found in the cave. The defence argued the glasses had been taken from Hart’s previous victims and that other evidence had been planted. They also suggested another suspect: a man named William Stevens, a convicted rapist reportedly seen at Camp Scott days before the murders. Hart under arrest Dean Boyd, a local waitress, testified she had served a nervous man at her diner the morning after the murders, and a friend of Stevens claimed he had lent him a flashlight matching the one found at the scene. He also alleged Stevens had confessed to the crime months later. But none of it was enough. The jury deliberated for only five minutes before acquitting Hart. Though he wasn’t cleared of his previous crimes, and still had a 308-year sentence to serve, justice in the Girl Scout case was never formally delivered. These are the 1977 trial and coroner notes. On 4 June 1979, just a few months after the verdict, Gene Leroy Hart collapsed and died of a heart attack while jogging in the prison yard. DNA Testing and Lingering Questions In 1989, DNA testing of semen samples from the scene showed three out of five probes matched Hart’s DNA. Statistically, one in 7,700 Native Americans could have been a match, which wasn’t enough to close the case definitively. More testing in 2008 was inconclusive due to deterioration of the evidence. Then, in 2017, the sheriff of Mayes County raised $30,000 in donations for further testing. By 2019, new results emerged, this time strongly suggesting Hart’s involvement. But the findings weren’t made public until 2022, when the victims’ families requested transparency. “Unless something new comes up... I am convinced of Hart’s guilt,” said Sheriff Mike Reed. Still, legally, the case remains open. Officially, the Oklahoma Girl Scout Murders are unsolved. Legal Aftermath The families of the victims pursued a civil suit against the Magic Empire Council, which ran the camp. The lawsuit, seeking $5 million, alleged negligence — particularly regarding the ignored threat note and the tent’s distance from staff supervision. In 1985, the jury ruled in favour of the Council. In the years since, the parents channelled their grief into activism. Michele Guse’s father helped enact the Oklahoma Victims’ Bill of Rights and founded the Oklahoma Crime Victims Compensation Board. Lori Farmer’s mother, Sheri, launched the state’s chapter of Parents of Murdered Children. The camp itself never reopened. Camp Scott stands abandoned, overgrown, and silent, its legacy frozen in time. A Dark Chapter Without Closure Despite advancements in forensic science and the passage of time, the deaths of Lori, Michele, and Doris remain officially unsolved. Their story has been the subject of books, documentaries, podcasts, and public debate. Even Broadway star Kristin Chenoweth, who was supposed to attend the same camp session but fell ill, later said the event profoundly shaped her. What happened that night in June 1977 remains one of America’s most disturbing unsolved crimes. Whether or not conclusive justice will ever emerge, the memory of those three young girls, and the questions surrounding their deaths, continues to echo through the woods of Oklahoma.

In the overhead shot, they're perfect. Dozens of women arranged into flowers, spirals, and concentric rings, their faces and bodies reduced to components of an enormous human pattern. The camera swoops in from thirty feet above and the audience gasps. Nobody's watching any individual woman. That was rather the point. Busby Berkeley is remembered as one of Hollywood's great visionaries, the man who turned the movie musical into something genuinely cinematic during the bleakest years of the Great Depression. The kaleidoscopic overhead shots, the waterfall sequences, the neon violins, the 56 white grand pianos: all of it is credited to his genius, and the credit is largely deserved. But there's a version of the Busby Berkeley story that doesn't get told alongside the greatest hits reel. It's the story of the hundreds of women who made those numbers possible and were largely forgotten the moment the camera moved on. And it's the story of a night in 1935 when two of those women died, and Berkeley walked away from it. A Choreographer Who Never Danced William Berkeley Enos was born in Los Angeles in 1895 to a theatrical family. His father was an actor and director; his mother, Gertrude Berkeley, was an actress whose surname he later combined with that of a stage performer called Amy Busby to create his working name. He attended the Mohegan Lake Military Academy in New York, enrolled in the army in World War I, and was sent to France, where he organised military parades and drills for battalions of soldiers. He never had a dance lesson in his life. When he arrived in Hollywood at the start of the sound era, the choreographic language he brought with him was the language of military formations: large groups moving in precise synchronisation, individuals subsumed into collective geometry, the overhead view that reveals patterns invisible from ground level. He didn't teach his dancers steps. He taught them positions. The camera did the dancing. Warner Bros. were facing near-bankruptcy by the early 1930s, having lost millions in the Depression years after turning a $17 million profit in 1929. They needed something spectacular and cheap enough not to sink them. Berkeley gave them 42nd Street, Gold Diggers of 1933, and Footlight Parade, all in the same year, all featuring the same essential ingredient: hundreds of women moving as one. How You Got the Job Berkeley held open auditions that were, by any honest measure, closer to inspections. He was looking for specific physical proportions, specific facial symmetry, specific leg length. He wasn't especially interested in whether the women could dance, because his numbers didn't require dancing in any conventional sense. They required precision movement, the ability to hold a position, and the willingness to do whatever Berkeley asked in whatever costume he specified. The costumes were frequently not much. Pre-Code Hollywood, operating before the Production Code was strictly enforced after 1934, allowed Berkeley considerable latitude. The opening of Gold Diggers of 1933 featured Ginger Rogers and a chorus of women dressed in nothing but strategically placed silver dollars. The "Pettin' in the Park" sequence from the same film ends with a chorus line of women in metal corsets, with a small person in a baby costume handing Dick Powell a can opener. Berkeley's sexual imagery was not subtle, and his chorus girls were its primary vehicle. A 1942 Warner Bros. short film called Calling All Girls documented the actual process by which women were selected for chorus work in movie musicals of the era. The selection criteria it depicts are about physical appearance, not skill. Women walked, turned, and were assessed. Those who passed moved on. Those who didn't were thanked and shown out. Berkeley developed a signature technique called the "Parade of Faces," in which the camera moved slowly along the line, pausing on each woman for a close-up. It was meant to individualise them, to give each performer a moment. In practice, it was an inventory. A catalogue of the faces he'd selected. The women he didn't select never made it into the frame at all. For more on the lives of women who built their identities around performance in this era, read about Josephine Baker, dancer, film star, spy and activist, and Audrey Munson, America's first supermodel, whose story ended in tragedy. What They Were Paid and What They Were Worth Chorus girls at Warner Bros. in the early 1930s earned roughly $25 to $75 a week for their work, depending on experience and the specific production. In Depression-era America, where millions were unemployed and breadlines stretched around city blocks, this was considered good money. It was also a fraction of what the studio was making from the films they appeared in. The work itself was physically demanding in ways the finished product doesn't reveal. Berkeley was a perfectionist who shot and re-shot sequences until they met his exacting standards. The "By a Waterfall" sequence in Footlight Parade, in which dozens of women formed formations in and around a large pool, required the women to spend extended periods in the water on a soundstage. The pool was reportedly the largest ever built at that point. The shoot ran for days. Nobody was asking whether the women were cold. Berkeley's numbers required the kind of mechanical precision that exhausted everyone involved. Getting 150 tappers to synchronise for the "Lullaby of Broadway" sequence in Gold Diggers of 1935 meant rehearsals that went on long past reasonable hours. Getting 56 women to manoeuvre 56 white grand pianos across a stage in geometric patterns meant doing it again and again until it looked effortless. Berkeley was not known for his patience when the patterns weren't right. What the women got in return was a credit that most audiences ignored, wages that vanished quickly in Depression-era Los Angeles, and in the vast majority of cases, no lasting career. They were chosen for how they looked in aggregate, from above, as part of a pattern. When the pattern was complete, they were thanked and the next production began. The Women Nobody Remembers Of the hundreds of women who appeared in Berkeley's numbers at Warner Bros. between 1930 and 1939, a small handful are remembered by name. Ruby Keeler, who could tap dance and had married Al Jolson, became a star. Joan Blondell and Ginger Rogers had the wit and personality to make the narrative sections of the films as compelling as the numbers. Aline MacMahon brought genuine acting skill to roles that didn't always deserve it. The rest are largely anonymous. The woman in the silver dollar costume next to Ginger Rogers in the opening of Gold Diggers of 1933. The woman whose legs Berkeley tracked through from ground level in 42nd Street. The woman forming the centre of the human flower in the overhead shot that everybody recognises. Their names aren't in the histories. Their faces, when you can see them at all, are one of dozens. Berkeley's "Parade of Faces" technique, for all its apparent intimacy, captures this perfectly. Each face gets its moment. Then the camera moves on to the next one. Then the next. By the time you've seen fifteen of them, the individual has dissolved back into the pattern. That was what the pattern was for. The films themselves were perfectly aware of this dynamic. The plot of 42nd Street is about a chorus girl who gets her big break when the star breaks her ankle. The entire backstage musical genre of the 1930s was built on the fantasy that talent and luck could lift a woman from the chorus line to the marquee. What it didn't examine was what happened to the hundreds who stayed in the chorus line, and the hundreds more who didn't make the cut at all. The Night on Roosevelt Highway On the evening of 8 September 1935, Berkeley attended a party at the Pacific Palisades home of Warner Bros. production chief William Koenig. He had a meeting scheduled with bandleader Gus Arnheim the following morning and left the party while still, according to multiple witnesses, heavily affected by alcohol. Driving south on Roosevelt Highway (now Pacific Coast Highway), 400 yards north of Santa Monica Canyon, Berkeley crossed into oncoming traffic. His car struck a vehicle head-on and sideswiped a third. Two women died: Ada von Briesen and Peggy Daley. Five other people were seriously injured. Berkeley himself was badly cut and bruised. When witnesses reached the crash site, several reported smelling alcohol on Berkeley's breath. One of them, a pest control worker named Alvin Hudson, who had been driving one of the other vehicles, later testified that Berkeley's headlights had appeared suddenly in front of him in the middle lane with no warning. Another witness, a student named William Hudson, told the coroner's jury he had smelled liquor on Berkeley when he spoke to him at the scene. Berkeley being carried into his trial on a stretcher, September 1935 Berkeley was charged with second-degree murder. He was tried three times. The first two juries hung. In the third trial he was acquitted. He arrived at court on a stretcher, badly enough hurt from the crash that he couldn't walk in. Warner Bros., whose most commercially valuable choreographer was on trial for killing two people, hired the best legal defence available. Jerry Giesler, one of Hollywood's most celebrated criminal defence attorneys, represented him. Ada von Briesen and Peggy Daley are not mentioned in histories of the Berkeley musical. Berkeley continued working at Warner Bros. until the late 1930s, then moved to MGM. He never served a day in prison. Berkley being comforted by his mother after his drunk driving crash. The MGM Years and What They Cost At MGM, Berkeley's excesses caught up with him in different ways. He was removed from directing Girl Crazy in 1943 after conflicts with Judy Garland, though the production number "I Got Rhythm" that he'd already directed remained in the film. His biographer Jeffrey Spivak and others who documented the period noted that Berkeley's on-set behaviour became increasingly erratic and verbally abusive as his career there continued. He clashed with studio brass repeatedly over budgets. His instability had consequences for the people who worked with him. Outside of work, Berkeley's personal life was in similar disarray. He was married six times, a figure that tells its own story about his capacity for sustained relationships. He was the subject of an alienation of affections lawsuit involving a prominent actress. He attempted suicide more than once in the late 1940s and spent periods institutionalised. By the mid-1950s he was considered a minor figure, his moment having passed. The integrated musical had replaced the spectacle number as Hollywood's preferred form, and his specific skill of organising large groups of women into geometric patterns had no obvious application in a genre now dominated by Fred Astaire's partnership with Cyd Charisse or Gene Kelly's emotional athleticism. Those were forms that required genuine dancing. Berkeley's numbers had always required something else. What the Overhead Shot Means In 1975, the French philosopher Michel Foucault published a book about power and the body, arguing that one of the defining gestures of modern institutions is the arrangement of bodies into visible, controllable formations. He was writing about prisons and schools, not Hollywood musicals, but the description applies. Berkeley's overhead shot turns the individual human being into a unit within a pattern, visible only as part of a larger design, indistinguishable from the units around her. Berkeley himself would have found this analysis baffling. He said his only goals were to top himself and amaze the audience. "In an era of breadlines, depression and wars, I tried to help people get away from all the misery," he said. "I wanted to make people happy, if only for an hour." That's probably true, and it's not nothing. The escapism those films provided was real and genuinely valued by the people who queued to see them. But the women in the patterns were real too. They had names. They came to auditions hoping to be chosen. They were paid wages that seemed good in 1933 and look rather different from this distance. They held positions in cold water on soundstages for hours while Berkeley decided if the angle was right. They were, by his own admission, chosen for their looks and their capacity to form attractive geometric shapes, not for anything they could individually do. The overhead shot is brilliant. The films are genuinely extraordinary products of their time and place. And Ada von Briesen and Peggy Daley are still dead, and most of the women who made those numbers possible are still anonymous, and Berkeley still walked away from all of it with his reputation essentially intact. That's a story that sits right underneath the kaleidoscope, if you know where to look. For another account of a performance career that was exploited and forgotten, read about Evelyn Nesbit, the girl on the velvet swing and the Gilded Age scandal that consumed her. SOURCES 1. Britannica: Busby Berkeley — https://www.britannica.com/biography/Busby-Berkeley 2. New World Encyclopedia: Busby Berkeley — https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Busby_Berkeley 3. UCLA Library Special Collections (Los Angeles Times Photographic Archive): Busby Berkeley manslaughter trial photographs, 1935 — https://calisphere.org/item/ark:/21198/zz00288461/ 4. UCLA Library Special Collections: Alvin Hudson testimony, Busby Berkeley crash, 1935 — https://dl.library.ucla.edu/islandora/object/edu.ucla.library.specialCollections.latimes:7923 5. Pre-Code Misbehaving: Famous Pre-Code Trials: Busby Berkeley — http://www.precodemisbehaving.com/2012/12/famous-precode-trials-1-busby-berkeley.html 6. Paste Magazine: In 1933, Busby Berkeley Became Hollywood's Killer Choreographer — https://www.pastemagazine.com/movies/musicals/busby-berkeley-gold-diggers-of-1933 7. Dance Teacher Magazine: Busby Berkeley — https://dance-teacher.com/busby-berkeley/ 8. Jeffrey Spivak: Buzz: The Life and Art of Busby Berkeley (University Press of Kentucky, 2010)

