Crime & Mystery — The Day Vault

Three men in 1950s overcoats and hats kneel with their backs to the camera in a dim hangar, fitting a torn piece of aluminium aircraft skin onto a wooden frame.

November 1, 2026

Forty-four people died. He was tried for killing one.

On November 1, 1955, United Air Lines Flight 629 left Denver's Stapleton Airport bound for Portland. Eleven minutes later it blew apart over farmland near Longmont, Colorado. All...

Three children in homemade Halloween costumes walk away down a dim 1970s suburban street at dusk, carrying pillowcases of candy past glowing porch lights.

October 31, 2026

Every parent feared a stranger on Halloween night

On October 31, 1974, eight-year-old Timothy O'Bryan died hours after trick-or-treating in Deer Park, Texas, a suburb of Houston. Before bed he had eaten from a giant Pixy Stix...

Victorian passengers, seen from behind, help each other out of a smoke-filled railway carriage with shattered windows inside a dark brick tunnel.

October 30, 2026

Two bangs in the tunnels, and a city full of suspects

On the evening of 30 October 1883, two bombs went off on London's underground railways within minutes of each other. One exploded in the tunnel near Praed Street station on the...

Three men in 1960s overcoats, seen from behind, as one is steered into the back of a black car on a damp Paris street.

October 29, 2026

The policemen were real. That was the problem.

On October 29, 1965, Mehdi Ben Barka arrived on Boulevard Saint-Germain in Paris for a lunch meeting at the Brasserie Lipp. The exiled Moroccan opposition leader had come to...

Seen from behind, a man and woman in 1920s clothes crush grapes in a metal washtub in a stone basement, with stoneware crocks lined up against the wall.

October 28, 2026

Congress outlawed beer. It left the grapes alone.

On October 28, 1919, the U.S. Senate overrode President Woodrow Wilson's veto and passed the National Prohibition Act. Named for Minnesota congressman Andrew Volstead, it gave the...

Seen from behind, a crowd of men in bowler hats and women in long bustled dresses climbs the granite steps of a columned courthouse on an overcast morning in 1870s New York.

October 27, 2026

A million dollars bail, and he walked out anyway

On October 27, 1871, officers in New York arrested William M. Tweed, the Tammany Hall boss who had treated the city treasury like a private account. Bail was set at $1 million, a...

Two frontier townspeople, a woman in a long dress and a man in an apron, press against a weathered doorframe and peer toward a dusty lot hazy with gunsmoke.

October 26, 2026

Thirty seconds in Tombstone, then a murder charge

On the afternoon of October 26, 1881, about thirty shots were fired in Tombstone, Arizona Territory, in roughly thirty seconds. When the smoke cleared, Tom McLaury, Frank McLaury...

An empty barber chair in a 1950s barbershop, a white towel draped over its arm, a barber in a white jacket standing beside it with his back turned.

October 25, 2026

He came in for a shave. The gunmen came in behind him.

On the morning of October 25, 1957, Albert Anastasia settled into a chair in the barbershop of the Park Sheraton Hotel in Manhattan for a haircut and...

Men in overcoats and fedoras crowd up the stone steps of a courthouse on an overcast morning, seen from behind.

October 24, 2026

Chicago's deadliest man was undone by his tax returns

On October 24, 1931, a federal judge in Chicago sentenced Al Capone to eleven years in prison. He was also fined $50,000 and ordered to pay court costs.

A waiter in a white apron, seen from behind, sweeps broken glass beside an overturned chair in a dim 1930s restaurant back room, with abandoned plates on a table.

October 23, 2026

They shot him to protect the prosecutor

On October 23, 1935, gunmen walked into the Palace Chop House in Newark, New Jersey, and opened fire on Dutch Schultz, the beer and numbers boss of the Bronx. Three of his men...

A woman in an apron, seen from behind, sets a plate of food on a wooden table in a dim 1930s farmhouse kitchen beside an iron stove.

October 22, 2026

He asked a farm wife for a meal

On October 22, 1934, FBI agents and local police shot Charles Arthur Floyd in a farm field near East Liverpool, Ohio. The newspapers called him Pretty Boy. The Bureau had called...

A man in a 1970s windcheater stands on wet rocks at dusk with his back to the viewer, shading his eyes as he searches an empty grey sea and sky.

October 21, 2026

He described what was above him. Then the radio filled with noise.

On October 21, 1978, a 20-year-old pilot named Frederick Valentich took off from Moorabbin airport, near Melbourne, in a small Cessna. He was heading across Bass Strait to King...

Seen from behind, a man in a cowboy hat crouches on a gravel creek bank, filming the forest across the water with an old hand-held movie camera.

October 20, 2026

A minute of film, and nobody knows how fast it ran

On October 20, 1967, two men riding along Bluff Creek in Northern California came back with about a minute of 16mm colour film. Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin said a tall, dark,...

