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...
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...
In February 1775, a Danish woman killed her four month old baby. When Authorities found her, she told them she would happily die for her crime. But why? Because at the time, a murder was more forgivable than suicide A woman slit the throat of her own baby. The crimes were part of a wave of suicide-murders in the 17th and 18th centuries - a wave that swept through much of Europe but was especially common in Denmark. Insane though it may sound, people used to commit murder just so they could get executed. They even researched what crimes incurred the death penalty to guarantee they would die. During that time in history, suicide was not only a crime - it also meant your soul would be condemned to Hell for eternity. Unlike people who committed public suicide, suicide-murderers were terrified of killing themselves - and so they committed capital crimes punishable by death. Unlike the suspicious suicides in history, these murderers were upfront about their crime and their motivation. One m...
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