On the night of 18 July 1969, a car went off a bridge on Chappaquiddick Island, Massachusetts, and sank into Poucha Pond. The driver, Senator Ted Kennedy, got out. His passenger, 28-year-old Mary Jo Kopechne, didn't. Kennedy waited ten hours before reporting the accident to police. There was no autopsy. The grand jury that convened the following year was prevented from calling key witnesses. Kennedy pleaded guilty to leaving the scene, received a two-month suspended sentence, and went on to serve another forty years in the United States Senate. For fifty years, as the author William C. Kashatus put it, Mary Jo Kopechne was treated as "collateral damage" by the Kennedys and the Washington political establishment. She deserves better than that. Here is her story, and what actually happened at Chappaquiddick. Kopechne at her graduation A Life Built Around Politics Mary Jo Kopechne was born on 26 July 1940 in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Her parents, Joseph and Gwen, were not political people, but their daughter became one almost from the moment she understood what politics was. As a 20-year-old, she was galvanised by John F. Kennedy's inaugural address in 1961 and his challenge to Americans to ask what they could do for their country rather than what their country could do for them. After graduating from Caldwell College in 1962, she moved to Montgomery, Alabama, where she taught at Montgomery Catholic High School for a year. She was drawn south by the civil rights movement, and the students she taught remembered her clearly. One recalled her as someone with "confidence and a zest for life that was intriguing. She was humble and kind and stood firm in her beliefs." Teaching wasn't where she felt she could have the most impact. In 1963 she took a job in the Washington office of Florida senator George Smathers, and the following year transferred to Robert Kennedy's Senate office. Her father said simply: "Politics was her life." Her mother agreed. "It was a good career, working with the politicians. It was what she wanted to do." Mary Jo Kopechne, as a member of Bobby Kennedy’s campaign staff. The Boiler Room Girls In Robert Kennedy's office, Kopechne quickly distinguished herself. She and five other women, Rosemary Keough, Esther Newberg, Nance and Maryellen Lyons, and Susan Tannenbaum, became known as the "Boiler Room Girls," a nickname that came from their cramped, windowless, airless office. The name was affectionate but slightly misleading. These weren't secretaries. They were political operatives. Of the six, Kopechne was considered the sharpest political mind. Dun Gifford, who oversaw the group, recalled her as "the most politically astute" of them all. During the 1968 presidential primary, her specific skill was delegate intelligence: tracking the shifting loyalties of delegates across dozens of states in real time, negotiating on Kennedy's behalf, and feeding his campaign the information it needed to make decisions. "That ability allowed her to negotiate deals on RFK's behalf, to travel with him when necessary, and even to offer her opinions when she had the best working knowledge of a situation," Gifford said. If Kennedy had won the presidency, Gifford believed, "Mary Jo would have been rewarded with a very significant job in his administration." He never got the chance to give it to her. On 5 June 1968, Robert Kennedy was shot dead at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, minutes after winning the California primary. You can read more about the timeline of the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King, who was killed just two months before Kennedy, in a separate piece. Kopechne was devastated. She told a former teacher she couldn't bring herself to return to Capitol Hill: "It will never be the same again." She took a position at a consulting firm in Washington but stayed close to the other Boiler Room Girls. Their reunions, one family friend recalled, were "almost like war veterans getting together," women who had shared something intense and irreplaceable and lost it in the most sudden, violent way possible. Senator Ted Kennedy in 1969. Chappaquiddick Island, July 1969 Ted Kennedy had been watching his brothers die for years. John assassinated in Dallas in 1963. Robert gunned down in Los Angeles in 1968. Now, at 37, the political spotlight had fallen entirely on him. Polls in 1969 showed 79% of American voters believed he might run for the presidency in 1972. Even Richard Nixon was worried about facing another Kennedy. That summer, Kennedy was competing in the Edgartown Regatta, sailing the family boat Victura, the same vessel that had belonged to JFK. He and his cousin Joe Gargan organised a reunion cookout for the Boiler Room Girls on Chappaquiddick Island, a small barrier island accessible from Edgartown only by ferry. Kennedy's wife Joan was at home in Massachusetts, pregnant with their fourth child. The party on 18 July 1969 was held at a rented cottage. There were twelve people: the six Boiler Room Girls, Kennedy, Gargan, lawyer Paul Markham, Kennedy's part-time driver John Crimmins, family friend Raymond La Rosa, and attorney Charles Tretter. There was food, drink, and conversation about Bobby Kennedy. People danced in the front yard. Around 11:15pm, Kennedy asked his driver for the car keys. He said he wanted to return to his hotel and that Kopechne wasn't feeling well, possibly from too much sun. Kopechne left with him without telling anyone, leaving her purse and her room key on the table. A diver investigates Kennedy’s submerged car the following morning. The Bridge Dike Bridge was a narrow, wooden, unlit structure that crossed from the main road of Chappaquiddick to a remote beach area. Kennedy was expected to turn left toward the ferry landing. Instead, he turned right, onto the unpaved and unlighted Dike Road. Multiple witnesses later noted that Kennedy had driven that route before, which made his claim of simple disorientation harder to accept. The Oldsmobile went off the bridge and somersaulted into Poucha Pond. Kennedy later testified: "There was complete blackness. Water seemed to rush in from every point, from the windshield, from underneath me, above me." He said he couldn't recall exactly how he got out, but he did. He said he dived repeatedly to try to reach Kopechne. He said the current was too strong. He gave up and swam to shore. What happened next is the part of the story that Kennedy's defenders have never been able to satisfactorily explain. Rather than going directly to the nearest house and calling for help, he walked back to the party cottage, roughly two miles away. He spoke privately to Gargan and Markham. All three returned to the bridge and Gargan and Markham made their own attempts to dive to the car. They failed. Kennedy told them he would report the accident to the police. He didn't. He went back to his hotel, changed his clothes, slept, and in the morning asked the hotel desk clerk what time it was. Fishermen had already spotted the submerged car at around 7:30am. Kennedy called police at 9:45am, nearly ten hours after the crash. His call came after the car, and Mary Jo Kopechne's body, had already been found. According to Leo Damore's 1988 book Senatorial Privilege, which drew on extensive interviews with Joe Gargan, Kennedy had at one point considered claiming that Kopechne had been driving the car, with himself as a passenger. Gargan, by Damore's account, refused to go along with it. Joan and Ted Kennedy, wearing a neck brace, arrive at St. Vincent’s Church in Plymouth, Pennsylvania, for Mary Jo Kopechne’s funeral, July 22, 1969. Could She Have Survived? The medical examiner at the scene, Dr Donald Mills, made a preliminary determination of drowning and, given the prominent people involved, deferred to the district attorney on whether a full autopsy was needed. No autopsy was ordered. Kopechne's body was released and her parents took her home to Pennsylvania. When the district attorney later petitioned to exhume the body for examination, a Pennsylvania court refused. Kopechne's parents, who had been told the proposed autopsy was primarily to determine whether their daughter had been pregnant, supported the decision to deny it. The truth of what killed her was never formally established. John Farrar, the captain of the Edgartown Fire Department's search and rescue dive team, had a view on it. He testified at the inquest that when he entered the submerged car, he found Kopechne in the rear footwell, her head tilted upward toward a pocket of trapped air at the back of the vehicle. There was little water in her lungs. Farrar's conclusion was that she hadn't drowned immediately. She had been breathing trapped air and may have survived for several hours after the car went into the water. Spectators look on as the car that Ted Kennedy crashed into the pond is pulled from the water, July 24, 1969. "It took her at least three or four hours to die," Farrar said. "I could have had her out of that car twenty-five minutes after I got the call. But he didn't call." If Farrar's assessment is correct, and it has never been definitively refuted, then Mary Jo Kopechne was alive in the car while Kennedy slept at his hotel. The Investigation That Went Nowhere Kennedy pleaded guilty to leaving the scene of an accident and received a two-month suspended sentence. Judge James Boyle, who noted in his ruling that Kennedy had been negligent, retired from the bench just days after sentencing. The inquest in January 1970 was closed to the public. When the Dukes County grand jury convened in April 1970, surviving jurors later said its investigative powers were effectively hamstrung by court officials. The Boiler Room Girls were never called to give evidence that might contradict Kennedy's account. No indictment was returned. Kennedy had his driver's licence suspended for sixteen months. Edgartown police chief Dominic Arena, who had taken Kennedy's statement, later told Damore that he had felt confused and pressured from the outset. He was a small-town police chief who had suddenly found himself at the centre of a case involving one of the most powerful political families in America, using his office phone while standing in a puddle of water in what he described as "a state of confusion." Kennedy's legal team was among the most expensive and connected money could buy. The machine around him moved fast and effectively. The full truth of what happened between 11:15pm on 18 July and 9:45am on 19 July 1969 has never been established in a court of law. The Televised Address On 25 July 1969, the same day he pleaded guilty, Kennedy gave a twelve-minute televised address to the people of Massachusetts from Hyannis Port. He called his failure to report the accident promptly "indefensible." He denied any "private relationship" with Kopechne. He denied being drunk. He described himself as "deeply scarred" by the deaths of his brothers and invoked what he called a "curse" on the Kennedy family. He asked Massachusetts voters to help him decide whether he should resign his Senate seat. The response was overwhelmingly supportive. The Boston Globe received calls at a two-to-one ratio in his favour. The Kennedy family received telegrams running 100-to-1 for him to stay. He stayed. The neck brace Kennedy wore at Kopechne's funeral and in the days following attracted its own controversy. His personal physician, Dr Robert Watt, later said he had never recommended Kennedy wear one publicly. Whether the brace reflected genuine injury or was a visible marker of suffering calculated to generate sympathy, nobody can say for certain. What Became of Ted Kennedy Kennedy never ran for the presidency in 1972. He did run in 1980, challenging incumbent Jimmy Carter for the Democratic nomination, and lost. In a primary debate, when asked directly why he wanted to be president, he gave a famously incoherent answer that many analysts blamed on Chappaquiddick's psychological shadow. He withdrew from the race and never ran again. Ted Kennedy in 1984 He remained a senator from Massachusetts until his death from brain cancer in August 2009, aged 77. He became one of the most consequential legislators in Senate history, a champion of healthcare reform, civil rights, and immigration law, and was eulogised as the "Lion of the Senate." In his memoir, True Compass, he described Kopechne's death as "a horrible tragedy that haunts me every day of my life." Whatever the haunting amounted to privately, it didn't end his career. The system that was supposed to investigate what happened at Chappaquiddick protected him at every turn, and he benefited from a degree of public sympathy that had everything to do with his family name and very little to do with his conduct that night. What Mary Jo Kopechne Deserves to Be Remembered For Her cousin William Nelson said that Kopechne was a woman ahead of her time. "I'm pretty sure she would have pioneered a new path for women in Washington. She was kind of glossed over as the girl in the car. It was all about Ted Kennedy. She would have gone on to do great things." Her mother Gwen, speaking to the Boston Globe in 2007, thirty-eight years after her daughter's death, said: "Sometimes I'd like to scream a lot but I'm trying to hold it back. It would be nice if somebody spoke up." The 2017 film Chappaquiddick, directed by John Curran and starring Jason Clarke as Kennedy, significantly revived public interest in the case. It was widely praised for its refusal to sentimentalise Kennedy and for treating Kopechne as a real person rather than a plot device. It didn't answer the questions that the investigations of 1969 and 1970 chose not to ask, but it put them back in front of a new generation. Mary Jo Kopechne was 28 years old. She was one of the sharpest political operatives of her generation, working in a field that barely acknowledged that women could do that job at all. She had survived the assassination of the man she'd devoted years of her professional life to and kept going. She died because a senator made a wrong turn, got out of a sinking car, and spent the next ten hours doing nothing. The questions her family spent the rest of their lives asking were never properly answered. Ted Kennedy served in the Senate for another forty years. He is remembered as the Lion of the Senate. Mary Jo Kopechne is remembered, when she's remembered at all, as the woman in his car. SOURCES 1. Britannica: Chappaquiddick Incident — https://www.britannica.com/event/Chappaquiddick-incident 2. History.com: Senator Ted Kennedy Drives Car Off Bridge at Chappaquiddick Island — https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/july-18/incident-on-chappaquiddick-island 3. Martha's Vineyard Times: The Crash That Launched Chappaquiddick — https://www.mvtimes.com/2019/07/17/crash-launched-chappaquiddick/ 4. E! Online: The Kennedys and a Cover-Up: The Bizarre True Story of Chappaquiddick — https://www.eonline.com/news/925270/the-kennedys-and-a-cover-up-the-bizarre-true-story-of-chappaquiddick 5. Leo Damore: Senatorial Privilege: The Chappaquiddick Cover-Up (1988) 6. William C. Kashatus: Before Chappaquiddick: The Untold Story of Mary Jo Kopechne (2019) 7. EBSCO Research Starters: Chappaquiddick Scandal — https://www.ebsco.com/research-starters/law/chappaquiddick-scandal

Hannibal Lecter is one of the most famous villains in cinema history. He's also, according to forensic psychiatrists, not really a psychopath. Neither is Norman Bates. Neither is Patrick Bateman, despite the title of his film. And Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees aren't even close. In 2014, Belgian forensic psychiatrist Samuel Leistedt and his colleague Paul Linkowski published a study in the Journal of Forensic Sciences that set out to answer a fairly specific question: how accurately does cinema portray clinical psychopathy? To find out, they watched 400 films spanning nearly a century of moviemaking, from 1915 to 2010. Their findings are more interesting than the clickbait headlines they generated, partly because of what they found, but mainly because of what Hollywood consistently gets wrong. What Is a Psychopath, Clinically? Before getting into the films, it helps to understand what the word actually means in a clinical context, because it's used very loosely in popular culture. Psychopathy is not a formal diagnosis in the DSM-5, the standard psychiatric manual, but it's a well-established clinical construct most closely associated with antisocial personality disorder and assessed using the Psychopathy Checklist Revised, or PCL-R, developed by Canadian psychologist Robert Hare. The PCL-R scores individuals across two broad factors. The first covers emotional detachment: superficial charm, an absence of guilt or empathy, shallow emotional responses, manipulativeness, and a grandiose sense of self-worth. The second covers antisocial behaviour: impulsivity, irresponsibility, poor long-term planning, aggression, and a tendency toward criminal or deviant conduct from an early age. The key thing to understand is that psychopaths are not necessarily violent, and they're not necessarily dramatic. Many function perfectly well in everyday life. Psychopaths are estimated to make up roughly 1% of the general population, but around 15 to 25% of prison populations. That gap tells you something important: the majority of psychopaths aren't in prison, and most aren't killers. They're emotionally flat, often charming, fundamentally indifferent to other people's welfare, and frequently very good at concealing all of this. Leistedt and Linkowski used the PCL-R as their measuring stick throughout the study, assessing each cinematic character against its criteria to determine whether the portrayal was clinically accurate, partially accurate, or simply fictional. 