In the late 19th century, one of the most famous stagecoach robbers was Black Bart, who was also known as a “gentleman bandit.” 

Black Bart—whose real name was Charles E. Boles—robbed at least 28 Wells Fargo stagecoaches without firing a shot or injuring any passengers. Following two of the robberies, Boles left behind homespun poetry, including these taunting verses from 1877:

I’ve labored long and hard for bread For honor and for riches, But on my corns too long you’ve tred You fine haired Sons of Bitches.

In between Wells Fargo holdups which earned him between $300 and $500 apiece ($9,000 and $15,000 today), Boles lived the good life in San Francisco, dressed in fine suits like the mining engineer he pretended to be.   

The real Charles Boles left behind a wife and four kids in Iowa to chase gold out West. After failing at prospecting, Boles turned to his life of crime. But the Civil War veteran was much different from the era’s typical highway robber, says Old West historian and author John Boessenecker.

“These guys were generally ruffians, heavy drinkers and womanizers,” says Boessenecker, author of Gentleman Bandit: The True Story of Black Bart, the Old West's Most Infamous Stagecoach Robber. “And Boles was well-dressed, well-spoken, and gentlemanly.”

During Boles’ first stagecoach heist in 1875, a panicked passenger threw her purse out the window as Boles demanded the cash-filled Wells Fargo “express box.” Boles retrieved the purse and returned it with a bow, saying, “I don’t want your money. I only want boxes.”   

After his 28th robbery over eight years, Boles was finally apprehended (his handkerchief, left at the scene, bore markings from a San Francisco laundry shop that the police used to track him down). 

Black Bart served four years in San Quentin. Upon his release, the aging Boles vowed to go straight, but it wasn’t long before a lone bandit fitting Boles’ description knocked over five more California stagecoaches. Boles was last seen checking into a hotel in 1888, then he vanished. An old acquaintance said that he saw Boles in Mexico running a mine, but Boessenecker couldn’t find any death records in Mexico matching Boles’ name or description. 

If you graduated from an American high school anytime over the last century, chances are you read “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” a brilliant, stream-of-consciousness short story about the final thoughts (and fantasies) racing through a man’s mind as he is hanged from a railroad bridge during the Civil War. 

That miniature masterpiece, which writer Kurt Vonnegut called “the greatest American short story,” is only a taste of the literary force who was Ambrose Bierce. 

Bierce was a contemporary of Edgar Allen Poe and Mark Twain, and was, in many ways, a combination of the two legendary American writers. 

Like Poe, Bierce explored themes of supernatural violence and death—often in gruesome detail—in his fiction and poetry. And like Twain, Bierce was equally famous for his incisive wit and mischievous prose, which he deployed in works like The Devil’s Dictionary and his long-running newspaper column in the San Francisco Examiner called the “Prattler.” 

By 1913, Bierce was a 71-year-old man who, despite his literary success, had suffered more than his fair share of personal tragedy. He was haunted by the trauma of the Civil War, in which he fought bravely for the Union. That psychological pain was compounded in Bierce’s later years by the deaths of both of his sons (one to suicide, another to alcoholism) and then his wife. 

The last confirmed time that Bierce was seen alive was on October 23, 1913, when he was interviewed by a reporter from the New Orleans Daily States newspaper. Bierce was passing through Louisiana on his way to Mexico, where he planned to report about Pancho Villa, the mustachioed revolutionary who had become an international celebrity. 

“There are so many things that may happen between now and when I come back,” Bierce said cryptically. “My trip might take several years, and I’m an old man now.” 

In a letter allegedly written by Bierce to his niece a few weeks later (the letter, if it existed, has been lost), the acerbic writer quipped, “Goodbye. If you hear of my being stood up against a Mexican stone wall and shot to rags please know that I think that a pretty good way to depart this life. It beats old age, disease, or falling down the cellar stairs. To be a gringo in Mexico—ah, that is euthanasia.”

And just like that, one of the most famous American writers disappeared. Theories about his fate abound. There are several versions claiming Bierce was killed by either Pancho Villa or by Mexican federal forces, both of whom suspected the white-haired journalist was a spy. Another version tells of a man who crossed the Rio Grande into Texas delirious with pneumonia, who mumbled his name as “Ambrosia” before he died.

