Mysteries and Histories

On Easter Sunday in 1955, Ruth Ellis waited outside a Hampstead pub for her lover, racing driver David Blakely, then shot him dead in the street as he walked toward his car. She confessed almost immediately, but the story behind that final act was tangled with years of domestic abuse, coercion, infidelity, violence, and a legal system that gave the 28-year-old nightclub manag...

In 1971, an off-duty constable walking near an abandoned flint mill beside the River Trent in Burton upon Trent found what he first thought was a piece of cement, until he saw it was part of a human skull. Beneath the earth lay the skeletal remains of a young man, naked, bound hand and foot, and buried in a shallow grave in a kneeling position, with only pink socks and a wedd...

At Nottingham’s Goose Fair in 1766, cheese became a symbol of something much bigger: hunger, profiteering, and a town pushed too far. After failed harvests sent food prices soaring, locals watched Lincolnshire merchants buy up huge quantities of cheese, already selling at nearly double its usual price, to carry away and resell elsewhere.

What began as an argument spiral...

On a freezing January night in 2010, 55‑year‑old JoAnn Matouk Romain attended an evening prayer service at her church on Lake Shore Drive in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, then seemed to vanish between the pews and the water. Her Lexus was found abandoned in the church parking lot with her purse, wallet, and cash still inside, footprints in the snow led toward Lake St. Clair, and p...

In the isolated highlands of Papua New Guinea, a strange and horrifying disease spread through entire villages, leaving women and children trembling, stumbling, and erupting into sudden fits of laughter before wasting away to death. For years, no one knew what was killing them, and the answer turned out to be far more disturbing than anyone expected: a fatal prion disease tie...