400 Films, 126 Characters, Ten Years of Watching The methodology was as straightforward as it sounds, and also as exhausting. Leistedt enlisted colleagues including senior forensic psychiatrists and cinema critics to watch 400 films over three years. From that pool, they identified 126 fictional characters whose profiles met enough criteria to qualify as meaningfully psychopathic representations. Of those, 105 were male and 21 were female, a ratio that broadly reflects real-world data on psychopathy, where male cases outnumber female ones significantly. The characters were then categorised by subtype. The study identified several distinct categories of cinematic psychopath, corresponding to real clinical subtypes. Primary psychopaths, who show high levels of emotional detachment and low anxiety, tended to be the most realistically drawn. Secondary psychopaths, characterised by higher environmental influences, anxiety, and borderline traits, were the most common type in the female sample, accounting for 71% of female psychopathic characters. The manipulative subtype accounted for 48% of female characters. Among males, secondary (51%) and prototypical (34%) subtypes dominated. The headline finding was that cinematic portrayals of psychopathy have become more accurate over time, as clinical understanding of the condition has improved. But accurate portrayals remain in the minority. Most fictional psychopaths are still built around dramatic excess rather than clinical reality. The Most Realistic Psychopath in Cinema Leistedt and his team concluded that the most clinically accurate psychopathic character in the 400 films they watched was Anton Chigurh, Javier Bardem's character in the Coen Brothers' No Country for Old Men (2007), adapted from Cormac McCarthy's novel. Anton Chigurh played by Javier Bardem What makes Chigurh realistic is precisely what makes him so unsettling to watch. He isn't explosive or erratic. He's consistent. He operates according to a self-constructed moral framework, however warped, and applies it without deviation. He doesn't kill for pleasure, at least not in any obvious sense. He kills as a consequence of a logic he's committed to, and he feels nothing about it. There's no relish, no theatricality, no monologuing. As the researchers wrote, he "appears to be invulnerable and resistant to any form of emotion or person." That emotional blankness is the key. Real psychopaths don't tend to be sadists who enjoy suffering. They tend to be people for whom other people's suffering simply registers as irrelevant information. Chigurh doesn't hate his victims. He doesn't love killing. He just has a system, and the system happens to result in a great many deaths. Honourable mentions went to two other characters. Hans Beckert in Fritz Lang's M (1931), played by Peter Lorre, was praised for depicting a child killer who experiences his compulsions as a form of torment rather than pleasure, which aligns with certain clinical profiles. Henry Lee Lucas in Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986) was cited as an example of what the researchers called an "idiot psychopath": impulsive, unable to plan ahead, with a chaotic personal history and poor family relationships. Both characters drew on real criminal cases and both were assessed as clinically plausible. Peter Lorre in 'M' Why Hannibal Lecter Doesn't Qualify The exclusions are where the study gets really interesting. Patrick Bateman, Gordon Gekko, Norman Bates, and Hannibal Lecter are four of cinema's most famous "psychopaths." None of them, according to Leistedt's team, accurately fits the clinical profile. Hannibal Lecter is the most counterintuitive exclusion. He's brilliant, remorseless, and kills without hesitation. But real psychopaths are emotionally flat, not emotionally elaborate. Lecter is deeply invested in his victims, intellectually engaged with them, aesthetically offended by mediocrity. He has strong preferences, cultivated tastes, and a performative relationship with his own cruelty. Real psychopaths don't put on a show. They don't care enough to. Lecter also displays a kind of intense, selective emotional engagement with people he finds interesting, which is the opposite of the shallow affect that defines clinical psychopathy. He's a fictional archetype of evil, as the study's authors put it, rather than a genuine clinical portrait. Norman Bates doesn't qualify for a different reason. His behaviour is rooted in psychosis and dissociation, a fractured identity produced by severe trauma, rather than in the cold, calculating detachment of psychopathy. The researchers classified him as a "pseudopsychopath," someone who displays some surface similarities to psychopathy but whose underlying condition is something else entirely. Patrick Bateman is more interesting. The study didn't exclude him entirely: some versions of the analysis treated him as a primary psychopath. But his defining characteristics in the film, the obsessive status anxiety, the desperate need for social approval, the near-constant performance of normalcy, work against the diagnosis. Real psychopaths don't care what others think of them. The grandiosity is there, but the social anxiety runs entirely counter to the emotional detachment the PCL-R requires. Gordon Gekko's exclusion is the most ironic. Leistedt's study noted that psychopathic traits are disproportionately represented in senior management and high-powered corporate environments, where emotional detachment, charm, and a willingness to exploit others without guilt can function as career advantages. Gekko is a commercially successful predator built on precisely those traits. The reason he didn't make the cut is that, in the film, he ultimately shows emotional investment in Bud Fox's fate, which breaks the clinical profile. A true psychopath wouldn't have cared. Slasher Films and the Problem of the Supernatural Killer The study was particularly critical of the slasher film tradition. Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees, two of horror's most recognisable faces, were dismissed as clinically irrelevant. Leistedt's team argued that characters like these accumulate traits from multiple personality types simultaneously, sadism, superintelligence, invulnerability, prophetic awareness of victims' plans, in a way that has no clinical grounding. They're cultural symbols of evil rather than portrayals of any real psychological condition. The earlier gangster and villain archetypes of the 1940s, such as Tommy Udo in Kiss of Death (1947) and Cody Jarrett in White Heat (1949), were similarly criticised, though for different reasons. These characters were read by audiences as psychopathic but were actually being played as genre villains: brutal, unpredictable, sexually corrupt, emotionally unstable. That's not psychopathy. That's melodrama. Women on Screen: The Scheming Manipulator and Her Exceptions Of the 126 characters in the study's sample, only 21 were female. The researchers noted that this roughly reflects the real-world gender distribution of diagnosed psychopathy, but it also reflects Hollywood's limited imagination when it comes to female villainy. The dominant stereotype for female psychopaths in cinema, the study found, is the scheming sexual manipulator: a woman who weaponises men's desires to achieve her goals. Hedra Carlson in Single White Female and Catherine Tramell in Basic Instinct were cited as examples. Both use sex as a tool of control, and both fit a long cinematic tradition that conflates female psychopathy with erotic danger. Annie Wilkes in Misery was identified as a notable exception, a female psychopath whose violence isn't sexualised and whose profile is more consistent with the controlling, obsessive variant of the condition. She's driven by a grandiose internal logic, she feels no genuine empathy for her victim's suffering, and she's chillingly consistent in applying her own rules. The researchers considered her one of the more clinically plausible female portrayals in the sample. What Cinema Gets Right, Eventually The study's broader conclusion was cautiously optimistic. Cinematic portrayals of psychopathy have improved as clinical understanding has deepened. Characters from the 1990s and 2000s tend to be more nuanced than those from the 1940s and 1950s, when psychopathy was largely conflated with straightforward villainy or supernatural menace. Leistedt and Linkowski noted that the most realistic portrayals, including Chigurh, serve a genuine educational function. Medical schools and forensic psychiatry programmes have used certain films as teaching tools, not because they're perfectly accurate, but because they capture something real about how psychopathy presents, especially the emotional flatness, the internal consistency, and the absence of the dramatic excess that popular culture expects. The real lesson of the study is that Hollywood's psychopaths are too interesting. They monologue. They have elaborate aesthetics. They want you to understand them, or they want you to be terrified of them. Real psychopaths want neither of those things, because wanting anything from other people requires caring about other people, and that's precisely what they can't do. Anton Chigurh doesn't want to be understood. He just has a system. And that, it turns out, is the most frightening version of all. For a closer look at real psychopathic killers and what actually drove them, read about Leonard Lake, the sadistic survivalist who built a bunker for murder, or Carl Panzram, whose story is one of the most disturbing in American criminal history. SOURCES 1. Leistedt SJ, Linkowski P. Psychopathy and the Cinema: Fact or Fiction? Journal of Forensic Sciences. 2014;59(1):167-174 — https://doi.org/10.1111/1556-4029.12359 2. Semantic Scholar: Psychopathy and the Cinema: Fact or Fiction? — https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Psychopathy-and-the-Cinema:-Fact-or-Fiction-Leistedt-Linkowski/e3aace47030d04bcf9a4576cebc705001bb90700 3. Hare RD. Without Conscience: The Disturbing World of the Psychopaths Among Us. Guilford Press; 1999. 4. Lovefraud: And the Most Accurate Psychopath in Cinema Award Goes To... — https://lovefraud.com/and-the-most-realistic-psychopath-award-goes-to/

In October 1902, a Parisian publisher named Émile Bayard launched what is generally considered the world's first nude photography magazine. He called it Le Nu esthétique: L'Homme, la Femme, L'Enfant, which translates roughly as The Aesthetic Nude: Man, Woman, Child. It was sold by subscription only, published in monthly fascicles, and dedicated to William-Adolphe Bouguereau, the most celebrated academic painter in France. The preface was written by Jean-Léon Gérôme, Bouguereau's peer and rival for the title of the era's definitive painter of the classical nude. That combination of names tells you exactly what Bayard was trying to do. He wasn't publishing pornography. He was making an argument that the nude human body, photographed in poses drawn from centuries of western art, was a legitimate subject for a periodical. He backed that argument with two of the most prestigious names in French academic painting and sold the results to subscribers who received their copies discreetly through the post. The Academic Tradition It Was Built On To understand what Le Nu esthétique was doing, you need some sense of what Bouguereau and Gérôme represented in 1902. Both men were titans of the French academic painting tradition, the system of art education and exhibition centred on the École des Beaux-Arts and the official Salon that had defined what serious French painting looked like for most of the 19th century. Bouguereau had produced 822 known finished paintings over a 50-year career, many of them mythological scenes featuring female nudes of extraordinary technical refinement. He had won the Prix de Rome, been elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts, and was so dominant at the Salon that Cézanne once expressed frustration at being rejected by what he called the "Salon de Monsieur Bouguereau." Gérôme was equally distinguished, known for his Orientalist paintings and his precise, almost photographic approach to detail. He had also moved from painting into sculpture and had a genuine interest in the relationship between photography and the fine arts, which made him a logical choice to write the preface to a publication explicitly trying to bring photographic technique into dialogue with the academic figure tradition. By 1902, both men were near the end of their careers and their tradition was under pressure from the Impressionists and the various avant-garde movements that would come to define the early 20th century. Bouguereau died in 1905, three years into the magazine's run. Gérôme died in 1904. The dedication of Le Nu esthétique to Bouguereau reads, in hindsight, like a farewell salute to a particular idea of what beauty was supposed to look like. What the Magazine Actually Contained Over five years, Bayard published 25 separate fascicles, each containing multiple collotype plates of nude photographs. Complete sets held in rare book collections suggest each issue ran to around four full-page plates, with most plates containing multiple photographs rather than a single image. The total number of photographs across the full run runs into the hundreds. The photographs were shot in studio conditions, with models posed against plain or lightly dressed backdrops in attitudes drawn directly from classical art. The poses referenced the Greeks and Romans, and the more recent academic tradition of Bouguereau and Gérôme. There were draped figures and undraped ones, single models and groups, men and women. Props were used: cloth, urns, natural branches. Some images employed basic photographic special effects, double exposures or soft filters, to enhance the painterly quality of the result. The photographers credited for the work were Forestier and Bayard himself. Their approach aligned closely with the Pictorialist movement that was reshaping art photography in Europe and America at the same time, the same tradition behind the work of photographers like Arthur Kales in Los Angeles. Pictorialism treated photography as a fine art rather than a documentary medium, using lighting, pose, and darkroom technique to produce images that could be exhibited and collected alongside paintings and prints. The physical object was carefully produced. Issues came in illustrated card wrappers, the first cover bearing a printed dedication to Bouguereau. The format was folio-sized, around 37 by 27 centimetres, designed to be kept and consulted rather than read and discarded. Surviving complete sets are now extremely rare and command significant prices at specialist auction. The Problem of Competitors Almost immediately after Le Nu esthétique launched, imitators appeared. This was predictable. A subscription publication containing photographs of nude bodies, however artistic its framing, was also commercially attractive to publishers with no particular interest in the academic nude tradition. The imitators were, in Bayard's view, transparently erotic rather than aesthetic, and their existence created a problem he hadn't anticipated. The nude photography market in France was already well established by 1902. As we've covered in our piece on vintage French nude photography of the 1920s, and in the earlier work documented in our article on le stéréo nu and boudoir photography in Belle Époque Paris, there was a substantial trade in nude photographs as postcards, prints, and stereoviews throughout the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Most of that material existed in a grey zone, tolerated by authorities but not quite respectable. Bayard's project was an explicit attempt to separate his work from that tradition by anchoring it to the highest prestige names in academic art. When cheaper imitators used the same format and the same subscription model but dropped any pretence of artistic intent, Bayard found himself lumped in with publications he considered beneath contempt. The moral crusaders who launched legal attacks against the nude magazine market in this period did not draw the distinction between Bayard's Bouguereau-dedicated fascicles and the more obviously titillating material his imitators were producing. Closure and Legacy Bayard shut Le Nu esthétique down in 1907, after five years and 25 issues. The reasons he gave were the insult of being compared to his inferior competitors and the harassment of the legal campaigns launched against the category as a whole. Whether the publication was also losing subscribers or simply becoming harder to defend legally isn't entirely clear from the surviving record. What's clear is that he chose to close it on his own terms rather than wait to be forced out. The magazine's legacy is genuinely significant. It established that a serious, commercially distributed, subscription-based publication could treat nude photography as a fine art subject with the backing of the most respected painters of the era. That's a different claim from the one being made by the postcard sellers and stereoview publishers who operated in the same market. It didn't win the argument in 1907, but it laid groundwork that later publications would build on. The Bibliothèque nationale de France holds complete or near-complete sets and has digitised much of the run through Gallica, making the images freely accessible for the first time to anyone with an internet connection. What you find there is exactly what Bayard claimed to be producing: carefully posed, technically accomplished photographs of nude human bodies in the tradition of western academic art, shot with genuine attention to composition and light. Looked at now, the images do what Bayard said they would. They recall the poses of Greek and Roman sculpture, the reclining figures of Renaissance painting, the mythological scenes of Bouguereau. They sit in the same lineage as the work being done slightly later by photographers like Alfred Cheney Johnston in New York and Studio Manassé in Vienna: photographers who understood that the nude figure in front of a camera was not automatically erotic, and that how it was framed, lit, and posed determined what kind of image it actually was. Bayard was making that argument in print in 1902, and the archives prove he was right. Read More on Utterly Interesting Le Stéréo Nu and the Man Who Brought Boudoir Photography to Belle Époque Paris Vintage French Nude Photography of the 1920s: Prints, Postcards and Context Alfred Cheney Johnston and His Exquisite Images of Ziegfeld Follies Showgirls Studio Manassé and Vienna's Glamorous Photography Revolution Arthur Kales and the Soft Focus World of Pictorialist Photography Sources Gallica / Bibliothèque nationale de France: Le Nu esthétique digitised archive Edition Originale: Le Nu esthétique, Bayard 1903 catalogue entry Eric Chaim Kline Bookseller: Le Nu Esthétique catalogue description PICRYL: Emile Bayard, Le Nu esthétique public domain archive The Art Story: William-Adolphe Bouguereau Gods and Foolish Grandeur: Art and the Outrageous Pose, Le Nu esthétique 1902-07