Seen from behind at night, a man in a dark overcoat with handcuffed wrists tumbles onto the gravel edge of a country road while a boxy old car's tail-lights speed away into the mist.

October 19, 2026

They stopped the priest's car. The driver jumped.

On October 19, 1984, three officers of Poland's secret police flagged down a car on a dark road near Toruń. They wore traffic-police uniforms. In the car sat Jerzy Popiełuszko, a...

At night under harsh floodlights, passengers in 1970s clothes slide down an airliner's emergency chute onto a dark runway, one helping another up.

October 18, 2026

The rescue worked. By morning, the prisoners it was meant to free were dead.

Shortly after midnight on 18 October 1977, West German commandos stormed a hijacked Lufthansa jet on the runway at Mogadishu, Somalia. Three of the four hijackers died. The...

Twelve men in dark 1930s suits sit in a wooden jury box in a dim courtroom, some leaning forward intently as pale light falls through tall windows.

October 17, 2026

They couldn't prove the murders. They proved the taxes.

On October 17, 1931, a federal jury in Chicago found Al Capone guilty. It was not for bootlegging or for murder. It was for failing to pay his income tax.

In a dim Victorian room lit by a gas lamp, a man in a dark wool coat lifts the lid of a small plain cardboard box. His face is turned away from the viewer.

October 16, 2026

The one letter that didn't sign itself Jack

On the evening of October 16, 1888, George Lusk received a small cardboard box in the post. Lusk was a builder in London's East End and chairman of the Whitechapel Vigilance...

A military police guard in a white helmet, seen from behind, peers through a small lit hatch in a heavy steel cell door in a dim prison corridor.

October 15, 2026

Watched every minute. Gone anyway.

On the night of October 15, 1946, Hermann Göring, the most senior Nazi convicted at Nuremberg, bit down on a cyanide capsule in his prison cell. He was due to hang within hours.

Four people in Victorian overcoats and long skirts walk in a loose circle on an autumn lawn behind a brick house, their backs to the viewer, under a grey sky.

October 14, 2026

He filmed his family for two seconds, then vanished from a train

On October 14, 1888, Louis Le Prince stood in a garden in Roundhay, Leeds, and pointed a single-lens camera of his own design at four people on the lawn. They walked in loose...

Two men in 1970s raincoats, seen from behind, stand at a closed motel room door in a dim corridor, one lifting his hand to knock.

October 13, 2026

The FBI found her in a motel. A jury let her go.

On October 13, 1970, FBI agents arrested Angela Davis at a motel in midtown Manhattan. She had spent two months as one of the most hunted people in America, only the third woman...

Hotel guests in dressing gowns stand huddled on a dark seafront promenade with their backs to the viewer, looking up at a large Victorian hotel with a gaping hole torn through its upper floors.

October 12, 2026

He used a false name. He still filled in the card.

At 2:54 a.m. on October 12, 1984, a bomb exploded inside the Grand Hotel in Brighton, where Britain's governing Conservative Party was staying for its annual conference. A chimney...

Seen from behind, a woman in a shawl stands in a log cabin doorway at night, holding up a lantern toward dark trees.

October 11, 2026

Two shots in the night, one witness. Her story kept changing.

On October 11, 1809, Meriwether Lewis died at Grinder's Stand, a log inn on the Natchez Trace in Tennessee. He was 35, three years back from the Pacific, and governor of Upper...

At dusk, a man and a teenage boy, seen from behind, toss a football on a suburban front lawn scattered with autumn leaves while a boxy late-1960s sedan sits at the curb.

October 10, 2026

He was tossing a football on his lawn. Then a car stopped.

On October 10, 1970, Pierre Laporte, Quebec's minister of labour, was playing football with his nephew on the front lawn of his home in Saint-Lambert, across the river from...

Black-and-white scene of a 1930s crowd in overcoats and hats, seen from behind, pushing toward a line of mounted police whose horses rear in the confusion.

October 9, 2026

The film showed one gunman. It did not tell the whole story

On 9 October 1934, King Alexander I of Yugoslavia stepped off a warship in Marseille to begin a state visit meant to strengthen his alliance with France. Within minutes of leaving...

Seen from behind, three Korean palace guards in dark uniforms and wide-brimmed hats run across a misty stone courtyard toward a tiled-roof hall lit by one lantern in the pre-dawn dark.

October 8, 2026

Two foreigners saw it. The court saw nothing.

Before dawn on October 8, 1895, Japanese soldiers and hired swordsmen forced their way into Gyeongbok Palace in Seoul. They were looking for one woman: Queen Min, wife of King...

In a dark 1840s tavern lit by one oil lamp, two men with their backs turned lift a limp man in an oversized coat from a wooden bench. His face is hidden in shadow.

