On this day in 2007, in one of the deadliest shootings in U.S. history, 32 students and teachers die after being gunned down on the campus of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University by Seung Hui Cho, a student at the school who later dies from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The violence began around 7:15 […]
On June 13, 2006, jurors began deliberations in the trial of Susan Polk, 48, for the October 2002 murder of her psychotherapist husband Felix Polk, 70, in a poolside cottage at the couple’s Orinda, California, home. Felix was stabbed and cut 27 times and had suffered blunt force trauma to the head. Susan and Felix […]
On this day in 2005, more than two weeks after American teen Natalee Holloway vanished while on a high school graduation trip to the Caribbean island of Aruba, police there search the home of 17-year-old Joran Van der Sloot, one of the last known people to see the young woman alive. Although Van der Sloot […]
W. Mark Felt’s family ends 30 years of speculation, identifying Felt, the former FBI assistant director, as “Deep Throat,” the secret source who helped unravel the Watergate scandal. The Felt family’s admission, made in an article in Vanity Fair magazine, took legendary reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who had promised to keep their source’s […]
May 27, 2005, was the third day that Carl Edward Roland, 41, wanted by police in connection with the murder of his ex-girlfriend Jennifer Gonzalez, spent perched on a crane 18 stories above Atlanta’s Buckhead neighborhood. Police in Pinellas County, Florida, discovered the badly beaten body of Gonzalez, 36, in a retention pond on May […]
On this day in 2005, a U.S. Marine general drops murder charges against 2nd Lt. Ilario Pantano, a Wall Street trader and former Marine who had rejoined the service after the attacks of September 11. Pantano had been accused of the premeditated murder of two suspected Iraqi insurgents, a crime punishable by death. In April […]
On this day in 2005, ex-teacher and convicted pedophile Mary Kay Letourneau, 43, marries her former victim and the father of two of her children, Vili Fualaau, 22. Just nine months earlier, Letourneau had been released from prison after serving a seven-and-a-half year sentence for raping Fualaau. Letourneau first met Fualaau when she was a […]
Eric Rudolph agrees to plead guilty to a series of bombings, including the fatal bombing at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, in order to avoid the death penalty. He later cited his anti-abortion and anti-homosexual views as motivation for the bombings. Eric Robert Rudolph was born September 19, 1966, in Merritt Island, Florida. He served […]
On this day in 2005, billionaire mogul Martha Stewart is released from a federal prison near Alderson, West Virginia, after serving five months for lying about her sale of ImClone stock in 2001. After her televised exit from the facility, Stewart flew on a chartered jet from nearby Greenbrier International Airport to New York, where […]
On January 25, 2005, a Wichita, Kansas, television station receives a postcard from the BTK killer that leads police to discover a Post Toasties cereal box that had been altered to contain the letters BTK. This communication was one in a long line sent by the serial killer who terrorized Wichita for over 30 years, […]