Somewhere between 1894 and the First World War, a sport briefly existed that involved two teams of eleven men throwing themselves at a leather ball six feet in diameter, weighing around 70 pounds, on a pitch the size of a football field. The sport was called pushball. It was invented by a man who hated football. It was taken seriously by Spalding, Harvard, the British military, and the Yorkshire Post. It crossed the Atlantic, toured the north of England, mutated into a version played on horseback, and briefly spawned a terrifying car-based variant in the 1920s. Then it more or less vanished. Here's the full story. The Man Who Hated Football Moses G. Crane was a Massachusetts-based inventor and electrical engineer who is primarily remembered today, if at all, for his work on the fire alarm system. A search through his patent filings from the late 19th century shows a restless, curious mind: there's an egg-beater, an ice-cream freezer, a method of making pliers, a restyled bicycle, an electro-mechanical gong, and a gun-barrel scraper. But the invention that consumed him toward the end of his life was a sport. Crane had three sons who played football at Harvard. He wasn't a fan. His particular complaint was the ball. It was too small, too brown, too easy to lose sight of on a crowded, often equally brown field. As he later explained: "If the ball were only made large, yes, large enough so that a player on one side could not see who was on the other, you would then have a chance to interest spectators in watching the whole game and in introducing much merriment, as well as skill." In 1894, having apparently failed to persuade anyone that this was a reasonable position, he decided to simply build the ball himself. He commissioned a leather-covered sphere six feet three inches in diameter, built over a wooden frame. It weighed around 70 pounds. It cost him $175, which is roughly $6,000 in today's money. His local sporting club, the Newton Athletic Association, had promised that if he built such a ball, they'd find something to do with it, and they kept their word. Moses Crane died in 1898, just as pushball was starting to attract wider attention. He never saw how far his oversized idea would travel. How the Game Actually Worked Pushball's official rulebook was published and distributed by the Spalding sports equipment company, which became the game's biggest commercial backer. According to Spalding's rules, the game was played by two teams of eleven: five forwards, two left wings, two right wings, and two goalkeepers. The pitch was 140 yards long and 50 yards wide. At each end stood an H-shaped goal: two posts eighteen feet high, planted twenty feet apart, with a crossbar seven feet from the ground. Scoring worked on a tiered system. Getting the ball under the crossbar and through the posts earned five points. Managing to heave the entire six-foot ball up and over the crossbar earned eight. There was also a two-point "touchdown" rule for safety plays behind the goal. Tactics were taken seriously enough that plays had names, "the flying wedge" being the most notable, and referees were employed to adjudicate tackles. In practice, photographs from early matches show something closer to a human avalanche. Twenty-two men running at full speed into a giant leather sphere, climbing on top of it, getting buried under it, attempting to push it collectively through a goal while the opposing team tried to redirect it in the other direction. It was, by any measure, ridiculous. It was also apparently enormous fun to watch. The Harvard Debut and the Hay-Stuffed Disaster Crane's son Edwin helped develop the rules and introduced the game to Harvard in 1895. The official debut came on 3 November 1895 during the half-time break of a Harvard versus University of Pennsylvania football match. Twenty thousand people were in the ground. Most of them had no idea what was about to happen. Edwin captained the Harvard team for the demonstration. Early matches were sometimes undermined by the basic problem of sourcing a ball. The official Spalding version was expensive and inconvenient to transport. On Thanksgiving Day 1902, a promoter named W. Carsey staged a match at Equitable Park in New York between the Metropolitans and the All Americans. Rather than purchasing an official ball, he hired a shoemaker to make a replica. The shoemaker stuffed it with hay. The ball was too large to fit through any doorframe, so it was left outside overnight. That night it rained. By morning, the fifty-pound hay ball had absorbed enough water to balloon to over five hundred pounds. The match proceeded anyway. History doesn't record the outcome, but the photograph of the remains of the hay-stuffed ball, published in Spalding's 1903 handbook, speaks for itself. The British Invasion By 1895, the British press was already reporting on pushball as a "Yankee invention," noting that "the ball itself is a great curiosity. It can be moved with very slight pressure. Indeed, a good wind will send it rolling across the field at a lively rate." But the game didn't properly arrive in Britain until 1902. EV Hanegan’s 6ft ball was made from the hides of nine horses and took two and a half hours to inflate. The man responsible was a British entrepreneur named E. V. Hanegan, who saw a spectator sport opportunity and moved decisively. Hanegan's contribution to pushball history was twofold. First, he commissioned his own version of the ball, made from the hides of nine horses. It was so large that it took two and a half hours to inflate using a specially modified pump. Second, he had a gift for promotional copy. "Pushball is a game for giants," he declared. "Such a game as the gods on Olympus might have played without great loss of dignity." The first official British match was played at Crystal Palace on 23 August 1902, watched by 4,004 spectators. British rules differed slightly from the American version, with teams of eight rather than eleven. From Crystal Palace, Hanegan took the game on a nationwide tour: Hull, Halifax, Middlesbrough, Newcastle, Sheffield, Glasgow, and Cork all hosted matches. The Yorkshire Post covered the sport with genuine enthusiasm. Thousands turned up at each stop. The moment when a team managed to lift the ball above their heads and tip it toward the opposing goal was apparently the crowd-pleaser, drawing cheers every time it happened. Hanegan's promotional material specifically targeted rugby and football clubs, suggesting they use pushball as a summer training tool to "keep their players in the pink of condition." It didn't take. But the sport found a different and more committed audience in the British military, which had the large parade grounds and organisational discipline that pushball seemed to demand. Horses, Cars, and the Perturbation of Several Cows Almost as soon as pushball was established as a sport, people started trying to play it in ways it wasn't designed for. Horseback pushball was introduced at Durland's Riding Academy in New York in 1902, the same year the British tour was happening, and quickly crossed the Atlantic. In England it was played at the Royal Tournament. The horse version had no restrictions on riding style. Players propelled the ball using their horses' knees and chests, and a skilled rider could apparently direct the animal to punt the ball the full length of the field. A newspaper account of a 1904 horseback match noted that the game was played "to the perturbation of several cows" grazing nearby. Pushball in Rollerskates (this was short lived) By the 1920s, someone had decided that horses weren't dangerous enough. Auto pushball involved two teams of three cars attempting to direct the giant ball toward the opposing goal using their bumpers and bodywork. A period advertisement promised that "in it one gets many a thrill." This was, presumably, an understatement. The sport doesn't appear to have survived long. The story of auto polo, in which men with mallets played polo from moving cars, gives a sense of how little the era worried about the safety of novelty sports. Pushball at University: Class Wars by Any Other Name The sport found its most committed home in American universities, where it filled a specific social role. At Miami University in Ohio, the early 1900s saw freshmen and sophomores conduct annual battles for class status. Through the 1880s and 1890s, these had taken the form of brutal capture-the-flag contests that led to genuine injuries, multiple hospitalisations, and eventually an outright ban around the turn of the century. Pushball arrived in 1909 as the approved replacement. The rules were loosened considerably for university play: rather than the standard eleven per side, Miami University fielded thirty students per class. The Student newspaper's account of the 1910 contest described the ball arriving from the University of Michigan, 240 miles away, at a cost of $150, and being described by the students as either "the plaything of the gods" or, more prosaically, "a ball from Michigan." At the starting pistol, sixty young men rushed the ball simultaneously. Sides were disputed before the game even started, with each class insisting the other had two extra players. After three recounts, a pistol shot launched the melee. Boys climbed on top of the ball. Boys got pinned beneath it. Both years of recorded Miami University matches, 1910 and 1911, were won by the sophomores. Both teams, including girls who came to watch, posed for photographs in front of the ball and Stoddard Hall afterwards. By 1912, however, the impracticality of borrowing a ball from a university 240 miles away had worn thin. Tug-of-war replaced pushball. When the First World War began in 1914, what remained of the sport's momentum largely dissipated. Artillerymen enjoy a game of pushball on horseback at the 1927 Leek Carnival in Staffordshire. Emory University in Atlanta kept the tradition going considerably longer, playing annual pushball matches from 1923 until 1955, when the game was finally retired on the grounds that it had become too rough. Macalester College in Minnesota has played it since 1914, traditionally involving both students and faculty. Pushball and the Blinded Soldiers One of the more unexpected chapters in pushball's history involves its use as rehabilitation. After the First World War, the sport was adopted as a training and therapy exercise for soldiers who had been blinded in combat. The logic was sound: a ball six feet in diameter is impossible to miss, and a game built around physical contact, noise, and group coordination didn't require sight to participate meaningfully. It's one of the stranger coda stories in sports history, a novelty sport that briefly became a tool of medical rehabilitation. Why It Died Pushball's fundamental problem was practical. The ball was expensive to manufacture, difficult to transport, impossible to store indoors, and catastrophically vulnerable to rain. The hay-stuffed disaster of 1902 wasn't an isolated incident. Leather balls left outside in wet weather became sodden and unplayable. A proper Spalding ball cost more than most sporting organisations could justify for a game that hadn't yet established a regular competitive structure. Spalding's own catalogue declared in the early 1900s that "there is every indication that the game will occupy a permanent place among the sports of America." It didn't. The professional leagues never materialised. The university games were fun but logistically awkward. The British military took to it, but military enthusiasm for novelty sports doesn't tend to outlast the novelty. The horseback version survived longest, eventually evolving into modern "horse soccer" and related equestrian ball sports that are still played today. But pushball itself quietly faded. It's worth noting that the Edwardian sporting landscape was genuinely crowded with strange competitive pursuits that didn't survive. The 1908 Olympics famously included duelling pistols as a competitive event, and the era produced dozens of sports that were photographed, documented, and then abandoned. Pushball just happened to be bigger than most of them. What It Left Behind Pushball doesn't have much of a physical legacy. The Spalding rulebooks survive in archive collections. The photographs from Miami University, the Library of Congress, and Headingley are in the public domain and freely viewable online. There's a short newsreel of Dutch women playing pushball from around 1927, and a 1933 clip of Loyola students in Chicago competing for a prize keg of beer via pushball. The Crystal Palace where Hanegan launched the British version burned down in 1936. Modern inflatable pushballs do exist, sold primarily as corporate team-building props and festival novelties rather than sporting equipment. They're lighter, cheaper, and much easier to inflate than Hanegan's nine-horse-hide monster. They also aren't really the same thing. The original game was built around the specific weight and resistance of a 70-pound leather ball that pushed back, that could trap you, that required genuine collective strength to move. An inflatable beach ball six feet across moves in a puff of wind, which is precisely the thing Moses Crane was trying to avoid. Crane wanted a ball you couldn't miss and couldn't easily move. He got one. The sport he built around it lasted about thirty years, gave thousands of people something chaotic and entertaining to watch, and then left almost nothing behind except some excellent photographs and the word of a Yorkshire Post reporter who thought, for a moment in 1902, that this might really be something. SOURCES 1. Public Domain Review: "Plaything of the Gods": Photographs of Pushball (early 1900s) — https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/pushball/ 2. Sport and Society Research Network: Pushball, a Game for Giants that Bewitched Britain — https://sportandsociety.com/news/pushball-a-game-for-giants 3. Atlas Obscura / Slate: The Best Sport of the Early 1900s Involved Pushing Around an Elephant-Sized Ball — https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-best-sport-of-the-early-1900s-involved-pushing-around-an-elephantsized-ball 4. Sportsavour: Pushball, the Long-Forgotten Game of Pushing-Around-the-Ball — https://www.sportsavour.com/pushball-long-forgotten-game-pushing-around-ball/ 5. 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica / Wikisource: Pushball — https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclop%C3%A6dia_Britannica/Pushball 6. BFI / Replay: Field Pushball — https://replay.bfi.org.uk/video/17af3d30-f9a5-5e8f-942a-ef95d8a8a240 7. NSLM Blog: Men, Horses, and a Big Ball — https://nslmblog.wordpress.com/2020/11/03/men-horses-and-a-big-ball/ 8. Spalding's Athletic Library: Push Ball, History and Description (1903 edition via Internet Archive) — https://archive.org/details/pushballhistoryd01newy

On the evening of 5 January 1757, a 42-year-old domestic servant from northern France pushed through the crowd at the Palace of Versailles, drew a small penknife, and stabbed King Louis XV in the side. The wound was barely a centimetre deep. The king lived. The attacker, Robert-François Damiens, made no attempt to run. He stood there and was seized immediately. What followed was one of the most extreme mismatches between crime and punishment in recorded history. Louis XV recovered within days. Damiens spent the next 83 days in prison being tortured repeatedly, then endured an execution so savage that eyewitnesses fainted, vomited, and turned away in disgust. Giacomo Casanova was in the crowd at the Place de Grève that day and later wrote in his memoirs that he found the spectacle an offence to our common humanity. Robert-François Damiens Damiens was the last person in France to be executed by drawing and quartering. His case has fascinated historians, philosophers, and the morbidly curious ever since, not least because it marked the dying gasp of a medieval punishment system that was already wildly out of step with the Enlightenment era surrounding it. Who Was Robert-François Damiens? Damiens was born on 9 January 1715 in La Thieuloye, a small village near Arras in northern France. His father was a poor gatekeeper. From childhood, he was described by those who knew him as difficult and hot-tempered, which apparently earned him the nickname Robert le Diable, Robert the Devil. He briefly enlisted in the French army, then cycled through a succession of jobs as a domestic servant, working for various well-off families and Parisian institutions. He was dismissed from several of them for stealing. One of his employers was the Jesuit college in Paris. He also worked in the households of several councillors attached to the Parlement de Paris, the kingdom's highest court. That last detail matters. The Parlement was deep in a bitter political and religious conflict with Louis XV over the relationship between the crown, the Jesuits, and the Jansenist sect. The councillors Damiens worked for were vocal critics of the king, and he apparently absorbed a great deal of their frustration. He wasn't a political agent or a conspirator. He was an unstable man who had spent years listening to powerful people say the king was ruining France, and he eventually decided to do something about it. Historians have consistently noted that Damiens was probably mentally unwell. Under interrogation, he described his goal not as killing Louis XV but as punishing him, a warning rather than an assassination. He expected, somehow, to survive this. The Attack at Versailles The evening of 5 January 1757 was dark and cold. Louis XV had been visiting the princesses at Trianon and was making his way back through the covered passageway near the Royal Courtyard, accompanied by the Dauphin, senior guards, and members of the court. A coach was waiting for him. Damiens had spent part of the afternoon lurking around the palace grounds. When the king emerged from the guardroom into the torchlit passage, Damiens pushed through the crowd of courtiers, grabbed the king by the shoulder with one hand, and struck him in the right side with the penknife. He was caught almost immediately, in part because he hadn't removed his hat in the presence of the king, which made him conspicuous. Louis reached for his side, and his hand came back bloody. The penknife had penetrated between the fourth and fifth ribs, but the thick winter clothing and, according to some accounts, the padding of the king's coat reduced the depth of the wound to just one centimetre. Louis initially thought he'd been punched or elbowed. When he realised he was bleeding, he called for a confessor because he genuinely feared he might be dying. He wasn't. The court surgeons examined him and confirmed the wound was shallow. Louis XV was back on his feet within days. The blade had barely touched him. Damiens made no attempt to escape. He was