An ex-cop said he stole millions so he could give it to the poor

It was the largest armed robbery in Austrian history. The heist had been near perfectly executed — perfect, that is, except for one small oversight. The thieves didn’t realize that the ATM had a security camera that automatically took photos of the street. The images were blurry, but they revealed

Crows make human friends but also hold grudges for years

Many people who receive attention from crows feel that the birds have more complex motives. “It seemed like they would just come by to hang out,” my sister tells me — like, well, friends. What is a friend, anyway? For a scholarly perspective, I spoke to Thom van Dooren, a field

The co-pilot who bombed Hiroshima never got over it

Ask most people who flew the plane that dropped the first atomic bomb and you'll get one name: Paul Tibbets. He's the one who named the Enola Gay after his mother, the one who spent decades insisting he never lost a night's sleep over

He escaped from a memory unit by listening to the keypad tones

At the Elmcroft of Lebanon, Tennessee, the staff of the memory-care unit knew the code to the keypad that controlled the exit door. Residents weren’t supposed to be able to leave unattended. That’s how the system worked: the keypad stood between those in the facility’s care

They fell in love but had to check they weren't brother and sister

For years, Arthur Kermalvezen, the child of a sperm donor, saw possible fathers everywhere he went. "I imagined it might be my teacher, the people I saw on the bus... and I was very angry because it's impossible to live like this." When, as an adult,

The secret plot to topple the US government after World War I

In July 1933, former Marine General Smedley Butler was visited by a pair of gentlemen who had come to urge him to run for the office of National Commander of the American Legion, an influential organization of veterans. Though Butler declined the invitation, one of the men⁠— Gerald MacGuire⁠— made

You may be a risk-taker because of this parasite that lives in cats

The organism in question is a protozoan, meaning a single-celled animal, and it’s called Toxoplasma gondii. It’s one of the most successful parasites on the planet. Depending on which country’s serology data you look at, somewhere between eleven per cent of Americans, thirty per cent of

The bizarre bomb plot that blew up a Lake Tahoe casino

“I don’t think it belongs here.” Such was the assessment of Bob Vinson, the graveyard shift supervisor at Harvey’s Wagon Wheel Casino in Lake Tahoe, Nevada. The “here” Vinson referred to was a nook just outside the telephone equipment room in the employees-only portion of the second

In 1973 Icelanders fought a volcano — and won

On January 23, 1973, the 5,000 residents of the tiny Icelandic island of Heimaey — located just four miles off Iceland’s southern coast — woke up to the Earth splitting open. In the dead of night, a mile-long volcanic fissure ripped through the ground just a half-mile from

An eccentric millionaire, a fake castle and 101 princesses

I awoke one morning in the summer of 2023 to discover that, while I’d slept, my son Joel had been texting my wife and me a series of unnerving messages about a perilous situation he had found himself in, in rural Connecticut. From what I could tell, as I

There's a Polish cemetery that's just for suspected vampires

A 400-year-old grave held the body of a young woman, the rusted blade of a sickle over her throat and a padlock fastened to her foot — the macabre signs of a community terrified the deceased would rise again. Archaeologists unearthed Zosia, as the skeleton was nicknamed, from an

She was a scuba-diving TV star and an early LSD experimenter

Zale Parry, a depth-defying scuba diver and underwater stuntwoman whose reverence for the oceanic world was deepened by tripping out on LSD in a research study that included Cary Grant, Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper, died on July 20 at her home in Tillamook, Ore. She was 93. Once