It felt like a new world to the citizens of the USSR. The year was 1959, and Nikita Khrushchev had formally ruled over the Soviet Union for nearly a year. He had begun the process of “de-Stalinizing” the country, allowing the citizens – many of whom could not remember a time before Stalin’s totalitarian rule…
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The desert was very red, even before the corruption settled on the land from the sky itself – a vast expanse of russet granules, rocky and harsh and very, very old. There were flats and canyons, scraggly desert shrubs low to the ground in some places, the occasional cluster of salt grass or cottonwood tree…
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The room is quiet and dark and a little cool. You’re sitting up on your bed, all of ten years old, and the light rain is tapping against the window, a steady rhythm that is occasionally punctuated by damp leaves hitting the glass in the sporadic winds, making shadows dance across your wall. Slowly turning…
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There’s a grassy field in Elbert County, Georgia, about 40 miles outside of Athens. It’s the highest point in the county and indistinguishable from all other such fields across that general area of America in most respects: green and lush in some places, with barren rocky patches in others. In the middle of this field,…
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In the Enfield borough of London, England lay a neighborhood known as Brimsdown, formerly Grimsdown. Brimsdown is, and was, an industrial and commercial region. Much of the residential area consists of council housing – that is, government-owned housing rented at a lower rate based on need. The Hodgson family – mother Peggy and three of…
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It often happens as the dusk settles itself gently over the lush rainforest. Farmed animals, confined to pens or herded by human and canine protectors, wouldn’t have a sense of their own vulnerability or the existence of predators, you might think. But somewhere, deep down in their basest primal instincts that reach back to the…
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Apprehensive they went, clasping each other tightly, into the night. It was so, so quiet outside of the footsteps of their papa, clomping along hurriedly, unsteadily ahead. The unnatural still of the night seeped into all three children’s blood, making them shiver as the moon poured silver upon them. They didn’t need to go out…
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Perhaps the most thorough and well-balanced of the Sheppard trials was the one held long, long after Marilyn Reese Sheppard’s death. In the first installment of this article, we discussed the first trial of her husband and accused killer, Sam, some of the questionable decisions made by the trial judge, and the media circus that…
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There is much that can be said about Edgar Allan Poe, but in terms of his literary habits, little that needs to be. Much more famous in death than he was in life, he was nevertheless a literary critic of some renown in his own time. His true love, however, was lurid, ghastly fiction. Poe…
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It’s an old, old story. The shadowed, dusty crossroads sit lonely in the sultry, oppressive summer night, seemingly waiting for the young Black man who now arrives. He holds a guitar in one hand and a mostly empty bottle of whiskey in the other. He does not stumble as he walks, but looks about warily…
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