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Forensic facial reconstruction has helped catch killers and put names to unidentified remains, yet a U.S. judge will not accept it as proof of anything. This episode explains why. The 1993 Daubert standard demands that expert methods be standardized, reliable, and backed by a known error rate, and a sculpted face can offer none of those. Hand one skull to five trained artists and you get five diff...

A chain gang was more than prisoners in leg irons. Each man's shackles were fastened to a long central chain that bound the group into one unit, forcing a synchronized gait known as the convict shuffle. Chains used in Georgia in the first half of the 20th century weighed up to 20 pounds. Iron rubbing on skin for hours caused shackle sores that became infected, and one man's stumble could pull down...

Today the word outlaw suggests a rebel on a motorcycle or a gunslinger at a saloon door. For most of history it was a legal sentence, and one of the harshest a society could impose short of execution. An outlaw was placed outside the protection of the law, which is different from being a fugitive. The Hungarian bandit Sandor Rozsa ran from the police but still got a trial when caught. William John...

In April 1892 Nate Champion was trapped alone in a log cabin in Johnson County, Wyoming, surrounded by more than 50 gunmen. Between volleys he took out a pocket journal and wrote a calm account of his final hours, noting that he could hear the attackers splitting wood to burn him out. The men outside were not outlaws. They were a private army funded by the wealthy ranchers of the Wyoming Stock Gro...

Billy the Kid's famous run of violence began with a badge, not a crime. In New Mexico Territory he was a young ranch hand working for John Tunstall, an English newcomer who opened a store and bank in Lincoln to compete with James Dolan and Lawrence Murphy. Their firm, known as the House, held the government beef contracts, kept local ranchers in debt, and had Sheriff William J. Brady in its pocket...

In 1933 Alan Blair, a medical faculty member at the University of Alabama, held a black widow against his skin for ten seconds to document the bite and test whether repeated bites could build immunity. The pain, the rigid abdomen, and the soaring blood pressure were so severe that he refused a second bite and abandoned the experiment. The culprit is latrotoxin, a neurotoxin that forces nerve endin...

The grizzly bear carries the scientific name Ursus arctos horribilis, yet in Yellowstone this supposed monster may spend a whole day eating 40,000 army cutworm moths. Its diet can be 80 to 90 percent plants, depending on where it lives. Nineteenth century naturalists counted 86 species of grizzly, but genetic testing shows a single species of brown bear, with coastal animals fattened on salmon to...

Alice Ivers Duffield Tubbs Huckert, known across the frontier as Poker Alice, was born in Devonshire, England, on February 17, 1851, and schooled at a Virginia boarding academy meant to turn out refined ladies. Then her family moved to the mining town of Leadville, Colorado. There she married Frank Duffield, a mining engineer who taught her poker, and when a dynamite charge killed him she turned t...

Tombstone got its name from a warning. In 1877 Army scout Ed Schieffelin set out alone to prospect in Apache country, and fellow scout Al Sieber told him the only rock he would find would be his own tombstone. He found a silver vein instead, and within a few years the mesa called Goose Flats held the most productive silver district in Arizona. The mines gave up 32 million troy ounces, and the mone...

In 1690 the danger of robbery in Hyde Park was so great that King William III had oil lamps strung along his route between St. James's Palace and Kensington Palace, creating the first artificially lit highway in Britain. The men he feared were highwaymen, a term first printed around 1617 that meant a mounted robber and nothing less. Thieves on foot were mere footpads. The golden age began around t...

Eliot Ness spent his last years in Coudersport, Pennsylvania, telling skeptical bar patrons that he was the man who took down Al Capone. The truth was more complicated than either his boasts or the movies. Born in Chicago in 1903 to Norwegian immigrants, he studied political science and business administration, ran credit checks for the Retail Credit Company, and absorbed the scientific policing i...

Pat Garrett is remembered for one gunshot in a dark bedroom, but his life ran far longer and stranger than that night. Born in Alabama in 1850 and raised on a Louisiana plantation, he was orphaned as a teenager and left in 1868 with more than $30,000 of debt. He went west as a buffalo hunter, killed a fellow hunter named Joe Briscoe in a dispute, and drifted to Fort Sumner in New Mexico Territory....