October 7, 2026

He wrote the first detective story. His own death is still open.

On October 7, 1849, Edgar Allan Poe died in a Baltimore hospital. He was 40. Four days earlier he had been found at a tavern on Lombard Street, barely conscious and unable to say...

Two men in 1860s coats and hats, seen from behind, push a heavy iron safe toward the open door of a moving train car at night, lit by a swinging lantern.

October 6, 2026

The safe was too heavy. So they threw it off the train.

On October 6, 1866, a few miles outside Seymour, Indiana, masked men boarded an Ohio & Mississippi Railroad train as it pulled away into the dark. They walked through to the Adams...

In an 1890s hardware store, a shopkeeper in an apron hands rifles over a wooden counter to townsmen in hats, seen from behind, as daylight comes through the open door.

October 5, 2026

The vault was open. The cashier said it wasn't.

On October 5, 1892, five members of the Dalton Gang rode into Coffeyville, Kansas, planning to rob two banks at the same time. Nobody in the West had pulled that off. The Daltons...

Seen from behind, a man in a work jacket loads plain canvas sacks into the back of a white van in a dimly lit loading bay at night.

October 4, 2026

The robbery went perfectly. The spending gave it away.

On October 4, 1997, David Ghantt, a vault supervisor at the Loomis Fargo depot in Charlotte, North Carolina, loaded a company van with cash and drove off. The take was $17.3...

In a dim, lamplit tavern, a man in a crumpled, badly fitting coat slumps on a wooden bench while another man in shirtsleeves crouches beside him and steadies his shoulder. Neither face is visible.

October 3, 2026

He was wearing someone else's clothes

On October 3, 1849, a compositor at the Baltimore Sun named Joseph Walker found a man slumped and barely conscious at Ryan's tavern on East Lombard Street. It was Edgar Allan Poe....

Seen from behind, a woman carrying grocery bags hurries low and sideways across a parking lot between parked cars at dusk, under orange lights.

October 2, 2026

Everyone watched for a white van. The car was blue.

On October 2, 2002, at about 5:20 in the evening, a bullet came through the window of a craft store in Aspen Hill, Maryland. Nobody was hit. Less than an hour later, a man was...

Seen from behind, interpreters in headphones lean toward microphones inside a glass booth overlooking a wood-panelled 1940s courtroom.

October 1, 2026

Twelve sentenced to hang. One never reached the rope.

On October 1, 1946, the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg handed down its sentences. Twelve men were condemned to death, one of them, Martin Bormann, in absentia. Seven...

A Victorian police constable, seen from behind, crouches in a dark brick doorway at night and holds a lantern over a scrap of cloth on the step.

September 30, 2026

Two murders in an hour. One clue wiped by dawn.

On 30 September 1888, two women were killed in London's East End less than an hour apart. Elizabeth Stride was found in Dutfield's Yard, off Berner Street, around 1 a.m. Catherine...

At dawn, a ship steward's hands reach for a folded dark overcoat and hat on a wooden deck below a steamer's stern railing, with a calm grey sea behind.

September 29, 2026

He asked to be woken early. The cabin was empty.

On the evening of September 29, 1913, Rudolf Diesel boarded the steamer Dresden at Antwerp for the overnight crossing to Harwich. The inventor of the engine that bears his name...

Seen from behind, a row of men in straw boater hats and dark suits lean on the rail of a wooden ballpark grandstand, watching a blurred green field in late afternoon light.

September 28, 2026

The jury said not guilty. Baseball didn't ask.

On September 28, 1920, a Cook County grand jury in Chicago indicted eight members of the Chicago White Sox for conspiring to throw the 1919 World Series. The heavily favoured Sox...

At night, travellers in 1840s coats and top hats walk up a wooden gangplank onto a paddle steamer, their backs to the viewer, lit by lanterns in the river mist.

September 27, 2026

Nobody knows where Poe went for nearly a week

On September 27, 1849, Edgar Allan Poe left Richmond, Virginia, on a steamboat bound for Baltimore. He was forty, newly engaged, and planning to travel north to bring his aunt...

A blindfolded man in a 1930s shirt and suspenders sits on a wooden chair in a dusty farmyard, his head tilted toward the sky as though listening for something overhead.

September 26, 2026

He couldn't see the farm. He could hear the plane.

Before dawn on September 26, 1933, federal agents and Memphis police entered a house in Memphis and arrested George "Machine Gun" Kelly, one of the most wanted men in America. He...

An unmarked 1980s delivery lorry waits at a high steel prison gate under razor wire. A man seen from behind leans toward the driver's window on a grey, overcast afternoon.

September 25, 2026

The most secure jail in Europe ran on a timetable

On September 25, 1983, thirty-eight IRA prisoners broke out of HM Prison Maze, near Lisburn in Northern Ireland. It remains the largest prison escape in British history.