It’s just as likely, writes Roy Morris in Ambrose Bierce: Alone in Bad Company, that the Mexico account was a ruse that Bierce used as a cover to end his own life. There are no reliable reports of Bierce in Mexico. And Bierce frequently wrote about suicide with his usual sarcastic detachment, (“A pistol is objectionable; it makes too much noise and wakes the baby.”) 

For a man who wrote about death with such an unflinching eye, greeting the end on his own terms sounds like a very Biercian way to go.

From the moment Amelia Earhart took her first airplane flight in 1920, the 23-year-old from Kansas knew that flying was her true calling. Just 12 years later, Earhart became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic, catapulting her to world fame. 

But Earhart had an even greater ambition—to become the first aviator, male or female, to fly around the world at the equator, a distance of nearly 29,000 miles over large expanses of ocean. 

In March of 1937, Earhart and a two-man crew made their first attempt, flying westward from California to Hawaii. But the mission was aborted after Earhart’s custom-built, twin propellor engine Lockheed 10-E Electra crashed on takeoff from Honolulu, skidding on its belly when the landing gear buckled. No one was hurt, but Earhart needed a new plane.

Three months later, Earhart launched her second attempt, this time flying eastward across the Atlantic from Florida. Her navigator for both attempts was Fred Noonan, a veteran Pan Am aviator. The challenge of flying over the Atlantic first was that it left the hardest part of the trip for the end of their exhausting journey—locating and landing on tiny Howland Island, a mile-and-a-half-long speck in the middle of the Pacific.

After multiple refueling stops, Earhart and Noonan landed in Lae, New Guinea on June 29, 1937. The next destination was Howland Island, but instead of leaving immediately, Earhart sent a telegram to her husband saying that "RADIO MISUNDERSTANDING AND PERSONNEL UNFITNESS” had forced a delay. It’s not clear what Earhart meant by her message or if either of those issues contributed to her disappearance. 

Earhart and Noonan took off from New Guinea on July 2, but never made it to Howland Island. The U.S. Coast Guard ship Itasca was stationed at Howland to help direct Earhart’s plane, but Earhart and Noonan apparently couldn’t hear the Itasca’s radio transmissions. The ship received a few garbled messages from her complaining of “cloudy weather.” 

Earhart’s final transmission, sent more than 20 hours into the flight, was that she and Noonan would keep “running north and south” along their target longitude line for Howland Island. They were never seen or heard from again. 

The conventional wisdom is that Earhart and Noonan ran out of fuel and crashed in the immense Pacific, but there is an alternative theory. An organization called the International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery has proposed that Earhart and Noonan may have crash landed on the tiny atoll of Nikumaroro, 409 miles southeast of Howland.

On July 30, 1975, Jimmy Hoffa left his home in the Detroit suburbs for a lunch meeting at the Machus Red Fox restaurant. The former president of the International Brotherhood of the Teamsters had planned to meet with two underworld operators: a Detroit mobster named Anthony “Tony Jack” Giacalone and a New Jersey Teamster (with mob ties) named Anthony “Tony Pro” Provenzano. But Hoffa’s lunch guests never showed. 

At 2:15pm, Hoffa called his wife saying that he’d been stood up and was coming home. She never saw him again. 

There is no shortage of suspects and theories tied to Hoffa’s infamous disappearance. That’s because he made plenty of enemies in his career as chief of America’s largest and most powerful labor union. Ambitious and aggressive, Hoffa won a historic labor contract in 1964 for more than 400,000 truckers. But throughout his career, Hoffa was under investigation by the U.S. Justice Department for alleged mafia connections. 

In 1964, the authorities finally caught up with Hoffa. He was convicted of attempting to bribe a jury member in a 1962 trial and embezzling Teamsters’ pension plan funds. Hoffa was sentenced to 13 years in federal prison, but President Richard Nixon commuted Hoffa’s sentence in 1971 with the stipulation that Hoffa would never again run the Teamsters. 

