Her photo is one of thousands snapped by Alphonse Bertillon, a police clerk in Paris who revolutionized detective work. Not only was Bertillon the first to photograph a crime scene, but he also streamlined the use of mugshots. By 1884, his groundbreaking new criminal codification method helped catch 241 repeat offenders in Paris. At first glance, the faded 1903 photograph of Mme Debeinche’s bedroom, bound in the yellowed pages of an early 20th-century album, shows what looks to be an unremarkable middle-class Parisian apartment of the time. The overstuffed room brims with floral decoration, from the wallpaper and heavy swag curtains to the carpeting, chair upholstery—even the chamber pot. A large reproduction of Alexandre Cabanel’s voluptuous 1863 painting, “Birth of Venus,” hangs on the wall. A sizeable unmade bed with a hefty carved-wood frame dominates the scene. But on closer look, there is something unnerving about the tableau. The Venus is crooked. A spindle chair lies on its si...
Jeffrey Konen was 18 years old when he disappeared from the Houston Heights area on Sept. 25, 1970. He had been hitchhiking from the University of Texas to his parent’s home in Houston. Three years later, his naked body was found buried at High Island Beach under a large boulder. His hands and feet were bound, and he was wrapped in plastic and covered in a layer of lime. He died of asphyxiation after a cloth was placed in his mouth, and he was manually strangled. Konen was the first known victim of the infamous Candy Man serial killer. This Candy Man didn’t have a hook for a hand and a swarm of bees at his disposal like in Bernard Rose’s 1992 horror classic with the same name. Instead, the real-life killer, named Dean Arnold Corll, was much more terrifying. Corll was given the nickname for being known as the “pleasant, smiling candy man of the Heights,” who would give candy to children who stopped by his family’s factory, the Corll Candy Co., according to Texas Monthly. From December ...
This image is titled "The last Jew in Vinnitsa", the text that was written on the back of the photograph, which was found in a photo album belonging to a German soldier The Vinnytsia massacre was a mass execution of (mostly ethnic Ukrainian) people in the Ukrainian town of Vinnytsia by the Soviet secret police NKVD during Joseph Stalin’s Great Purge in 1937–1938. Mass graves in Vinnytsia were discovered during the German occupation of Ukraine in 1943. The investigation of the site first conducted by the international Katyn Commission coincided with the discovery of a similar mass murder site of Polish prisoners of war in Katyn. Because the Germans utilized this evidence of Communist terror to discredit the Soviet Union internationally, it became one of the better researched sites of the politically motivated NKVD massacres among many in Ukraine. Much as in the case of other massacres of people considered enemies of the people by the communist regime of Russia, the victims bu...
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