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...
The 1944 Warsaw uprising was the single largest military effort undertaken by resistance forces to oppose German occupation during World War II. Soldiers from the Kiliński Battalion of the Polish Home Army take a German prisoner during the period In the end, German troops destroyed the majority of Warsaw during and immediately after the uprising. Among the demolished buildings was the Royal Castle. On August 1, 1944, the Polish Home Army (Armia Krajowa, AK), a non-Communist underground resistance movement, initiated the Warsaw uprising to liberate the city from the German occupation and reclaim Polish independence. The impetus for the military action was the ongoing retreat of the German forces from Poland, followed by the appearance of the Soviet Red Army View This Term in the Glossary along the east bank of the Vistula River. By October 2, 1944, the Germans had suppressed the uprising, deporting civilians to concentration and forced-labor camps and reducing Warsaw to ruins. Pla...
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 ...
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