Hoffa ignored that order and was orchestrating his return to power when the fateful 1975 meeting was scheduled. The purpose was for Giacalone, a Detroit mafia boss, to “mend fences” between Hoffa and his Teamster rival Provenzano. 

Who killed Hoffa? Giacalone and Provenzano were suspects, but each had ironclad alibis. Eyewitnesses claimed to have seen Hoffa leave the restaurant in the back of a maroon Mercury Marquis with three men. Later, a hair from the backseat of a car matching that description was matched with Hoffa’s DNA. 

In the best-selling 2004 book, I Heard You Paint Houses, journalist Charles Brandt identified the shooter as Frank “The Irishman” Sheeran, an enforcer for a mafia boss named Russell Bufalino. Sheehan confessed the killing to Brandt, but other Hoffa experts say that Sheeran’s story doesn’t hold water. 

A more likely assassin, some say, was Salvatore “Sally Bugs” Briguglio, a known trigger man for Provenzano. Briguglio was murdered in 1978. So if he was Hoffa’s killer, he took the secret to his grave. 

For decades, Hoffa’s body was rumored to have been buried under the former Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, New Jersey, but that claim has been debunked. 

One leading theory is that Hoffa was murdered near the Detroit restaurant and then his body was fed through a cardboard shredder at a local mob-owned garbage company. The business, Central Sanitation Services, burned down in a suspicious fire six months after Hoffa’s disappearance. 

It’s the only unsolved commercial hijacking in American history. 

On November 24, 1971, a man calling himself Dan Cooper (a journalist misreported it as D.B. Cooper and that name has stuck) bought a one-way ticket on a Northwest Orient flight from Portland to Seattle. 

During the flight, Cooper showed the flight attendant what looked like a makeshift bomb in his briefcase, telling her to communicate his demands to the pilot: $200,000 in $20 bills, four parachutes and safe passage to Mexico City. 

Authorities in Seattle exchanged the 35 passengers for the money and parachutes and Cooper and the flight crew took off for Mexico City. Cooper told the captain to fly low and slow and ordered the Boeing 727 jet’s rear door to be unlocked. Around 8 p.m., Cooper strapped on a chute, grabbed the bag of cash and jumped into the night somewhere above Oregon. 

The FBI actively investigated the NORJACK (“Northwest Hijacking”) case for 45 years, pursuing hundreds of leads about the identity of D.B. Cooper. None led to an arrest and the FBI officially ended its search in 2016. 

One of the only solid pieces of evidence dates to 1980, when a boy dug up three bundles of $20 bills along the Columbia River in Washington state. Cooper also left behind a clip-on tie aboard the plane, which the FBI says has been DNA tested, but no matches were found. 

The top suspect for amateur sleuths has been Richard Floyd McCoy, Jr. Fewer than five months after hijacking, McCoy pulled off a nearly identical heist, parachuting into the Utah desert with $500,000 in cash. 

McCoy, a Vietnam vet with pilot and parachuting experience, was quickly caught by the FBI and convicted. He later escaped from prison and was killed by authorities in 1974.  

Was McCoy actually D.B. Cooper or just a copycat? A YouTube investigator named Dan Gryder claims to have found D.B. Cooper’s parachute in McCoy’s mother’s home, and says that the McCoy children were sworn to secrecy from revealing that their father was the infamous hijacker. 

The FBI page about the NORJACK investigation says McCoy was ruled out as a suspect because “he didn’t match the nearly identical physical descriptions of Cooper provided by two flight attendants and for other reasons.” 

Heinrich Mueller, who served as the chief of the Gestapo, Adolph Hitler’s ruthless secret police, was a very high-ranking Nazi official whose fate and whereabouts were completely unknown for more than 60 years after World War II ended. 

Mueller’s crimes included aiding the planning and execution of Kristallnacht, the 1938 Nazi-orchestrated pogrom when thousands of Jewish homes, businesses and synagogues were sacked and burned across Germany. An estimated 30,000 Jews were arrested and shipped to concentration camps. 

As the direct boss of Adolf Eichmann, Mueller also authorized the killing of thousands of Soviet prisoners of war and attended the infamous Wannsee Conference when top Nazis planned the “Final Solution”—the total extermination of Jews in Axis-controlled Europe. 

