In the early 1990s, punk band The Gits were on their way up. Nirvana had recently moved the capital of rock music to Seattle, The Gits’ adopted hometown, and major record labels were scouting the city for the next big thing.

The Gits, fronted by 27-year-old singer Mia Zapata, had moved to Seattle from Ohio in 1989. Over the next four years, they lived and recorded at “the Rathouse,” an abandoned house in the low-rent, high-crime Capitol Hill neighborhood. …

As presidents go, Gerald R. Ford might not be very memorable. If he’s remembered at all, it’s usually for pardoning Richard Nixon.

But Ford was unique in a few ways. For one, he’s the only president who was never elected, not even as a vice president. In late 1973, Nixon’s vice president, Spiro Agnew, pled no contest on tax evasion charges and resigned his office. So Nixon, using the 25th Amendment, named Ford — a popular Michigan representative and minority leader in the House — as his new vice president. After an FBI background check and confirmation by the House…

Sept. 11, 1982, Rome, Georgia: Youth Development Center worker Ken Dooley receives a late-night hang-up call. Within a few minutes, gunshots rip through his home. Fortunately, he isn’t injured. He calls the Rome police, but without any witnesses or evidence — other than the bullet casings — the case doesn’t look likely to be solved.

The next day, another Youth Development Center worker, Linda Adair, receives a similar call, and within minutes, her home is also attacked — this time, with a Molotov cocktail. Again, luck is with the victim, and no one is harmed.

This time, there was a…

Nov. 2, 1980: A man and a young boy are walking on a dirt road near Bass Lake in central California when they notice something odd just ahead of them. As they approach, they can tell that it’s a man, dressed in a formal suit, lying face-down on the side of the road. They immediately call the police.

Police find the man’s wallet in his back pocket and use it to identify him as Craig Miller, a 22-year-old student at Sacramento State University who had been reported missing the day before. His cause of death is easily determined: three gunshot…

In the wake of the violent insurrection on the U.S. Capitol building Jan. 6, the spotlight has shown on the dangers of cults. While QAnon — along with the other far-right cults that participated in the violence — plotted their attack right out in the open, too many in the media, police, and national security fields ignored or dismissed the danger — until it was too late.

This moment in time might seem unique and unprecedented. In America, it is. But a similar situation unfolded in Japan over 25 years ago: a quirky cult with some clear red flags emerged…

On the evening of March 21, 1981, a cross was set ablaze in front of the Mobile County Courthouse in Alabama. This was proof that the terror of the Ku Klux Klan was not ancient history — less than two decades had passed since the peak of its reign of terror, the violent backlash against the Civil Rights movement.

But after then-President Lyndon Baines Johnson (D-Texas) signed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts in 1964 and ‘65, he publicly denounced the Klan, and state and federal law enforcement began cracking down on its members and leaders. …

Oct. 17, 2009, Fairfax, Virginia: 20-year-old Virginia Tech student Morgan Harrington is getting ready to see her favorite band, Metallica, perform at the John Paul Jones Arena that evening as part of their World Magnetic tour.

Morgan is visiting at her parents’ house in Fairfax, about 45 minutes away from Charlottesville, where she lives with her roommates. Here at her parents’, she gets dressed for the concert: Pantera T-shirt, miniskirt, leggings, and boots, all black.

Later in the afternoon, she heads back into Charlottesville to pick up her roommates and friends to drive them all to the concert.

The friends…

Thanks to tons of sloppily researched listicles and YouTube videos, most people think H.H. Holmes was America’s first serial killer. Far from it; by the time Holmes took his first victim, there had already been at least 10 earlier serial killers.

In fact, the first known serial killers in the U.S. were a pair of men known as the Harpe Brothers, and their crimes — some of the most brutal and psychopathic in American history — spanned decades.

Micajah and Wiley Harpe weren’t actually brothers; they were cousins. The older of the two, Micajah, was born around 1748; the younger…