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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...

On May 30, 1899, a woman with cropped hair and men's clothes held up the stagecoach running between Globe and Florence, Arizona, one of the last horse drawn lines in the territory. With her partner Joe Boot covering the passengers, she collected $431.20 and two guns, then handed each victim one dollar back for a meal. The gesture made Pearl Hart famous. She told reporters she was Pearl Taylor, the...

Dodge City began with a sod house and a bar in a tent. Rancher Henry L. Sitler built the house near Fort Dodge in 1871, the town was staked out in 1872 on the hundredth meridian, and George M. Hoover opened the first business, selling liquor to soldiers. When the Santa Fe Railroad arrived that September, the main trade was buffalo hides and bones. The cattle came later, and for a reason nobody pla...

The real wolverine, Gulo gulo, is about the size of a medium dog, 24 to 40 pounds, and nothing like the bear sized monster of legend. What it has is equipment. It walks flat on oversized paws that work like snowshoes, climbs ice with claws like crampons, and wears oily fur that sheds frost. An upper molar rotated 90 degrees shears meat frozen as hard as wood, and its jaw bone measured 940.8 newton...

Alcatraz sat a mile and a quarter off San Francisco, close enough for inmates to smell the sea air and hear laughter drifting across the bay. When the Department of Justice took over the island in 1934, it offered no rehabilitation, only containment. Men lived in cells nine feet long, five feet wide, and seven feet high, flushed their toilets with salt water, and were counted 13 times a day. Under...

Charles Edward Stuart was born in Rome on December 31, 1720, in a household living on the Pope's charity and certain that God meant it to rule Britain. His grandfather, James II, had been deposed in 1688, and his father was the claimant known as the Old Pretender. Raised as a king in waiting, Charles found at 17 that most European courts would not even receive him as a prince. When a French invasi...

Frank Hamer survived 17 gunshot wounds, was left for dead four times, and killed somewhere between 53 and 70 people, all while wearing a badge. Born in 1884 in rural Texas, the son of a blacksmith, he left school after the sixth grade but had a near photographic memory and learned tracking by studying the Comanche and the Kiowa. At 21 he captured a horse thief on his own, and by 1906 he was a Texa...

Albert Pierrepoint was born in 1905 into a struggling Yorkshire family and learned at age 11, from a newspaper serializing his father's memoirs, that both his father Henry and his uncle Tom had been state hangmen. Henry had been struck from the Home Office list in 1910 for arriving at a prison drunk. Albert set out to redeem the family name through sobriety and precision. He first assisted his unc...

Frank James was born in 1843 in Kearney, Missouri, the son of a Baptist minister with a large library. He loved Shakespeare and hoped to become a schoolteacher. Then the Civil War broke out in 1861, when he was 18. He joined the secessionist Missouri State Guard, fell ill at the siege of Lexington, was left behind, and went home on parole, only to be forced by a pro-Union militia of his own neighb...

Robert Stroud never kept a single bird at Alcatraz, and the gentle figure Burt Lancaster played on screen bears little resemblance to the man. Born in Seattle in 1890 to an abusive, alcoholic father, he ran away at 13 and by 18 was in Juneau, Alaska, working as a pimp. In January 1909 he knocked a bartender named Charlie von Dahmer unconscious in a dispute over an unpaid fee and a beating, then sh...

On August 21, 1911, a handyman named Vincenzo Peruggia, who had helped build the Louvre's protective glass cases, tucked the Mona Lisa under his work smock and walked out. The museum had more than 400 rooms and few guards, and staff took a full day to notice, assuming the photographers had it. According to the famous account, the theft was ordered by Eduardo de Valfierno, an Argentine con man who...

On the morning of February 14, 1929, seven men waiting for a whiskey delivery in a garage at 2122 North Clark Street in Chicago were lined up against a brick wall by men dressed as police and cut down with Thompson submachine guns. One of them, Frank Gusenberg, lived long enough to tell real officers that no one had shot him. The target, North Side Gang boss Bugs Moran, was running late, saw the u...

On July 9, 1931, a clean-shaven stranger with a Scandinavian accent and plenty of cash arrived at Fort McPherson in the Northwest Territories. He told Constable Edgar Millen almost nothing, built an 8 by 10 foot cabin on the Rat River, and never took out a trapping license. The authorities called him Albert Johnson, almost certainly not his real name. That December, after local Indigenous trappers...

Alphonse Bertillon was born in Paris in 1853 into a family of noted statisticians and seemed determined to disappoint them. He was expelled from school, drifted through menial jobs and a stint in the army, and in 1879 took a clerk's post copying files at the Paris Prefecture of Police that his father arranged. The records around him were useless. Repeat offenders gave false names and nothing tied...

Ned Kelly was born in rural Victoria in the mid 1850s, the third of eight children of Red Kelly, an Irish convict transported for stealing pigs. The family were selectors, poor farmers working bad land under heavy installments while police looked after the interests of wealthy squatters. Red drank himself to death when Ned was 12, leaving the boy head of a watched and hungry household. As a child...

He was born Doroteo Arango in Durango in 1878, a sharecropper's son bound to the hacienda system and its inherited debts. In 1894, at 16, he shot a landowner he said had assaulted his sister, stole a horse, and fled into the Sierra Madre. Years of cattle theft, arrests, and work as a mule skinner taught him the mountains and the movement of supplies. In 1910 Abraham Gonzalez recruited the outlaw n...

John Gerard was born in 1564 into Lancashire nobility at a time when keeping the Catholic faith in England was treated as a threat to the crown. When he was five, his father, Sir Thomas Gerard, was jailed for plotting to rescue Mary, Queen of Scots, and the boy was placed with Protestant relatives while a secret Catholic tutor went on teaching him. He left for France at 12 to get the education bar...

Joseph Bolitho Johns was born in the 1820s, probably in Cornwall, the son of a blacksmith who died young. Smallpox scarred his face and poverty sent him into the mines as a boy. In 1848 he was caught with three loaves of bread, a piece of bacon, and some cheese, argued with the court instead of bowing to it, and received ten years of penal servitude. After Pentonville, Dartmoor, and the prison hul...