dragged away, and the hysteria began. The Politics of Panic Even though the attack was minor and Damiens clearly acted alone, the political fallout was enormous. Accusations flew in every direction. Some at court blamed the Jesuits, pointing to Damiens's time working at their college. Others suspected the Parlement itself, reasoning that its feud with the crown had created the conditions for this kind of fanaticism. Pamphlets circulated across Paris within days. The Jansenist-Jesuit dispute, which sounds arcane today, was genuinely explosive at the time. French Catholic clergy had been refusing to administer last rites to Jansenists, whom they considered heretics. The Parlement had sided with the Jansenists against the crown's support of the Jesuits. Damiens had absorbed all of this and, in his distorted reasoning, come to blame the king personally for the crisis. Despite weeks of brutal interrogation, investigators found no conspiracy. Damiens maintained he had acted alone. The government eventually accepted this, but it didn't reduce the fury around the case. If anything, a lone madman was in some ways more disturbing than a plot, because it offered nothing to dismantle. Voltaire, who had plenty to say about irrational behaviour in powerful institutions, used the case to sharpen his critiques of religious fanaticism and judicial excess. He was not alone in finding the punishment that followed grotesquely disproportionate. You can read more about four of the irrational behaviours Voltaire warned us about in a separate piece on the site. The Sentence The trial ran from 12 February to 26 March 1757. Damiens was convicted of regicide, which carried its own legal category: parricide against the person of the king. The fact that he'd failed didn't matter. Under French law, the intent and the act were enough. The sentence handed down was extraordinary even by the standards of the time. It followed the template used for François Ravaillac, who had successfully assassinated Henri IV in 1610. The prescribed punishment ran as follows. Damiens was to be taken to the Place de Grève wearing only a shirt and carrying a two-pound wax torch. On the scaffold, flesh would be torn from his breasts, arms, thighs, and calves using red-hot steel pincers. His right hand, the one that held the knife, would be burned with sulphur. Into the open wounds, the executioners were to pour a mixture of molten lead, boiling oil, burning resin, and molten wax. He would then be attached by ropes to four horses and pulled apart. Whatever remained of his body would be thrown onto a fire and his ashes scattered. His family home was to be demolished. His relatives were to be permanently banished from France. The sentence came from the Parlement of Paris, the same body whose councillors had employed Damiens. There was something almost grimly theatrical about that. The Execution On the morning of 28 March 1757, Damiens was taken from his cell. Accounts report that when told the day had arrived, he said only: "La journée sera rude." The day will be hard. At the Place de Grève, a large scaffold had been built. Estimates of the crowd vary, but it numbered in the tens of thousands. People had come from outside Paris. Spectators paid for elevated positions on rooftops and at windows overlooking the square. It was, by the standards of the day, an event. The torture began with the brodequins, iron compression devices fitted around the lower legs and tightened with wooden wedges to crush the bones and tissue. Damiens screamed and lost consciousness more than once. Then came the pincers. Specially made for the occasion, roughly a foot and a half long, the steel pincers were heated until red-hot and used to tear chunks of flesh from his chest, arms, and thighs. After each application, the executioners poured the boiling mixture of lead, oil, pitch, and sulphur directly into the wounds. Accounts from the day describe Damiens raising his head at intervals to look at what was being done to him. His right hand was burned with sulphur. The sulphur, according to one eyewitness account from an officer of the watch, burned poorly and only scorched the surface of the skin. The executioner had to try several times. Then came the quartering. Four horses were attached to Damiens by ropes bound to his arms and legs. The horses pulled. And pulled. And nothing happened. Damiens was a physically robust man, and his joints wouldn't give. After repeated attempts, a sixth horse was added. Still the dismemberment didn't proceed as intended. Eventually, the executioners resorted to cutting through the sinews with knives to allow the horses to complete the process. Even then, the horses could only separate the limbs after the muscles had been partially severed. Throughout all of this, Damiens was still alive. He reportedly cried out "Pardon, my God! Pardon, my Lord!" repeatedly. He did not curse. He did not beg the executioners to stop. He asked them to pray for him. What remained of his torso was thrown onto the fire. His ashes were scattered. The execution had taken the better part of a day. The executioner was Charles-Jean-Baptiste Sanson, part of the multi-generational family of state executioners who would later oversee the guillotine during the Revolution. His son Charles-Henri Sanson would execute Louis XVI, the grandson of the very king Damiens had failed to kill. You can read more about the life of Albert Pierrepoint, Britain's most prolific executioner, in a separate piece. The Legacy The execution of Damiens is remembered partly because it was the last of its kind in France, and partly because the philosopher Michel Foucault chose it as the opening of his landmark 1975 work Discipline and Punish, using it to illustrate the theatrical cruelty of pre-modern punishment before arguing that power over bodies was gradually replaced by power over minds. Foucault's point was not simply that the execution was horrible, but that it revealed something about how sovereignty worked in the 18th century. The king's body had been violated, however slightly, and the state's response was to demonstrate its absolute power over the body of the offender in the most explicit way imaginable. The punishment wasn't just about Damiens. It was a performance for everyone watching. Within a few decades, drawing and quartering had been abandoned across Europe. The guillotine arrived in France in 1792, selling itself on its reliability and, compared to what happened at the Place de Grève in 1757, its relative mercy. Damiens himself remains a strange, tragic figure. He wasn't a calculating assassin. He wasn't part of any plot. He was an unstable, frustrated man who did something catastrophically stupid with a small knife and paid for it with everything he had. Louis XV, for his part, recovered completely and reigned for another seventeen years. The wound was one centimetre deep. The punishment took all day. SOURCES 1. Britannica: Robert-François Damiens — https://www.britannica.com/biography/Robert-Francois-Damiens 2. Château de Versailles: Assassination Attempt on King Louis XV by Damiens, 1757 — https://en.chateauversailles.fr/discover/history/key-dates/assassination-attempt-king-louis-xv-damiens-1757 3. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity (CHNM): The Sentence against Damiens (1757) — https://revolution.chnm.org/d/242 4. Executed Today: 1757: Robert-Francois Damiens, Disciplined and Punished — https://www.executedtoday.com/2008/03/28/1757-robert-francois-damiens-discipline-and-punish/ 5. European Royal History: January 5, 1757 — Attempted Assassination of King Louis XV — https://europeanroyalhistory.wordpress.com/2023/01/05/january-5-1757-attempted-assassination-of-king-louis-xv-of-france-and-navarre/ 6. Geri Walton: Robert-François Damiens: Attempted Assassin of Louis XV — https://www.geriwalton.com/assassination-attempt-of-king-louis-xv/

In the September 1956 issue of Playboy, a young Danish woman appeared as Playmate of the Month under her real name. For almost everything else she did during her modelling career, she used a pseudonym. The split was deliberate and practical, and it tells you something about how women navigated the mid-century glamour world without permanently burning their options. Elsa Sørensen was born in Copenhagen on 25 March 1934. She won the Miss Denmark title as a teenager, which gave her a foothold in the modelling world at a time when Scandinavian beauty was having a significant cultural moment in Europe and America. The family emigrated to Vancouver, Canada, and Elsa eventually made her way to Los Angeles, where the serious work in glamour photography was being done. Dane Arden For most of her professional career, Elsa Sørensen worked under the name Dane Arden. The choice of pseudonym is almost too neat: Dane for her nationality, Arden as an anglicised surname that was easy for American editors and readers. It gave her a working identity that was separate from her Miss Denmark title and her real name, and it meant she could move between different kinds of publications without one career automatically attaching itself to the other. The men's magazine landscape of the 1950s was a particular ecosystem. Playboy was at the top of it, with genuine cultural ambitions and a readership that liked to think of itself as sophisticated. Below that were publications like Adam, the US edition of an Australian magazine, and titles like Cavalier and Rogue, which occupied similar territory with less pretension. Studio Manassé in Vienna had done something similar a generation earlier, creating a house style of glamour that crossed national borders and found markets in multiple countries. Dane Arden appeared in Adam multiple times across the late 1950s and into the 1960s, alongside her Playboy work. She later described the business with dry good humour, saying there was no nuttier business to be in than posing for cheesecake pictures. She noted that achieving a convincingly dishevelled look in a swimsuit for a beach shoot took considerably longer than getting ready for a formal occasion. This kind of matter-of-fact self-awareness was typical of the more experienced models of the era, women who understood exactly what they were selling and had worked out a practical relationship with it. Peter Gowland and the Playboy Centrefold The photographer who shot the September 1956 Playboy centrefold was Peter Gowland, one of the most significant glamour photographers working in Los Angeles at the time. Gowland was the son of two Hollywood actors and had grown up on film sets, learning lighting techniques by watching movies being made. After serving as a photographer in Germany during World War II, he built a career in glamour and pin-up work that would eventually span over 1,000 magazine covers. The New York Times named him America's number one pin-up photographer. He invented his own equipment, including the Gowlandflex twin-lens camera in the late 1950s, which was later used by photographers including Annie Leibovitz and Yousuf Karsh. Gowland and his wife Alice worked as a team, and the Sørensen centrefold was one of nine Playboy Playmates they photographed together over the course of their career. His approach was rooted in the same tradition as photographers like Peter Basch, who were bringing a European eye to American commercial glamour in this period. Gowland's work had a clean, lit quality that suited the Playboy aesthetic: controlled, professional, and technically precise without being cold. The Sørensen centrefold appeared in the same year that Gowland also shot Lynn Turner for the January issue, making 1956 a significant year in his Playboy output. Elsa appeared under her real name for this shoot, which was the exception in her career rather than the rule. Inside the Playboy Office One detail that sets Sørensen apart from many of her contemporaries is that she worked as a secretary in Hugh Hefner's Chicago Playboy offices during this period. The overlap between her modelling work and her office role gives her a different relationship to the Playboy operation than most of the women who appeared in its pages. She wasn't just a face on a centrefold; she was someone who understood the business from the inside. This was not entirely unusual in the early Playboy years, when the operation was small enough that people wore multiple hats, but it's a detail that doesn't get much attention in the standard accounts of the magazine's history. The broader story of how Playboy shaped mid-century American attitudes is covered in our piece on how Penthouse's Bob Guccione took on Playboy and changed publishing. Bunny Yeager and the Films In 1963, Sørensen appeared in Bunny Yeager's Nude Camera, a low-budget sexploitation film directed by Barry Mahon and built around the figure of photographer Bunny Yeager, who was by then famous for her work with Bettie Page. The film was a semi-documentary about the mechanics of nude modelling, shot in Miami and aimed at the adult cinema market that existed in the years before explicit pornography became widely legal. It played in adult theatres and had no pretensions beyond delivering what its audience came for, but it exists now as a document of a specific and short-lived moment in American film history. She also appeared in a second film, Intimate Diary of Artists' Models, working under her legal name Marie Perry. The two films represent a different side of her career from the Playboy centrefold, aimed at a different market and with a different kind of cultural currency. That she moved between these registers without much apparent difficulty says something about how permeable the categories were in practice, even if they looked more distinct from the outside. Marriages and Later Life Sørensen married twice. Her first husband was Guy Mitchell, the American singer born Albert Cernik, who was one of the most commercially successful pop performers of the early 1950s. Mitchell sold 44 million records over the course of his career and had six million-selling singles, including Singing the Blues and She Wears Red Feathers. At the peak of his fame in the mid-1950s he was a genuine star in the US, UK, and Australia. He and Elsa married in 1956, the same year as the Playboy centrefold, and divorced in 1965. Elsa Sørensen later in life Her second husband was Philip Mattingly, whom she outlived. After her modelling career wound down she settled into private life, eventually based in Florida. She died on 18 April 2013, aged 79, from complications following a bicycle accident in Vero Beach. It's a quietly unexpected end for someone whose image had been so carefully constructed around glamour and beauty, and it went largely unreported at the time. What She Represents Elsa Sørensen sits in a specific moment in the history of glamour photography, the period in the mid-1950s when Playboy was establishing what a mainstream nude photograph could look like, and when the network of men's magazines below it was providing work for a generation of models who understood the business pragmatically. The dual identity, Elsa Sørensen for Playboy, Dane Arden for everything else, was a sensible piece of career management in a world where the line between respectable and not was drawn differently depending on who was doing the drawing. Her work sits alongside that of contemporaries like Bettie Page and the models photographed by Irving Klaw on 14th Street, women who were building careers in a niche that was commercially significant but culturally marginal, and who navigated that with varying degrees of calculation and good humour. Sørensen's own description of the business as the nuttiest she could imagine being in suggests she was firmly in the good humour camp. Read More on Utterly Interesting Bettie Page: Between Innocence and Transgression Peter Basch: The German Émigré Who Shaped Mid-Century Hollywood Portrait Photography Irving Klaw: The Pin-Up King and Fetish Pioneer of 14th Street The Pubic Wars: How Penthouse's Bob Guccione Took on Playboy and Changed Publishing Studio Manassé and Vienna's Glamorous Photography Revolution Sources Vintage News Daily: Danish Classic Beauty, 25 Glamorous Photos of Elsa Sørensen Pulp International: Elsa Sørensen aka Dane Arden, 1960 John P. Walsh: Dane Arden (Elsa Sørensen), Vintage Danish Model Wikipedia: List of Playboy Playmates of 1956 Wikipedia: Peter Gowland Wikipedia: Guy Mitchell