In April 1945, as the Soviet army closed in on Berlin, Mueller was with Hitler and other Nazi officials inside the Führerbunker, an underground air raid shelter. The day after Hitler and Eva Braun killed themselves, Müller reportedly told Hitler’s pilot, Hans Baur, “We know the Russian methods exactly. I haven't the faintest intention of being taken prisoner by the Russians.”

After that, Mueller was never seen again. For years after the war, Nazi hunters and the CIA chased leads reporting that Müller had escaped to Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union or Brazil, but his trail always went cold. 

Then, in 2013, a German historian made a shocking announcement: Mueller never made it out of Germany alive and was likely buried in a mass grave in a Jewish cemetery in Berlin. 

The historian, Johannes Tuchel, found reports in East German police archives of a gravedigger who claimed to have buried a high-ranking Nazi officer in a mass grave after Berlin’s fall. 

From the description of the Nazi officer’s military decorations, Tuchel concluded that Mueller died in the Allied air raids in 1945 and was buried in the Berlin-Mitte Jewish Cemetery, also the final resting place of the 18th-century Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. 

No attempts were made to exhume Mueller’s body—Jewish law forbids it and Mueller was one of 2,700 victims buried in 16 mass graves. If Tuchel’s theory is correct, it would serve as Mueller’s final offense against Germany’s Jews. 

The Oscar-winning 2013 movie, 12 Years a Slave, was based on the life story of Solomon Northup, a free Black man from New York who was kidnapped in 1841 and sold into slavery in the deep South.

Born free in 1808 in New York state, Northup married in 1829 and settled with his wife and three children in the upstate resort town of Saratoga Springs. Northrop worked on canal boats and as a seasonable laborer at the grand hotels of Saratoga Springs, and moonlighted as a fiddle player in the surrounding villages.

In 1841, Northup was approached by two white men who offered him a high-paying gig to play the violin in a circus in New York City. After arriving, the men convinced Northup to continue to Washington, D.C., where slavery was legal. 

Northup was drugged at a Washington dinner and awoke inside a “slave pen” for captured runaway slaves. Northup’s pleas fell on deaf ears. He was falsely identified as a runaway slave from Georgia and shipped to Louisiana. His wife and children wouldn’t hear from him for the next 12 years. 

Northup was forced to labor on several Louisiana cotton plantations, where he was routinely beaten and nearly lynched. In 1852, he finally managed to sneak a letter to his friends and family in New York and, by 1853, he won back his freedom. 

A year after Harriet Beecher Stowe published her anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Northup wrote his first-hand slavery account. The searing memoir, titled Twelve Years a Slave, sold 30,000 copies in three years. Comparing it to Stowe’s novel, the abolitionist Frederick Douglass wrote, “Its truth is far greater than fiction.” 

Thanks to the book’s popularity, a witness identified Northup’s abductors as Alexander Merrill and Joseph Russell. They were briefly detained in the Saratoga County Courthouse, but never stood trial. 

At the time, American courts couldn’t agree if Black people—even free Black people—had the right to sue. In 1857, the Supreme Court handed down the Dredd Scott decision confirming that men like Northup had no legal recourse for justice.

Northup didn’t earn much from his book sales and supplemented his income with lectures about his ordeal. The last mention of Northup in a newspaper came in 1857 when he was forced to flee a Canadian theater in Streetsville, Ontario, after the rowdy crowd yelled racial epithets. 

Despite his fame and incredible fortitude, Northup slipped into obscurity. There are some letters, written years later, claiming that Northup became involved with the Underground Railroad. No one knows how or when he died, or where he was laid to rest.

In 1967, Jim Thompson went on vacation to the Cameron Highlands of Malaysia, a picturesque mountain region covered in thick jungle. He wasn’t your average American tourist. Thompson was a wildly successful businessman and clothing designer known as the “Silk King” of Thailand. The Jim Thompson silk company, still in business today, was responsible for popularizing the country’s exotic, high-end fabric in the 1950s.