Jack Diamond, known as Legs and sometimes as Gentleman Jack, took so many bullets and lived that the press and police called him the clay pigeon of the underworld. Born in Philadelphia in 1897 to Irish immigrants, he lost his mother as a teenager, moved to Brooklyn, and joined a Manhattan street gang called the Hudson Dusters. After deserting the Army and serving two years at Leavenworth, he came...

Two men named Alfred Hinds sit on opposite sides of a single encyclopedia disambiguation page. Alfred Walton Hinds, born in 1874 and dead in 1957, was a captain in the United States Navy and the 17th naval governor of Guam, a post that made him executive, legislature, and judge of a strategic Pacific coaling station. Alfred George Hinds, born in 1917 and dead in 1991, is recorded in just two words...

The real Peaky Blinders were not middle-aged crime lords running an empire after the First World War. They were a street gang of teenagers and young men in the slums of late Victorian Birmingham, grown out of the loose slogging gangs that fought police crackdowns on gambling and street sports. Their public debut came in March of 1890, when a gang led by Thomas Mucklow fractured the skull of George...

Gustave is a Nile crocodile estimated at more than 20 feet long and 2,000 pounds, blamed in local legend for the deaths of up to 300 people along the Ruzizi River and the northern shores of Lake Tanganyika in Burundi. Thought to have hatched around 1955, he is the product of indeterminate growth, the reptilian trait of never fully stopping, compounded over five decades of successful hunting. Obser...

Joseph Weil, better known as the Yellow Kid, stole an estimated eight million dollars over a career that ran from the streets of 1890s Chicago to the offices of a European dictator. Born in 1875, he left school early and by 17 was collecting debts for loan sharks, where he noticed his fellow collectors skimming cash and charged them for his silence. An apprenticeship with a veteran grifter named D...

Henri Charriere, born in 1906 and nicknamed Papillon for the butterfly tattooed on his chest, was a figure of the Paris underworld who admitted living as a pimp. In October 1931 he was convicted of murdering a fellow pimp, a killing he always denied, and was sentenced to life imprisonment plus ten years of hard labor in the penal settlements of French Guiana. His 1969 memoir told what happened nex...

For eight years in the early 20th century, the people of the Garhwal region of India barricaded themselves indoors every night. The reason was a single male leopard, seven feet six inches long, that officially killed more than 125 people. Its first recorded victim was taken from Benji village in 1918, and its territory lay across the pilgrim road to the shrines of Kedarnath and Badrinath, which su...

In the Ottoman Empire, a condemned grand vizier could be offered a foot race against the head gardener of the palace, who doubled as the state executioner. Beat him to the fish market gate and the sentence became banishment. That practice is one of many oddities in the history of a job that rarely involved killing. A typical town might see one or two death sentences in a decade, so executioners ro...

Colditz Castle sits on a rocky spur above a river in Saxony, and its story begins in 1046, when Emperor Henry III allowed a settlement on the hill. It was burned by the Hussites in 1430, burned again in 1504 when a baker accidentally set it alight, and rebuilt as a Renaissance residence and hunting lodge. Over the centuries it held one of the largest zoos in Europe, grew to 700 rooms, and then dec...

In 2007 the British military in Basra, Iraq had to issue a formal denial that it had released man-eating beasts on the local population. The animal behind the panic was the honey badger, Mellivora capensis, also called the ratel. It weighs up to 16 kilograms, about the size of a medium dog, and its reputation rests on real hardware. Its skin is so loose that a badger seized by a predator can twist...

In September 1943, with Sicily's government collapsed and as much as 70 percent of its food coming through the black market, a young olive oil trader named Salvatore Giuliano was stopped at a police checkpoint with two sacks of illegal grain. He shot an officer dead, took a bullet in the back, and fled into the hills. On Christmas Eve he escaped a dragnet in his hometown and killed a second office...

The red tunic, the Stetson, and the dark horse form an image recognized around the world, but the Royal Canadian Mounted Police is younger and far more complicated than the postcard. It was created in 1920 by merging the Dominion Police with the Royal North-West Mounted Police, a frontier force founded in 1873 to control First Nations and Metis populations and clear the way for settlement. Its off...

Harry Alonzo Longabaugh was born in Pennsylvania in 1867, the youngest of five children, and went west at 15 by covered wagon to help settle a cousin's homestead in Cortez, Colorado. He learned to wrangle and breed horses and seemed headed for a ranching career. Then came the winter of 1886 to 1887, the freeze that killed millions of cattle and wrecked the open range industry. Laid off by the N Ba...