She was dead at 26, mid-shoot on her final film, with Clark Gable left to finish the picture alongside a body double and reportedly saying he felt as if he were holding a ghost. Jean Harlow had been the biggest female star in Hollywood, the original platinum blonde, the woman who made pre-Code cinema feel genuinely dangerous. What happened to her, the marriages, the deaths around her, the mother who never quite let go, is a story that gets more complicated the closer you look. Jean Harlow age 4 Harlean Carpenter She was born Harlean Harlow Carpenter on 3 March 1911 in Kansas City, Missouri, the daughter of a dentist and his ambitious wife, Jean Harlow Carpenter. Her parents separated when she was young, and it was her mother, known to everyone as Mother Jean, who took her to Hollywood. Mother Jean had wanted to be an actress herself and had never quite given up on the idea. She enrolled her daughter at Ferry Hall boarding school in Illinois, where classmates later remembered Harlean as strikingly beautiful and passive, controlled by a mother who seemed to be running both their lives. One classmate put it plainly: Mother Jean had complete control over that girl. At 16, Harlean defied her mother in the one way available to her. She eloped with Charles McGrew, a wealthy young Chicago heir, in 1927. McGrew had money and, crucially, a plan to put distance between his new wife and her mother. The couple moved to Los Angeles. It didn't work. Mother Jean followed, and the marriage deteriorated alongside it. Harlean started taking acting work, initially to fill her time, registering at Central Casting under her mother's maiden name: Jean Harlow. It was her mother's name before it was hers. Edwin Bower Hesser and the 1929 Photographs In 1929, while she was still married to McGrew and still largely unknown, Harlow sat for photographer Edwin Bower Hesser in Griffith Park, Los Angeles. Hesser was known for outdoor figure studies, a style somewhere between the artistic nude tradition and the softer end of glamour photography. His work was similar in spirit to what photographers like Arthur Kales were producing in the same period, though aimed at a more commercial audience. The Harlow session produced around 70 images across various poses, some semi-nude, some more explicit, shot on a 4x5 Graflex camera in natural light. The photographs weren't widely circulated at the time, but they didn't stay buried either. McGrew cited them in the couple's divorce proceedings as evidence that his wife had posed for indecent pictures. Harlow publicly denied the photographs existed when the press picked up the divorce story in 1930, a denial she maintained even as her fame grew. A small group of the images surfaced in Playboy in the 1960s and another cache appeared in a photography publication in the late 1970s. By then Harlow was long dead and the images had become part of the mythology around her, the pre-fame nude session that her first husband used as a weapon and that she spent years pretending had never happened. They sit in the same tradition as the early figure work discussed in our piece on vintage French nude photography of the 1920s, artfully composed studies that existed in a grey zone between art and scandal depending entirely on who was looking and why. Hell's Angels and the Making of a Star The marriage to McGrew ended in divorce in 1929. Harlow moved back in with her mother and stepfather, Marino Bello, a smooth-talking Italian with rumoured gangster connections whom Mother Jean had married in 1927 and whom Harlow had never warmed to. She kept working as an extra and in small parts until late 1929, when she was spotted by an actor filming Howard Hughes' enormous aerial war picture Hell's Angels. Hughes cast her in the lead, and when Hell's Angels opened in May 1930 it was Harlow, not the planes, that everyone was talking about. Her performance was wooden in places, and critics said so, but her physical presence and the kind of electrical quality she had on screen was impossible to ignore. MGM signed her and the studio machine went to work manufacturing the platinum blonde image, the bleached hair, the silk dresses worn without underwear, the persona of the woman who didn't care what anyone thought of her. What followed was a run of pre-Code films that used her image deliberately and often brilliantly. Red-Headed Woman in 1932, in which she played a social climber who sleeps her way up and faces no real punishment for it, was the kind of film that the Production Code would make impossible within a couple of years. Red Dust with Clark Gable, Bombshell, Dinner at Eight: she was also funnier than anyone had expected, with a timing for comedy that her directors quickly learned to use. She was 21 and one of the highest-paid actors in Hollywood. Paul Bern The second marriage is where Harlow's private life becomes genuinely dark. In July 1932, at the height of her fame, she married Paul Bern, a 42-year-old MGM producer who had championed her career and whom she described as the person she wanted to sit at the feet of and learn from. The age gap was significant, the dynamic was strange, and people who knew Bern quietly raised eyebrows. He was respected professionally but had no known romantic history with women, was said to be interested in morbid psychology, and was known to carry a handgun. Jean Harlow and Paul Bern in 1932 On the night of 5 September 1932, less than two months into the marriage, Bern was found dead of a gunshot wound at their home in Beverly Hills. Harlow had been spending the night at her mother's house. The official finding was suicide, and MGM's Louis B. Mayer was among the first people on the scene, arriving well before the police, in what was later described as an effort to manage the impact on Harlow's career. The suicide note was ambiguous and its authenticity has been disputed. The alternative theory, advanced by MGM story editor Samuel Marx in his 1990 book Deadly Illusions, is that Bern was murdered by Dorothy Millette, a woman with whom he had a long earlier relationship and who may have considered herself his common-law wife. Millette jumped from a Sacramento river ferry two days after Bern's death. The studio, in this version of events, had the scene staged to look like suicide to protect its biggest star from scandal. Marx claimed that the MGM fixer present on the night admitted as much before his own death. The truth was almost certainly obscured from the night it happened and has never been fully recovered. Harold Rosson and William Powell Harlow married a third time in 1933, to MGM cameraman Harold Rosson. They divorced eight months later. She gave no detailed public explanation. The marriage is generally described by those who wrote about her as a mistake made too quickly after the trauma of Bern's death. Harold Rosson The relationship that seems to have mattered most to her in these years was with actor William Powell, who became her partner from around 1934. Powell was older, steady, and by most accounts genuinely devoted to her. She wanted to marry him. He wouldn't. His reasons for refusing were never clearly stated and he maintained a studied silence on the subject throughout his long life. He was at her bedside when she died. Mother Jean Running through all of this is the figure of Mother Jean, born Jean Harlow Carpenter, whose relationship with her daughter was never quite separable from her own frustrated ambitions. She had wanted to be an actress. She had moved to Hollywood and when Jean became famous, she and Bello lived in a house that Harlow's money paid for. Jean Harlow dining with her step-father, Marino Bello and her mother, Jean Poe Harlow Bello. The control Mother Jean exercised over her daughter was noted by almost everyone who knew them. Classmates at boarding school had remarked on it when Harlean was a teenager. People in Hollywood remarked on it when she was a star. Harlow gave her mother and stepfather money regularly, and there is evidence she was paying Bello off to keep him at arm's length. Mother Jean called her daughter Baby throughout her life and made decisions for her that Harlow rarely challenged. In the final weeks of Harlow's life, this control became the source of a controversy that has never been fully settled. Mother Jean was a Christian Scientist, and there are accounts suggesting she delayed or resisted proper medical treatment for her daughter, preferring prayer and self-treatment. The picture that emerges from the most thorough biography, David Stenn's Bombshell, is more complicated. Stenn found that doctors were in fact present, that Mother Jean did eventually bring in a physician who correctly diagnosed the kidney failure, and that by the time the severity of Harlow's condition was understood, there was nothing that could have saved her anyway. In 1937, before dialysis, acute kidney failure was essentially untreatable. Jean Harlow & William Powell, Coconut Grove, 1936 The Death Harlow had been ill in childhood in ways that would prove to have long consequences. She contracted meningitis at five and scarlet fever at fifteen. That scarlet fever infection, untreated or undertreated at the time, had damaged her kidneys. The damage was silent and progressive, and nobody around her seems to have known how serious it was. In the spring of 1937 she was filming Saratoga with Clark Gable for MGM. She she started complaining of fatigue, nausea, fluid retention, and abdominal pain. The studio doctor wasn't particularly alarmed and put it down to cholecystitis and influenza, unaware that she'd already been ill the previous year with a serious sunburn and another bout of flu. Her co-star Una Merkel noticed that Harlow had put on weight, looked grey, and was visibly exhausted on set. By 29 May things were clearly worse. During a scene in which her character had a fever, Harlow was obviously sicker than the role required. Between takes she leaned against Gable and told him she felt terrible and needed to get back to her dressing room. She asked the assistant director to call William Powell, who left his own set immediately and took her home. This photo with director Jack Conway and Clark Gable on the set of Saratoga, taken days before Harlow's collapse, and issued at the time her death was announced. The following day Powell found her no better. He contacted Mother Jean, insisted she cut short her holiday, and called a doctor. Because Harlow's previous illnesses had already delayed three productions, nobody initially treated this as a crisis. On 2 June the studio announced she had influenza again. The doctor called to her home, Ernest Fishbaugh, diagnosed an inflamed gallbladder. Mother Jean told MGM on 3 June that her daughter was improving and that everyone expected her back on set by Monday the 7th. Press reports ran contradictory headlines in the same papers. When Harlow didn't return, a worried Gable visited her at home. He later said she was severely bloated and that when he kissed her he could smell urine on her breath, both of them classic signs of kidney failure. A second doctor, Leland Chapman, was brought in for another opinion. He saw immediately that the gallbladder diagnosis was wrong. Harlow was in the final stages of kidney failure. On 6 June she told Powell she couldn't see him clearly and couldn't tell how many fingers he was holding up. That evening she was taken to Good Samaritan Hospital in Los Angeles and slipped into a coma. She died at 11:37am on 7 June 1937, aged 26. The official cause given to the press was cerebral oedema, a complication of kidney failure. Her hospital records list uremia. She was buried at Forest Lawn Glendale, her crypt marked with the words "Our Baby." MGM's Louis B. Mayer organised the funeral. Saratoga was released six weeks after her death. MGM completed it using body doubles and, for some scenes, stand-ins who dubbed her voice. The studio had considered recasting entirely, but public sentiment was too strong. It became the highest-grossing film of 1937 and the highest-grossing film of her career. Clark Gable said he felt as though he were working with a ghost. The photographs Hesser took in Griffith Park in 1929, the ones her first husband tried to use against her and she denied to her death, are now part of how she's remembered. She sits alongside other figures, Marilyn Monroe, Bettie Page, Anita Berber, as women whose image and body became public property while their actual lives stayed largely hidden. She didn't get to be old enough to shape her own legacy. She left that to her mother, her studio, and the film that finished shooting after she was gone. Read More on Utterly Interesting Marilyn Monroe: The Last Sitting with Bert Stern Bettie Page: Between Innocence and Transgression Anita Berber: The Queen of the Weimar Republic Ecstasy (1933): The Film That Changed What Cinema Could Show Peter Basch: The German Émigré Who Shaped Mid-Century Hollywood Portrait Photography Sources History.com: Jean Harlow Dies, June 7 1937 Encyclopedia.com: Harlow, Jean (1911-1937) Encyclopedia of the Great Plains: Jean Harlow Classic Blondes: Mother Jean and the Death of Jean Harlow Stenn, David. Bombshell: The Life and Death of Jean Harlow. Doubleday, 1993.

In 1952, a British court gave Alan Turing a choice: prison or chemical castration. He chose the hormones. Two years later he was dead, a half-eaten apple on the bedside table. He was 41. This is a man who had helped crack the Enigma code, built the theoretical foundations of modern computing, and contributed to shortening World War II by what historians estimate was two years or more. The state that benefited from all of that then prosecuted him for having a consensual relationship with another man, stripped him of his security clearance, subjected him to hormone injections that caused his body to develop breasts, and watched him deteriorate until he died. The story of Alan Turing is one of the most extraordinary and appalling in British history, and it still isn't told often enough without the film-friendly softening that tends to smooth away the genuine horror of what happened to him. Alan Turing at Sherborne School, 1926. A Mind That Didn't Fit Alan Mathison Turing was born in London on 23 June 1912. His parents were frequently in India on colonial service, so he and his brother were largely raised by English boarding schools. At Sherborne in Dorset, he was the kind of student headmasters didn't know what to do with: completely uninterested in the Latin and Greek that the school valued, and privately brilliant at the mathematics and science that it barely acknowledged. His headmaster wrote that if Turing intended to be a scientist, he was wasting everyone's time at a public school. Turing ignored him and kept going. At Sherborne he became close to a fellow student named Christopher Morcom, widely regarded as his first love. Morcom was sharp, kind, and shared Turing's passion for mathematics and astronomy. When Morcom died suddenly in February 1930 from complications of bovine tuberculosis, Turing was devastated. He threw himself deeper into the work they'd shared, and by his own account spent years working as though Morcom were still watching. The loss shaped him in ways that ran through the rest of his life, including his later fascination with questions of consciousness, mind, and whether thought could survive the body that produced it. In a letter to Frances Isobel Morcom, Christopher’s mother, Turing expressed his feelings candidly: "I am sure I could not have found anywhere another companion so brilliant and yet so charming and unconceited. I regarded my interest in my work, and in such things as astronomy (to which he introduced me) as something to be shared with him and I think he felt a little the same about me ... I know I must put as much energy if not as much interest into my work as if he were alive, because that is what he would like me to do." Christopher Morcom Turing maintained a warm and respectful correspondence with Mrs Morcom long after Christopher’s passing. She would send him gifts, and he would write to her, particularly to mark Morcom’s birthday. On the eve of the third anniversary of Morcom’s death, Turing wrote tenderly to her: "I expect you will be thinking of Chris when this reaches you. I shall too, and this letter is just to tell you that I shall be thinking of Chris and of you tomorrow. I am sure that he is as happy now as he was when he was here. Your affectionate Alan." Turing, front, in 1939 in Bosham, England, with a friend, Fred Clayton, rear. Between them are two Jewish fugitives from Germany whom Turing and Clayton helped. By 1931 he was at King's College Cambridge, tearing through mathematics at a pace that made his peers take notice. He was made a fellow in 1935. The following year he published a paper called On Computable Numbers, which described a hypothetical machine that could solve any problem expressible in logical steps. It was abstract, theoretical, and completely foundational. That machine is now called a Turing machine. It's the conceptual ancestor of every computer that has ever existed. Bletchley and the Bombe When war came in 1939, Turing went straight to Bletchley Park, the Victorian mansion in Buckinghamshire that served as Britain's codebreaking headquarters. The problem they were trying to crack was Enigma, a German encryption machine that scrambled messages through a system of rotors, plugboards, and wiring into something approaching 159 quintillion possible settings per message. The Germans changed the settings daily. They were confident it was unbreakable. Turing's contribution was the Bombe, an electromechanical device that drastically reduced the number of possible Enigma settings that needed to be tested, making daily decryption achievable. He built on earlier work by Polish mathematicians who had analysed captured Enigma machines before the war, and developed it into something that could actually be scaled and run operationally. The front of the BOMBE By mid-1940, German Luftwaffe signals were being read at Bletchley. Turing then turned to naval Enigma, which was more complex and which he later described as something he took on partly because nobody else was doing anything about it. The impact on the war was immediate and significant. With Enigma signals being read in near-real time, the Royal Navy could track U-boat wolfpacks and reroute convoys before they sailed into ambush. It kept Britain supplied with American arms, food, and fuel at a period when the Atlantic was genuinely close to being lost. Later, Ultra intelligence fed into the planning for D-Day, giving commanders reliable information about German troop movements and fortifications that would have otherwise cost thousands of additional lives to discover the hard way. Bletchley Park The scale of the contribution is still debated, but the Imperial War Museum estimates that Bletchley's codebreakers shortened the war by several years. Some historians put the figure at two to four. What that translates to in lives is genuinely difficult to calculate, but the numbers cited run into the millions. The Enigma Machine The operation only worked because of the people running it. Bletchley was a strange place, part country manor, part makeshift village, with huts hastily built on the lawns as the workforce expanded. It attracted an unusual cast: chess champions, classicists, crossword enthusiasts recruited from the pages of The Times, and mathematicians who were better with problems than with small talk. Dilly Knox, an eccentric classics scholar, had been cracking codes since World War I and was known for working in his bath. Joan Clarke was one of the very few senior female cryptanalysts, handling some of the trickiest elements of the Enigma problem. Hugh Alexander, a chess champion, led Hut 8 after Turing and kept the momentum going as the war went on. Hundreds of young women from the Women's Royal Naval Service, the Wrens, kept the Bombes running through night shifts, feeding punched tapes into the machines and taking down decrypted messages. The atmosphere was a peculiar mix of academic eccentricity and high-stakes urgency, with tea breaks, cryptic Christmas cards, and occasional dances