Thompson went on the walk March 26 in the Malaysian jungle and never returned. His disappearance prompted a massive search involving more than 300 Malaysian police, 30 indigenous trackers, British soldiers on leave in Malaysia, local mystics and a world-famous psychic. They didn’t find a clue to Thompson’s disappearance. 

Born into a wealthy textile family, Thompson first worked as an architect in New York before enlisting in the Delaware National Guard in 1941. The military trained him as an intelligence officer with the OSS, the precursor to the CIA and stationed him in Sri Lanka. 

After the war, Thompson settled in Bangkok, where he discovered the ancient artform of hand-woven Thai silk. Thompson supplied traditional weavers with raw silk and dyes and began exporting his own line of silk clothing. His bold-colored designs were featured in American fashion magazines and launched a global silk craze. 

“Thompson played a major role in revitalizing the Thai silk industry, and putting it back as a central part of Thai culture and costuming, while also upgrading its style and quality of silks,” says Josh Kurlantzick, a Senior Fellow for Southeast Asia and South Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of The Ideal Man: The Tragedy of Jim Thompson and the American Way of War. 

With the profits from his silk empire, Thompson collected priceless Asian art and artifacts. He built a stunning home in Bangkok, now a museum, where he showcased his collection and entertained guests (often with his pet bird “Cockatoo” on his shoulder). 

During his decades in Thailand, though, Thompson also collected his fair share of enemies, says Kurlantzick. He became critical of the war in Vietnam, had a long affair with the wife of an American diplomat, and angered rich Thais who didn’t appreciate a foreigner revitalizing their historic industry. 

Did one or more of those enemies conspire to murder Thompson in 1967? Kurlantzick doesn’t subscribe to “conspiracy theories,” including one claiming that Thompson was killed by a band of Malaysian communist terrorists. Thompson was in his early sixties and had recently been hospitalized for gallstones. 

“If I had to wager on his disappearance I would say that he went hiking in a very hot and unforgiving climate, already frail and exhausted and having been hospitalized in Bangkok,” says Kurlantzick. “He either got lost and died from the heat and dehydration, hurt himself and died from the heat and dehydration or had an encounter with a dangerous animal like a tiger.”

In 1888, the French-born artist and inventor Louis Le Prince made cinematic history. He gathered three family members in a sunny garden in Leeds, England, and filmed what’s widely considered the very first motion picture. 

The “Roundhay Garden Scene” is just over two seconds long, but proved that Le Prince’s patented camera technology—in which a continuous spool of celluloid film was cranked past a lens— worked. Le Prince hoped that sales of his world-changing invention would dig his family out of debt. 

He had some stiff competition. Thomas Edison’s well-funded lab in America was racing to get the first motion picture technology to market, as were the Lumiere brothers in France. But according to Paul Fischer, an author and film producer, Le Prince was the first to have a patent and a working motion picture camera. 

“It should be pretty straightforward that Le Prince was the first because we have a legal system that says that if you get a patent first, you're the first,” says Fischer, author of The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures: A True Tale of Obsession, Murder, and the Movies. “And he was the first by a mile.”

There’s a reason many people have never heard of Louis Le Prince, the “father of cinema.” On September 16, 1890, he boarded a train in Dijon, France, and was never seen again. According to his widow, Lizzie, Le Prince was starting a journey to the United States, where he planned to make the first public demonstrations of his revolutionary film camera. 

Weeks after Le Prince disappeared, Edison’s lab filed a patent “caveat”—a legal extension of a patent claim—that closely resembled Le Prince’s innovation of using a continuous spool of celluloid. 

Lizzie Le Prince was convinced that Edison stole her husband’s patent and may have had her husband killed. Edison’s supporters circulated stories that Le Prince was helplessly in debt and must have killed himself. 

“The question remains, if Le Prince did ‘disappear himself’ or die by suicide, then why did they never find a body? There's no trace of anything,” says Fischer. “People don't tend to kill themselves and then also make their body disappear.”

With Le Prince “missing,” his family couldn’t legally touch his assets or patents until he was declared dead in 1897. By that time, Edison owned the U.S. motion picture patent. Le Prince’s contribution was lost to history.