Famous & Murdered - True Stories

On August 28th,1963, Martin Luther King pronounced this short phrase that would remain famous: "I had a dream". This black American pastor dreamed of a world of peace, where all men would be equal and brothers. Although the laws establishing segregation had been repealed, the United  States still practices segregation between blacks and whites on a daily basis. And violence against African Americans has never stopped. Many peo...

You will recall that we left John the Fearless triumphant in 1407 when he had just had his cousin and rival Louis I of Orleans, brother of King Charles VI, assassinated. It was now 1419 and John had  come a long way. The unfortunate Charles VI, then known as the Mad King, had been ruling for thirty-nine years. His fits of madness lead cousin John to want to take over the throne. But Charles VI now had an heir, the dauphin Char...

A man walks through the snow-covered mountains at an altitude of 3,200 metres. He had stuffed his auroch skin shoes with grass, put on two coats and a bearskin hat. He was carrying a backpack, a deerskin quiver containing twenty arrowheads, a flint dagger, a copper axe and a deer antler tool. In a birch bark basket, he was carrying smouldering charcoal wrapped in young maple leaves. He was only about forty years old but his progres...

On December 15th, 1890, the sun had not yet risen over Standing Rock, one of the largest Indian reservations in the United States. Snow covered the mountains and the plain, burying the tipis. The snow was immaculate and crunched under the footsteps of the approaching men. They were Lakota Indians, part of the Indian police. There were about forty of them who gradually surrounded the tepee of one of the chiefs who was also one of th...

On April 9th 1865, the Battle of Appomattox in Virginia ended the Civil War. It was the election of Abraham Lincoln to the presidency of the United States, which set off the fuse in 1861 and provoked the secession of ten so-called Confederate Southern states. Lincoln was against slavery, as were the northern states, while the southerners could not imagine for a moment parting with their slaves, who were indispensable labour. After ...

This July 16th 1918 was a day like any other at the Ipatiev villa in Ekaterimburg. The morning sun had given way to a grey day. Alexis was getting a bit cold and Tatiana was reading the Bible to her mother. At 4 p.m. Nicholas and his four daughters went down to the garden for their daily walk. After dinner, Tatiana and Nicolas played cards and went to bed at quarter past ten. The temperature was 15 degrees. Time passed slowly here....

On the morning of July 15th 1997, on the porch of his sumptuous 5,800-square-metre villa in Miami Beach, Florida, a man was returning home. He had just bought some newspapers. The man was Gianni Versace, founder of the luxury brand that bore his name. Two shots rang out. The first bullet fractured the bottom of his skull and the base of his brain. The second bullet lodged in the right side of his face, near his nose, before fractur...

On March the 1st 2005, Edouard Stern did not show up for work. He could not be reached by telephone. His colleagues were worried because this was not his boss's style. You don't become the thirty-eighth richest person in France by lazing around in bed on morning. They went to his Geneva home and it was Dolores, the cleaning lady, who allowed them to enter the luxurious flat whose alarm had not been set. Something must have happened...

On Sunday December 2nd 1945, on the Boulevard des Invalides in Paris, a man was changing the flat tyre of his car. His companion had just gone to get a taxi. He was alone and it was raining. His body was found a few metres from his vehicle, dead, with a large-calibre bullet in his back. In his pocket, twelve thousand francs and his papers : Robert Denoël, forty-three years old, one of the greatest French publishers, had just been m...