On Dec. 28, 1885, London grocer Edwin Bartlett was discovered dead in his bed. In his stomach was a fatal quantity of chloroform, but, strangely, his throat and larynx showed no signs of the burning that liquid chloroform should have caused.

Bartlett’s wife, Adelaide, was having an open romance with George Dyson, a local minister. It transpired that she had induced him to buy chloroform at local pharmacies in quantities too small to provoke suspicion, ostensibly to help treat Edwin, who was undergoing painful dental surgeries.

At trial, Adelaide’s defense was simply that she had no way to get the chloroform into Edwin’s stomach without passing it down his throat. The jury let her go.

“Now that Mrs. Bartlett has been acquitted,” remarked pathologist Sir James Paget afterward, “she should tell us, in the interests of science, how she did it.” Adelaide made no response. The puzzle of Edwin’s death has never been solved.

On July 12, 1942, someone shot Max Geller, the owner of Harlem’s Green Parrot Restaurant. The restaurant was locally famous for its namesake parrot, who had a useful vocabulary and could greet regular patrons by name.

No customer could identify the killer, and the agitated bird would cry only “Robber! Robber!” As the investigation foundered, someone suggested that perhaps it was saying “Robert! Robert!”

On the list of Geller’s regular customers detectives found a Robert Butler, a cab driver who had disappeared after the shooting. They traced him to the Bethlehem Steel plant in Baltimore, and he confessed: He’d shot Geller in a drunken rage for refusing to serve him. He was convicted in February 1944 and sentenced to 15 years.

He said, “I never did like that bird.”

In 1902, 42-year-old Norwegian emigrant Belle Gunness bought an Indiana farm with $8,500 in insurance money she’d received when her husband and two children died. A second husband died after only nine months, and over the next six years a succession of prosperous suitors visited her farm and failed to return.

When the brother of one of these men grew suspicious, the farmhouse suddenly burned to the ground in April 1908. Firemen discovered the remains of four people stacked in the cellar: Three were Gunness’ children, but the fourth — an adult woman — was unidentifiable because its head was missing.

Investigation began to turn up butchered corpses buried around the property. Under questioning, farmhand Ray Lamphere said that Gunness would lure her victims to the farmhouse, drug them, kill them with an ax, and bury them in the hog pen or around the grounds.

It’s estimated that Gunness killed more than 40 people, making her one of America’s most prolific serial killers of either sex. Curiously, her own fate is uncertain — officially she was declared dead, but neighbors insisted the headless remains could not have been hers. Lamphere claimed she had staged her own death and absconded with $100,000 in stolen money. He may be right — there’s not enough surviving DNA to decide for certain.

The concept of forgery seems to be peculiarly inapplicable to the performing arts. It would be quite nonsensical to say, for example, that the man who played the Bach suites for unaccompanied cello and whom at the time we took to be Pablo Casals was in fact a forger. Similarly, we should want to argue that the term forgery was misused if we should read in the newspaper that Margot Fonteyn’s performance in Swan Lake last night was a forgery because as a matter of fact it was not Margot Fonteyn who danced last night, but rather some unknown person whom everyone mistook for Margot Fonteyn. Again, it is difficult to see in what sense a performance of, say, Oedipus Rex or Hamlet could be termed a forgery.

— Alfred Lessing, “What Is Wrong With a Forgery?” in Alex Neill and Aaron Ridley, eds., Arguing About Art, 1995

In the little town of Villisca, Iowa, 35-year-old Joe Moore, his wife, his four children, and two visiting daughters of a neighbor went to bed on June 9, 1912.

The following morning, all eight were dead.

“The parties were all killed with an axe which was found in the house, the axe belonging to Mr. Moore,” reported Iowa attorney general Horace Havner. “The window shades were all drawn and the doors covered with clothing so that no light could get out from the house. The mirrors in the house were also all covered. Not one of the parties received any injury below the neck but the heads of the victims were all beaten to a pulp, the head of Mr. Moore being mangled worse than the rest, although they were all beaten beyond the possibility of recognition.”

Ten years of investigations, grand juries, trials, and arguments produced no convictions. The case remains unsolved.

See Hinterkaifeck.