In 2007, 15-year-old Carly Ryan was murdered by a 50-year-old man who had spent around 18 months pretending to be her teenage boyfriend online. Carly believed she was in love with “Brandon Kane,” an 18-year-old musician from Melbourne. Brandon did not exist. He was one of the fake identities created by Garry Francis Newman, an online predator who had been secretly grooming Carly through messages and phone calls. Newman even invented another identity, “Shane,” Brandon’s father, and used it to enter Carly’s real life. He attended her 15th birthday pretending to be Shane and later tried to s**ually approach her himself. Carly rejected him. Weeks later, Newman used the fake Brandon identity to lure her to Port Elliot, South Australia. On February 20, Carly’s body was found floating in shallow water at Horseshoe Bay. She had been beaten, suffocated and drowned. Eleven days later, police tracked Newman to Victoria. When officers found him, he was sitting at his computer logged in as “Brandon Kane”, talking to another 14-year-old girl. In 2010, Newman was convicted of Carly’s murder and sentenced to life in prison with a 29-year non-parole period. He later confessed after the jury had already found him guilty.

A nonprofit paid Samuel Scott’s bail after he was charged with domestic violence against his wife, Marcia. Just 45 minutes after leaving jail, he returned home and fatally beat her. Scott, 54, had been arrested days earlier for a January attack in which he struck 54-year-old Marcia Johnson in the face. He was also served with a protective order requiring him to stay at least 300 feet away from her. The St. Louis Bail Project then posted his $5,000 bond. By around 7:45 p.m. that evening, Scott had returned to Marcia’s home. He brutally beat her, leaving her unconscious with a broken eye socket, broken ribs and severe injuries across her body. Marcia never recovered. She died five days later. Scott was charged with first-degree murder. In April 2022, a jury found him guilty of murder, domestic assault and violating the protective order. He was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

In late 2022, 36-year-old Steven Spinale tried to remove an ingrown hair near his groin. Weeks later, doctors gave him just a 4% chance of survival. Steven developed a severe bacterial infection that entered his bloodstream and triggered septic shock. His organs began shutting down. He developed internal bleeding, double pneumonia and acute respiratory distress syndrome, while the infection damaged his heart and caused a small stroke. Doctors placed him in a medically induced coma and eventually performed open-heart surgery. At one point, his family were told he might not survive and feared he had suffered catastrophic brain damage. Steven remained unconscious for around three to four weeks. Then he woke up. He had survived, without the permanent brain damage his family had feared. The recovery was long. Steven initially left hospital in a wheelchair, but by the end of 2023 he was learning to walk again. Something as ordinary as removing an ingrown hair had nearly cost him his life.

Ann Hathaway aged 17 vs 41. She won Best Supporting Actress at the 2013 Oscars for playing Fantine in Les Misérables. Les Misérables, Anne Hathaway pushed her body to an extreme to make Fantine look “near death.” She lost 10 pounds before filming, then another 15 pounds in just two weeks, reportedly eating only two thin squares of dried oatmeal paste a day. Hathaway later called the experience “a break with reality” and said she was left in a state of physical and emotional deprivation.

In December 2024, 14-year-old Emmarae Gervasi disappeared from her Long Island home barefoot and without a jacket. For 26 days, her father, Frank, barely stopped searching. He offered a $15,000 reward, flooded social media with pleas for information and followed every lead he could find. Then, on January 3, 2025, he received a tip. Emmarae was supposedly being held on a boat docked in Islip. Frank drove there himself. Before police even arrived, he forced his way onto the vessel and found his daughter alive inside. “I did find her myself before the police got there,” he later said. “It was 26 days of hell.” Police soon arrested Francis Buckheit. Prosecutors later alleged Emmarae had been held on his 56-foot boat for weeks and s**ually ab*sed there. Then the case widened. Other suspects were arrested on allegations that Emmarae had been se*ually exploited for drugs and money while she was missing. By August 2026, authorities had arrested 13 people connected to the case, and at least one defendant had pleaded guilty to sex trafficking. After nearly a month missing, Emmarae’s father was the person who finally opened the door and brought her home.

XXXTentacion’s son Gekyume keeps a Photoshopped photo with his late father as his phone wallpaper. XXXTentacion died seven months before his son Gekyume was born, so the two never got a single real photograph together. The rapper, whose real name was Jahseh Onfroy, was shot and killed on June 18, 2018, aged just 20. At the time, his girlfriend Jenesis Sanchez was pregnant with their child.

In August 1977, Elvis Presley was buried at Forest Hill Cemetery in Memphis. Less than two weeks later, police received information that men were plotting to steal his body and hold it for ransom. Officers secretly staked out the cemetery. On August 29, several suspects were arrested near the gates during what police described as an apparent trial run for breaking into the mausoleum. Contemporary reports even claimed explosives had been found, although police did not publicly confirm that detail. The scare convinced Elvis’s family that the public cemetery was no longer secure enough. His father, Vernon Presley, petitioned officials for permission to bury Elvis on the grounds of Graceland instead. Permission was granted. On October 2, 1977, Elvis and his mother Gladys were quietly reburied in Graceland’s Meditation Garden. The grave-robbing plot helped turn Elvis’s own home into his permanent resting place.