at the main house sitting alongside work that could decide the outcome of battles. Turing himself contributed a few personal touches to the environment. He hated people borrowing his mug, so he drilled a hole in the handle and chained it to a radiator pipe in Hut 8. He suffered badly from hay fever on his daily cycle commute and solved the problem by wearing a World War I gas mask while pedalling. These are small details, but they capture something true about the man: practical, slightly outside normal social conventions, and entirely focused on whatever problem was in front of him. The working rebuilt bombe now at The National Museum of Computing on Bletchley Park. Each of the rotating drums simulates the action of an Enigma rotor. When Turing and his colleagues found themselves blocked by Whitehall bureaucracy over resources, they went straight to the top. In October 1941 they wrote directly to Winston Churchill, asking him to intervene. Churchill's response was characteristically direct. He wrote to his Chief of Staff: "ACTION THIS DAY: Make sure they have all they want on extreme priority and report to me that this has been done." Bletchley got what it needed. Inside Bletchley Park: Eccentricity, Genius and Wartime Secrets For anyone expecting a regimented military camp, Bletchley Park was a surprise. It was a curious blend of country manor and makeshift village, with its big main house and a sprawl of draughty huts and brick blocks hastily built on the lawns as the operation grew. Each hut had its own atmosphere, some buzzing like beehives, others quiet except for the scratching of pencils and the rattle of typewriters. Inside, the codebreakers, known as “the Boffins”, and hundreds of support staff worked in shifts around the clock, seven days a week. People called it the “Golf Club” or the “Country House” to keep up appearances when asked by nosy friends what they were doing for the war effort. In truth, Bletchley was one of the most secretive and intense workplaces in Britain. Tea, Cigarettes and Ciphers It was not exactly glamorous. The huts were freezing in winter, stifling in summer and often smelled of stale tobacco and damp coats. Yet the atmosphere was electric with ideas. Young women from the Women’s Royal Naval Service, the Wrens, operated the Bombes, fed punched paper tapes into clattering machines, and took down streams of decrypted messages for senior officers to analyse. In break rooms, people fuelled themselves on endless mugs of tea, jam sandwiches, chocolate and cigarettes. Social lives were strange and spontaneous. If you fancied a dance, you might find a piano in the main house or join a staff dance in the dining hall. Romance did blossom among the huts, though everyone knew loose talk could sink ships, or, more likely, ruin months of delicate work. A Cast of Brilliant Characters While Alan Turing remains the poster boy for Bletchley Park today, he was surrounded by a cast of remarkable minds: Dilly Knox — An older, slightly eccentric classics scholar turned codebreaker who had actually begun tackling German codes in World War I. Knox was known for working in his bath and scribbling insights on envelopes. He inspired many of the younger cryptanalysts. Gordon Welchman — Another Cambridge mathematician and a close collaborator with Turing. Welchman made key improvements to the design of the Bombe and oversaw Hut 6, where German Army and Air Force codes were cracked. Joan Clarke — One of the very few senior female cryptanalysts, and Turing’s close friend (and brief fiancée). Brilliant at pure mathematics, she handled some of the trickiest pieces of the Enigma puzzle. Hugh Alexander — A champion chess player who brought a knack for pattern spotting and strategy to the work of codebreaking. He led Hut 8 after Turing, keeping the momentum going as the war rumbled on. Then there were the so-called “Debs of Bletchley”, bright young debutantes who had been roped in for their linguistic skills or quick minds. Many of them never dreamed they’d be trusted with secrets that could decide battles and save thousands of lives. Small Wonders: The Quirks and Daily Life of Bletchley Park While Bletchley Park was serious work, it was also a place full of odd habits, eccentric genius and the occasional outright silliness, necessary antidotes to the mental strain of fighting a secret war armed with pencils and machinery. Cycling with a Gas Mask Another Turing quirk was his daily cycle commute. He pedalled from his lodgings to Bletchley, cutting a solitary figure on country lanes. He suffered terribly from hay fever but refused to let it slow him down, so he wore a World War I gas mask while cycling, turning heads and no doubt giving the local milkmen something to talk about. Cryptic Christmas Cards Every Christmas, the Bletchley Park staff looked forward to special cards: cryptic puzzles and riddles slipped into festive envelopes by the senior cryptanalysts. Solving them became an unofficial contest that spread from hut to hut. It was a gentle reminder that, in this world, cracking codes wasn’t just deadly serious, it was a sport and a passion. The Piano in the Mansion At the heart of the old main house, there stood a well-used piano. After a long shift hunched over the Bombes or poring over ciphertexts, people would gather around it. Some nights it was cheerful singalongs; other times, after news of a torpedoed convoy, it was sombre tunes to soothe frayed nerves. A Bit of Cross-Dressing Bletchley Park was surprisingly tolerant of eccentricities that might have raised eyebrows elsewhere. It was whispered that one staff member sometimes showed up to night shifts in women’s clothing, and no one particularly minded. Results mattered more than appearance. Spies on the Inside Security was strict, but leaks still happened. German spies did manage to get scraps of information about Bletchley’s activities, though ironically, the Nazis were so convinced Enigma was unbreakable that they often ignored their own agents’ warnings. The Wrens’ Tales The young women of the Women’s Royal Naval Service (the Wrens) did a huge share of the shift work, keeping the Bombes running through the small hours. Many later described it as an odd mix of boredom and adrenaline: long stretches listening to the machines hum and click, broken by sudden moments when a decrypted message came through, a real glimpse into the enemy’s mind. A Legacy in Oddities and Triumph When Alan Turing chained his mug to a radiator, wore a gas mask on his bike or puzzled through the night while munching an apple, no one realised history was being rewritten in these small, peculiar scenes. Today, visitors to Bletchley Park can still see reconstructed huts, old Bombes whirring in demonstration, and even Turing’s mug, a reminder that sometimes, world-changing ideas start with a few brilliant misfits, endless tea, and a willingness to think differently. Secrets Carried for Decades One of the strangest aspects of Bletchley Park is how invisible it remained after the war. Most staff simply packed up, signed the Official Secrets Act and went back to ordinary jobs, teachers, librarians, civil servants. Some didn’t even tell their families for fifty years that they’d helped win the Battle of the Atlantic or lay the groundwork for D-Day. Alan Turing, of course, never got to tell his full story. His breakthroughs in computing and artificial intelligence were overshadowed by how Britain betrayed him. It wasn’t until the 1970s that historians began to piece together just how crucial the codebreakers had been, and how much we all owe to that little cluster of huts hidden in the Buckinghamshire countryside. A Secret War, A Private Life Even as Alan Turing was helping crack the ciphers that sped up Hitler’s downfall, he was fighting a more personal battle that Britain was nowhere near ready to win. By the conservative standards of mid-twentieth-century Britain, being gay was a crime, not just frowned upon but actually illegal under Victorian-era laws that hadn’t evolved with the times. Turing knew exactly what he risked by being open about his true self. To the outside world, he was a mild-mannered, slightly oddball bachelor whose mind was always off somewhere in the clouds of mathematics and machinery. Behind closed doors, though, he was a man longing for the same simple companionship that his heterosexual peers could enjoy without fear. One of the more touching chapters in this hidden side of Turing’s life is the story of Joan Clarke. Joan wasn’t just a talented cryptanalyst at Bletchley Park, she was Turing’s intellectual equal in many ways, a rare female mathematician at a time when women were largely funnelled into clerical roles. Joan Clarke The pair grew close, sharing jokes, chess puzzles and long hours bent over cipher sheets. In 1941, in an attempt to conform to the social expectations he could never truly inhabit, Turing proposed marriage to Joan. She accepted, perhaps out of affection and perhaps because, in that cloistered world of secrecy, companionship was precious. But honesty got the better of him. Turing gently told her about his sexuality and broke off the engagement before they could walk down the aisle. Remarkably, Joan didn’t turn away from him, she remained his loyal friend for the rest of his life, a rare ally when others looked the other way. After the war, when the secrets of Bletchley Park were packed away and everyone went back to “normal life”, Turing turned his restless mind to a new frontier, building machines that could mimic thought itself. At the University of Manchester, he helped construct the Mark I and Mark II computers, primitive by our standards but astonishing for their day. He took things further in 1950 when he published Computing Machinery and Intelligence in the journal Mind. There, in a few brisk pages, he posed a question that still fuels debates about artificial intelligence today: if a machine can answer our questions in a way that’s indistinguishable from a human, can we say it “thinks”? This elegant thought experiment became known as the Turing Test, an idea so ahead of its time that it still shapes how we talk about chatbots and algorithms today. Criminalised and Broken But Britain in the 1950s had little patience for a man who defied its moral code, no matter how many lives he had saved. In 1952, a small domestic drama upended his world. A young man named Arnold Murray, with whom Turing had formed a romantic relationship, let slip the name of a petty thief who had burgled Turing’s house. When police arrived to investigate, their interest veered quickly from the burglary to Turing’s private life. It didn’t take much for the authorities to bring charges of “gross indecency”, the same archaic law that had destroyed Oscar Wilde half a century earlier. Turing could have tried to lie or mount a legal fight, but he refused. In the same blunt honesty that had cost him his engagement to Joan Clarke, he admitted the truth in court. The consequences were cruel. Rather than jail, the court ordered Turing to undergo chemical castration, a grim experiment in forced “treatment” for homosexuality. He was given oestrogen injections that sapped his libido, altered his body chemistry and, humiliatingly, caused gynaecomastia, the development of breast tissue. It was a catastrophic blow to his well-being. Turing, once an avid long-distance runner who had competed against Olympic-level athletes, found his strength fading and his body changing in ways he neither wanted nor understood. The British government also stripped him of his security clearance. The man who had once been trusted with the country’s most sensitive secrets was now deemed unfit to serve, all because of who he loved. By June 1954, his isolation was near complete. He kept himself busy with experiments in his home lab in Wilmslow, playing with chemicals and electronics, distractions from the ruin of a career and the public shame. On 7 June, he was found dead in his bed. A coroner declared it suicide by cyanide poisoning, pointing to a half-eaten apple on his bedside table. Legend has it he dipped the apple in cyanide to mask the taste, a quiet nod, some say, to his favourite fairy tale: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Yet, as with so much in Turing’s life, even this ending is clouded by ambiguity. His mother, Ethel, and several friends believed it was accidental, he often handled cyanide carelessly in his home lab and had been in good spirits, with a to-do list waiting on his desk. Some have gone further, spinning conspiracies that the government silenced him to protect Cold War secrets. Whatever the truth, one fact remains: Alan Turing, the brilliant, eccentric mind who reshaped our technological age and helped win the Second World War, died condemned by the very country he had so loyally served. His quiet private battles only came to light years later, a tragic lesson in how genius and difference were too easily betrayed by prejudice. A Long Overdue Apology — and a Legacy That Refuses to Fade For decades after his death, Alan Turing’s name was known only to a select few in academia and the intelligence community. His wartime contributions remained buried under the Official Secrets Act until the 1970s, when historians finally began to piece together how decisive his codebreaking work had been in defeating the Nazi U-boat menace and clearing the way for D-Day. By the time the general public learned what Bletchley Park had achieved, and what Turing had sacrificed, it was too late to apologise to the man himself. But a slow, collective sense of shame grew in Britain as people came to understand the cruelty he had suffered simply for loving who he loved. It wasn’t until 2009, fifty-five years after Turing’s lonely death, that a formal apology finally came. Gordon Brown, then Prime Minister, issued a statement: “Alan and the many thousands of other gay men who were convicted, as he was, under homophobic laws were treated terribly. On behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan’s work, I am very proud to say: we’re sorry — you deserved so much better.” Four years later, in 2013, Queen Elizabeth II granted Turing a posthumous royal pardon, symbolically erasing the “crime” for which he had been punished. Campaigners didn’t stop there. They fought to ensure that other men who had suffered under the same law were also acknowledged. The result was what’s now known as “Turing’s Law,” which came into effect in 2017 and retroactively pardoned thousands of men convicted of consensual same-sex relationships before homosexuality was decriminalised in 1967. The pardon is complicated. Some have pointed out, reasonably, that a pardon implies wrongdoing being forgiven, when what actually happened was that Turing was convicted under a law that should never have existed. Andrew Hodges himself said the pardon didn't embody any sound legal principle, and that a more meaningful action would have been releasing the still-classified files on Turing's postwar work for GCHQ. A Name Etched Into Our Digital Age Today, Alan Turing’s story is no longer hidden in dusty files. Bletchley Park has become a museum and memorial to all the quiet heroes of that secret war, visitors can see the reconstructed Bombe machines, step inside the same draughty huts, and sense how close the world came to a very different outcome. Turing himself has been celebrated in statues, stamps, biographies and film. The Imitation Game (2014), starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley, dramatised his life for millions who might never have heard his name otherwise. While the film took some liberties, it cemented Turing in the public imagination as a tragic genius who deserved far more kindness in his own time. In the scientific world, his legacy is even stronger. Computer science students the world over learn about Turing machines and the Turing Test. His name adorns the most prestigious prize in computing, the A.M. Turing Award — the tech world’s equivalent of a Nobel Prize. His ideas about artificial intelligence continue to shape debates about how far machines can — or should — mimic the human mind. For the LGBTQ+ community, Turing’s story stands as a reminder of how brilliance and courage can be crushed by bigotry, but also how public attitudes can change, however slowly. His life is a cautionary tale and a point of pride: a way to honour those who paid the price for being themselves long before it was safe to do so. More Than a Codebreaker In the end, Alan Turing was so much more than the codebreaker who outwitted Enigma. He was a visionary who glimpsed a future where machines could reason, learn and even converse with us, and a man who, despite being let down by the country he helped to save, remained defiantly true to himself. He left behind no children, no memoirs, no grand speeches, just pages of dense, elegant mathematics and stories of a quiet oddball who chained his mug to a radiator, cycled with a gas mask and, with a handful of colleagues in a cold hut, cracked the code that changed the course of history. Today, every algorithm, every conversation about artificial intelligence, every modern computer, every encrypted communication traces a line back to work that Turing either did or made possible. The iPhone in your pocket is, at some level of abstraction, a descendant of the machine he described in a 1936 paper. He didn't live to see any of it. Sources Imperial War Museum: How Alan Turing Cracked the Enigma Code PBS NewsHour: 8 Things You Didn't Know About Alan Turing National WWII Museum: Alan Turing and the Hidden Heroes of Bletchley Park BBC: Alan Turing, The Codebreaker Who Saved Millions of Lives PBS: Turing's Law Will Pardon Thousands of Men Convicted Under UK Gay Laws Turing Archive, King's College Cambridge: On Computable Numbers

