A diabolical crime took place in June 2000 in the Italian village of Chiavenna, a town of 8,000 people in the Lombard Alpine province of Sondrio, where the 60-year-old nun Maria Laura Mainetti was brutally murdered. For three weeks, the Carabinieri puzzled over who...
Neighborhood Secrets
In 1772, the child murderer Susanna Margaretha Brandt was the talk of the town in Frankfurt am Main, the birthplace of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the man with whom I share a birthday. At the time, he was working as a lawyer in Frankfurt...
Countess Henkel von Kramschütz was a true femme fatale who instantly set every man’s heart aflutter. The attractive countess had many admirers who financed her extremely lavish lifestyle. In December 1790, the eloquent countess had moved into the house on Kaigasse in Salzburg, which...
More than 30 years ago, 18-year-old Lolita Brieger disappeared. She worked as an unskilled seamstress in Jünkerath, a village in the Vulkaneifel region of North Rhine-Westphalia, where she lived in a small apartment. The attractive, pregnant woman was last seen alive when she got...
Everyone knows the saying: “You have to eat the soup you’ve made for yourself.” This idiom, used when someone is to blame for something, originates from an old dining custom. In the past, people often ate their soup with bread. As the soup was...
The Chorinsky case was a sensational crime that kept the international press in suspense for months and occurred during a highly volatile political period in which the old feudal system clashed with the new liberal spirit of the times. Since early October 1867, 34-year-old...
