Mysteries and Histories

Between 1976 and 1986, three young Native American women were murdered, mutilated, and dismembered in Oklahoma City. Their deaths were linked by the apparent care taken to conceal, and degrade their bodies, leading investigators to believe a single unidentified offender was responsible: the Oklahoma City Butcher.

The victims were 18-year-old Cathy Lyn Shakelford, found ...

In 1968, a man searching for a well site in rural Kentucky found the body of a young woman wrapped in canvas. She had been strangled and left without identification; for three decades, the grave marker simply read “Tent Girl.”

Then amateur researcher Todd Matthews, whose future father-in-law had found her body, became determined to learn her name. In 1997, he created on...

In 1985, a hunter found a 55-gallon barrel in the woods near Bear Brook State Park in New Hampshire. Inside were the bodies of a woman and a little girl. Fifteen years later, police found a second barrel nearby containing two more children. For decades, none of the four victims had names.

DNA eventually exposed the man investigators believe was responsible: Terry Peder ...

In March 1997, deputies entered a rented mansion in Rancho Santa Fe, California, and found 39 members of Heaven’s Gate dead by suicide. They were dressed alike in black clothing and Nike trainers, lying in neatly prepared beds, one of the most unsettling mass deaths in modern U.S. history.

The group, led by Marshall Applewhite, believed human bodies were temporary “cont...

In 1974, 28-year-old Karen Silkwood worked at Kerr-McGee’s plutonium fuel plant in Oklahoma. A union activist, she raised alarms about safety failures, radioactive contamination, and alleged falsification of quality-control records, then testified to the Atomic Energy Commission about the risks facing workers.

On November 13, she was driving to meet a New York Times...