Juan Romero, 67, at his home in Modesto, Calif., holding a photo of himself and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, taken by The Los Angeles Times' Boris Yaro on June 5, 1968. (Jud Esty-Kendall/StoryCorps) It happened just after midnight on June 5, 1968. Robert F. Kennedy had just won the California Democratic primary at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, and he'd decided to take a shortcut through the kitchen to avoid the crowds. A 17-year-old Mexican-American busboy named Juan Romero was waiting there, hoping for another handshake. He'd already met Kennedy the day before when he delivered room service, and that brief encounter had changed something in him. Kennedy made him feel seen. Made him feel like more than just a busboy. Romero pushed through the crowd. Kennedy reached out. For a moment, they were connected by a two-handed grip. Then everything fell apart. The Handshake That Changed Everything Romero had arrived in the United States as a 10-year-old, a Mexican immigrant who'd grown up seeing photographs of John F. Kennedy hanging in Mexican homes. When Robert Kennedy announced his presidential campaign, Romero became convinced he was looking at the future. He was working at the Ambassador after school when he heard that the senator would be staying at the hotel. It felt like fate. The night before the primary, Romero delivered room service. Kennedy was there, and he greeted the teenager with genuine warmth. "I remember staring at him with my mouth open, and I see him shaking the hand of a waiter and then reaching out to me," Romero recalled years later. "He had piercing blue eyes, and he looked right at you. You knew he was looking at you and not through you." Kennedy gave him a two-handed shake. Romero walked out feeling transformed. "I remember walking out of that room feeling 10 feet tall, feeling like an American. I didn't feel like I was Mexican, and I didn't feel like I was a busboy, and I didn't feel like I was 17 years old. I felt like I was right there with him." Less than 24 hours later, Romero was in the kitchen again, this time on the night of Kennedy's greatest triumph. Word had spread that the senator would walk through to reach his car. Romero positioned himself, eager for another moment. Kennedy arrived with his entourage, moving through the crowd, shaking hands. "I remember extending my hand as far as I could, and then I remember him shaking my hand," Romero said. "And as he let go, somebody shot him." Ambassador Hotel Pantry/Kitchen (LAPD photo) The Moment Everything Stopped The photographs that followed are among the most haunting images of the 1960s. A mortally wounded senator lying on a cold kitchen floor. A teenage busboy kneeling beside him, cradling his head. The terror and confusion frozen on the boy's face. The camera caught what Romero experienced in those first chaotic seconds that would become iconic portraits of 1960s upheaval, not unlike the assassinations that would follow just months later. Romero knelt down to Kennedy. He could see Kennedy's lips moving. "I put my ear next to his lips and I heard him say, 'Is everybody OK?' I said, 'Yes, everybody's OK,' " Romero remembered. Kennedy then turned to someone else and said, "Everything's going to be OK." These would be nearly the last coherent words Kennedy would speak. He died the following day. Romero had a rosary in his shirt pocket. In that moment, with Kennedy bleeding on the cold concrete, he took it out and placed it in Kennedy's hand. "I could feel a steady stream of blood coming through my fingers," Romero said. "I remember I had a rosary in my shirt pocket and I took it out, thinking that he would need it a lot more than me. I wrapped it around his right hand and then they wheeled him away." The Weight of Fifty Years The iconic photograph spread across newspapers and into the collective memory. Juan Romero became famous for thirty seconds. Visitors came to the hotel asking for the boy in the picture. Photographers wanted recreations. For decades, Romero carried a crushing guilt. He quit his job at the hotel and left Los Angeles, eventually resettling in Wyoming in self-imposed isolation. He lived with a torment that wouldn't fade: what if Kennedy hadn't stopped to shake his hand? What if that thirty seconds hadn't happened? Would the bullets have come anyway? Would Kennedy be alive? The guilt consumed him. "After the thing was over, people started to say I was a celebrity and then I started to think, celebrity for what? Why a celebrity? Is it because a person is dying and you try to help them? Is it because a person was shot and you were there?" he said in an interview years later. He struggled with depression and trauma. He fled. He tried to outrun a memory that had become permanently tattooed on his hands, literally marked by Kennedy's blood. Eventually, Romero left Wyoming and resettled in San Jose, California, where he worked in construction and raised a family. But the past never fully released him. He dreaded June. On the bus to school the day after the shooting, a woman sitting in front of him was reading the newspaper. She recognized the photograph and showed it to him. "I remember looking at my hands and there was," he said, the memory still difficult to articulate decades later. He rode that bus home in shock, staring at his own blood-stained hands in newsprint. Finding Peace For nearly five decades, Romero lived in the shadow of that night. But something shifted in his later years, partly due to the love and support of Kennedy fans who reached out to tell him that he embodied the very values Kennedy had fought for. These were people who recognized that a 17-year-old busboy, acting on instinct and compassion, was exactly the kind of person RFK had dedicated his life to helping. Romero came to understand that his presence there, his humanity in the face of horror, was not something to feel guilty about. It was something that reflected the man Kennedy truly was. A friendship with a German woman named Claudia Zwiener helped Romero heal spiritually and emotionally. He began speaking publicly again, granting rare interviews to NPR, StoryCorps, and the Netflix documentary 'Bobby Kennedy for President.' Slowly, he began to let the guilt go. He visited Kennedy's grave, and though tears still came, the shame began to lift. In 2015, he told the Associated Press something he hadn't been able to say for fifty years: "I still have the fire burning inside of me." It wasn't the fire of guilt anymore. It was the fire that Kennedy had lit in him that first night, the feeling of being truly seen, of being part of something larger than himself. Juan Romero died in October 2018 at age 68, from a heart attack. But his story lived on. It's a story about trauma and recovery, about the impossible weight we sometimes place on ourselves for things beyond our control. It's about a teenager who did everything right and still spent fifty years wondering if it was enough. And it's about finally, after all that time, understanding that it was. Sources 1. Los Angeles Times, "Juan Romero, the busboy who held Robert F. Kennedy moments after he was fatally shot" (2018) 2. NPR, "The Busboy Who Cradled A Dying RFK Recalls Those Final Moments" (2018) 3. StoryCorps Interview with Juan Romero 4. CNN, "Juan Romero, busboy who aided wounded RFK in '68, dies" (2018) 5. The Daily Beast, "The Busboy Who Held RFK as He Died" (2024) 6. San Antonio Express-News, "Long-ago busboy talks about night he helped dying RFK" (2018) 7. Chicago Sun-Times, "50 Years of Guilt, Pain for Teen Who Held Dying RFK" (2018) 8. Irish Central, "Juan Romero, the busboy who cradled dying RFK speaks" (2019) 9. CBS News, "Teen immigrant who cradled fatally wounded Robert F. Kennedy dies in California" (2018)

On 4 June 2008, Travis Alexander was killed inside his home in Mesa, Arizona. He was stabbed nearly 30 times, had his throat cut so deeply he was almost decapitated, and was shot once in the head. His body wasn't discovered for five days, found by friends who'd grown worried when he failed to show up for a planned trip to Cancun. The woman who killed him had been in his shower taking photographs of him less than two hours before he died. The Jodi Arias case didn't just become a true crime story. It became a national obsession. A five-month trial. Eighteen days of testimony from the defendant alone. Court TV coverage that had people queuing through the night to get a seat in the gallery. Love, religion, jealousy, and a camera pulled from a washing machine. It had everything. Who Was Travis Alexander? Travis Victor Alexander was born on 28 July 1977 and grew up in a difficult household in Riverside, California. His parents were drug addicts, and after his mother died and his father went to prison, he and his siblings were raised by their maternal grandmother. He converted to the Mormon faith as a teenager, and by all accounts the church became central to his identity and ambition. By his late twenties, Alexander had built a reasonably successful life as a motivational speaker and legal insurance salesman working with PrePaid Legal Services. He was sociable, well-liked, and known for projecting an image of faith-driven self-improvement. Friends described him as charismatic and driven. He was also, by his own admission in private messages, caught between his religious values and a complicated private life. The couple in happier times Who Was Jodi Arias? Jodi Ann Arias was born on 9 July 1980 in Salinas, California. She dropped out of high school, got her GED, and spent her early twenties moving around the West Coast working waitress jobs and pursuing an interest in photography. People who knew her described her as intelligent and creative, but also intense in relationships. Her own parents, when later speaking to investigators, said they believed she had mental health problems and might be bipolar. In September 2006, Arias met Alexander at a PrePaid Legal conference in Las Vegas. The attraction was immediate and the relationship moved fast. Arias converted to the Mormon church shortly after meeting him and, within months, relocated from California to Mesa, Arizona to be closer to him. That move tells you a lot about where her head was at. They broke up in June 2007, after around nine months of dating. But the contact didn't stop. They continued to see each other sexually, and Alexander began to pull away while Arias found it impossible to let go. Friends of Alexander later recalled her showing up to his house unannounced, letting herself into the garage because she knew the door code, and on at least one occasion crawling through the dog door to get inside. Alexander told friends he thought she was stalking him. He apparently told one friend she was "not wife material" while still sleeping with her. By spring 2008, Alexander was trying to move on. He'd been seeing other women and had invited a woman named Mimi Hall to join him on the Cancun trip he'd originally planned to take with Arias. On 4 June 2008, Jodi Arias drove from California to Mesa. She has never fully explained why. The Crime Scene and What the Camera Showed Alexander's housemates found his body on 9 June 2008. He was in the shower, in an advanced state of decomposition given the summer heat. The scene was described by investigators as one of extreme, prolonged violence. Twenty-seven to twenty-nine stab wounds. A gunshot to the forehead. A throat wound so severe it nearly separated his head from his body. The medical examiner's report indicated the stab wounds to the back were consistent with a person being hunched over and trying to get away. Travis Alexander in one of the final photos recovered from his camera. There was no sign of forced entry. Whoever did this, Alexander let them in. Investigators found a digital camera in the washing machine. Someone had tried to destroy it, but forensic technicians recovered time-stamped photographs from the memory card. Those images showed Alexander alive in the shower, then images taken accidentally during the attack, then images of his body. The timestamps placed Arias at the scene on the afternoon of 4 June 2008, directly contradicting her initial statement to police that she hadn't seen him in months. A bloody palm print on the wall of the bathroom matched Arias. A strand of hair near the body contained both her DNA and Alexander's blood. Arias was arrested on 15 July 2008 at her grandparents' home in Yreka, California. Autopsy photos here. Three Different Versions of Events What made the Arias case particularly gripping was the way her account of events kept changing. When first interviewed by police, she denied being in Arizona at all. She claimed intruders wearing masks had broken in and killed Alexander while she watched, then let her go. Police didn't buy it. When confronted with the forensic evidence, her story changed. She admitted she had been there but claimed two masked intruders had committed the murder. That version also fell apart. By the time the case reached trial in January 2013, Arias had settled on a third account: self-defence. She claimed Alexander had been physically and sexually abusive throughout their relationship, and that on 4 June he had attacked her after she dropped his camera. She said she grabbed a gun from his closet in response and that the rest of the violence unfolded from there, though she claimed to have no memory of the stabbing itself. She described a kind of dissociative episode, saying her memory simply went blank. Travis Alexander's wounds. Prosecutor Juan Martinez was having none of it. His argument was straightforward: this was premeditated murder, planned and carried out by a jealous woman who couldn't accept that Alexander had moved on. The evidence of planning, he argued, included the fact that Arias had borrowed petrol cans before the trip to avoid stopping at Arizona service stations, rented a car in a city away from her home, and turned her mobile phone off while in the state. The Trial That Gripped America The trial began in January 2013 and ran for five months. It was televised live and became something of a cultural event, particularly on HLN, which devoted hours of daily coverage and post-trial analysis to it. People debated the case on social media as though they were personally invested in the outcome. Some believed Arias. Many didn't. Prosecutor Juan Martinez became a recognisable figure in his own right, known for his aggressive, combative style. The defence, led by Kirk Nurmi, focused on Arias's mental health and the alleged abuse. Expert witnesses testified that she had been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder and PTSD, and that these conditions explained both the relationship dynamics and the violence itself. Arias herself took the stand and didn't step down for eighteen days, which remains one of the longest defendant testimonies in American murder trial history. Jodi Arias’ 2008 mugshot She described her sex life with Alexander in explicit detail. She discussed the religious hypocrisy she claimed underpinned their relationship. She talked about his alleged anger and controlling behaviour. She was also, the prosecution argued, a liar who had demonstrated she would say whatever was necessary to survive. The jury convicted her of first-degree murder on 8 May 2013. During the penalty phase, they couldn't agree on the death sentence, which resulted in a mistrial. A second sentencing jury in 2015 also deadlocked. Arizona law at the time required a unanimous jury decision for a death sentence, and Arias escaped execution twice on procedural grounds. Arias hears the guilty verdict in court. She was later sentenced to life in prison. Life Without Parole On 13 April 2015, Judge Sherry Stephens sentenced Arias to life in prison without the possibility of parole. In her remarks, the judge cited the cruelty of the killing. Arias made a statement expressing sorrow but maintained she had acted in self-defence. She's currently held at Perryville Prison in Goodyear, Arizona. Her appeals have argued prosecutorial misconduct, ineffective counsel, and media bias. Arizona's appellate courts have so far upheld her conviction. She will not be released. Why This Case Still Gets Talked About The Arias case touched something that a lot of true crime coverage doesn't quite reach. It wasn't a stranger murder or a serial killer. It was two people who knew each other, were physically attracted to each other, and whose relationship turned into something corrosive and ultimately fatal. The court heard recordings of phone calls between them that were graphic, tender, and then horrible. The camera in the washing machine gave the crime a visual dimension that was almost impossible to look away from. Jodi Arias in her 2015 prison mugshot It also raised genuine legal questions. High-profile cases tried in the media have a long history in America, but the Arias trial, with its round-the-clock television coverage, pushed that dynamic into new territory. Legal commentators questioned whether any jury could realistically remain uninfluenced by the volume of public opinion surrounding the case. The prosecution's version of events, that an obsessive and jealous ex-girlfriend carried out a premeditated killing, was ultimately what the jury accepted. The defence's argument, that a vulnerable woman killed in self-defence and dissociated from the trauma, did not persuade them. Whether you find the verdict straightforward or complicated probably says something about which details you decided to believe. Travis Alexander was 30 years old. He'd planned to go on holiday the following week. He'd let someone he knew into his house, and he never left it. Sources 1. Arizona v. Jodi Ann Arias, Maricopa County Superior Court (2013) 2. ABC News, "Jodi Arias Trial: A Timeline of Events" (2013) - https://abcnews.go.com/US/jodi-arias-trial-timeline-events-arizona-murder-case/story?id=18123295 3. A&E True Crime, "The Murder of Travis Alexander" - https://www.aetv.com/articles/the-murder-of-travis-alexander-and-what-killer-jodi-ariass-life-is-like-behind-bars 4. Martinez, Juan. Conviction: The Untold Story of Putting Jodi Arias Behind Bars. William Morrow, 2016. 5. Fox News, "Key facts and questions about the Jodi Arias murder case" - https://www.foxnews.com/us/key-facts-and-questions-about-the-jodi-arias-murder-case.amp 6. ABC News, "Friends say they warned Travis Alexander that Jodi Arias was dangerous" - https://abcnews.com/US/friends-warned-travis-alexander-jodi-arias-dangerous-months/story?id=68731237 7. The Arizona Republic / AZCentral, News Archives (2008-2020) - https://www.azcentral.com This article is part of our True Crime archive, exploring murder cases, criminal investigations and the trials that followed.