A slow, lingering death in 1732 made its mark not only in Virginia criminal history, but presidential history as well. The first documented murder in the Orange County, Virginia region was of the grandfather of a U.S. president. But it may not have...
What have been the coldest cases ever solved? A craveonline article by K. Thor Jensen, “The Longest Cold Cases in History that were Eventually Solved” lists several. At the top of the list stands the 1957 murder of Maria Ridulph in Sycamore...
People love crime stories. They also love their dogs. Why not combine the two? That is exactly what German dog trainer and author Eva Pretscher has done with her new book on canine crime walks. Krimiwanderungen mit Hunden (Kynos Verlag, 2017) will...
A national mystery The Virginia Historical Society inherited a national mystery in 1981. That’s when it obtained the deButts-Ely family papers. The collection contains Robert E. Lee correspondence, and among it, a surprising letter...
Two theories on the popularity of the name “Fido” Fido. Do you actually know a dog with that name? It’s so cliché no one names their dog Fido anymore. Fido has instead become a generic name for dogs: “Bring Fido on vacation.” “Is...
It was dark. The clocks on Manchester’s towers were ticking towards midnight on August 1, 1876 when one of the most sensational crimes of Victorian England occurred. A gibbous moon was setting in the west, but you probably wouldn’t have seen it. The...
It’s perhaps fitting that one of the most controversial hearsay exceptions was first used in one of the most controversial trials of United States history. The muskets the British soldiers fired in the Boston Massacre found their marks in American...
He put up a fine luncheon for us and added to it a quantity of great light-green plums, the pleasantest fruit in Germany…. Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad Greengages Anna Pavord, writing for the British newspaper Independent, calls them “most...
God! how delicious the memory of it!—I caught him escaping from his grave, and thrust him back into it. – Mark Twain, “A Dying Man’s Confession,” in Life on the Mississippi Murder and revenge. These two themes form the warp and weft in “A...
A man who murdered his lover on his wedding day. A serial killer who lured girls into his house with the promise to show them their future husbands in a magic looking glass. The first intentional use of a dog to search for a cadaver. Lady Lucie Duff...
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