Crime in Time

The Portrait  On October 11, 1969, at 9:55 PM, a yellow taxi driven by 29-year old part-time journalist, part-time cabbie Paul Stine stopped near the corner of San Francisco’s Washington and Cherry Street. The passenger, the man who had named himself the Zodiac, shot Stine in the head, killing him instantly. Minutes later and a few hundred yards away, an 8-year old witness saw the man and recognized his face – or so he thought. The young witness identified the man as X., a 38-year old local who often went by a shortened version of his full first name. He shared it with a famed Greek playwright, philosopher and militarist, whose best-known work - the story of Greek soldiers caught behind enemy lines in ancient Persia - had just inspired a novel about troubled youth in New York's underworld of street gangs, and, in a decade, would serve as the basis for its legendary film adaptation, made by director Walter Hill. The information about X., who had ...

In April 1979 , a sudden outbreak of a deadly disease hit a large Russian city located 1400 kilometers east of Moscow. Today, the city is called Yekaterinburg; back then, it was known as Sverdlovsk. Hundreds of people and unknown numbers of pets and livestock were collapsing of fatigue, fever and shortness of breath. The black lesions that began appearing on their skin identified the illness even before the doctors confirmed it: it was anthrax. TASS, Russia’s chief news agency, reported the outbreak in a terse note which identified the reasons: tainted food sold in a local market illegally, without veterinarian approval, and, of course, taxing. Criminally amoral dealers had fed people meat from illegally butchered animals – most likely sheep, the press added – that were infected with anthrax, or possibly had even died of it. "Сибирская язва!" , warned the posters and placards posted all over the city. Сибирская язва , Siberian sore, was the commonly used nam...