After Tupac Shakur passed in September 1996, members of the Outlawz mixed some of his cremated ashes with marijuana, and smoked them. The group held a memorial for Tupac on a beach, bringing things he loved including weed, chicken wings and orange soda. Then came the unusual tribute. Young Noble and E.D.I. Mean later confirmed that some of Tupac’s ashes were mixed into marijuana and smoked by members of the group. They believed they were honouring something Tupac himself had requested. On the song “Black Jesus,” Tupac referenced wanting his friends to smoke his ashes after his death. E.D.I. Mean later admitted they had no idea how literally Tupac meant it. They took it literally anyway.

Robert Downey Jr. photographed after being sentenced to 3 years in prison. In the late 1990s, years of drug addiction, arrests, rehab and prison had made him so risky that Hollywood studios struggled to insure him. He got sober years before Iron Man, but the 2008 movie resurrected his career. Downey was reportedly paid just $500,000 for the first Iron Man. Four years later, The Avengers earned him around $50 million. He was even paid $10M for only 8 minutes of screen time in ‘Spider-Man: Homecoming’. His original Marvel run eventually brought him an estimated $500–600 million. Now, after Tony Stark’s death, he’s returning to Marvel as Doctor Doom. Forbes reports Marvel is guaranteeing him more than $100 million across Avengers: Doomsday and Secret Wars, before performance bonuses.

On February 11, 2012, Whitney Houston was found unresponsive in a bathtub at the Beverly Hilton Hotel and pronounced dead that day. Less than three years later, her daughter suffered a very similar fate. On January 31, 2015, 21-year-old Bobbi Kristina Brown was found face-down and unresponsive in a bathtub at her Georgia home. She never regained consciousness. Bobbi Kristina remained in care for almost six months before dying on July 26, 2015, aged 22. Her autopsy found that dr*g intoxication combined with water immersion caused severe brain damage, eventually leading to fatal pneumonia. A mother and daughter, both found unresponsive in bathtubs less than three years apart.

In July 2022, West Virginia mother Rebakah Weikle murdered her four-year-old daughter Haley because prosecutors said she had become jealous of the attention her husband gave the child. In the weeks beforehand, Weikle had searched online for information about stabbing, knife wounds and how lethal certain injuries could be. On the night of July 11, she followed Haley into her bedroom with a knife. Prosecutors said she held the little girl down, stabbed her in the chest and cut her throat. She then hid the knife and her bloody clothing. Haley’s body remained in the bedroom overnight. Weikle later woke her husband and had s*x with him while their daughter lay dead nearby. The following morning, when he asked her to check on Haley, Weikle told him she was dead. For years, she tried to blame her husband for the killing. But phone evidence eventually helped prove otherwise. In April 2026, Weikle pleaded guilty to first-degree murder and child abuse resulting in death and admitted she alone had killed Haley. She received two consecutive life sentences. She will not become eligible for parole until she has served at least 30 years.

When Albert Einstein died in 1955, pathologist Thomas Harvey performed his autopsy, then removed Einstein’s brain without his family’s permission and kept it for himself. Einstein had specifically wanted his body cremated so it could not become a shrine. Harvey preserved the brain, photographed it and eventually had it divided into roughly 240 tissue blocks, with thousands of microscopic slides prepared for researchers. Einstein’s son Hans Albert only gave permission afterward, on the condition that the brain be used for legitimate scientific research. Harvey then refused to surrender the tissue when Princeton Hospital demanded it back. He was eventually fired. For decades, pieces of Einstein’s brain followed Harvey wherever he went, at one point sitting in jars inside a cider box beneath a beer cooler. Then, in the 1990s, the story became even stranger. Harvey travelled across America with journalist Michael Paterniti while pieces of Einstein’s brain rode in the trunk of their Buick, stored inside a container in a duffel bag.

Tobey Maguire was once asked what he would legalize if he became president. His answer was “Assaulting abusive paparazzi.”

In January 2020, Sauntore Thomas received $99,000 after settling a racial-discrimination lawsuit, then had police called on him when he tried to deposit the money. The 44-year-old Detroit Air Force veteran walked into his TCF Bank branch carrying three legitimate settlement checks worth $59,000, $27,000 and $13,000. He also wanted to open a savings account. Instead, an assistant manager became suspicious and allegedly asked: “How did you get this money?” The bank refused to accept the checks and called police over suspected fraud. Four officers responded. Thomas even contacted his attorney, who offered paperwork proving the money came from a legitimate federal lawsuit settlement. He was not arrested or charged. Thomas closed his TCF account, walked into a Chase branch about an hour later and deposited the same checks without a problem. The money cleared by the following morning. Then Thomas sued TCF Bank for racial discrimination too. TCF publicly apologised and admitted that police “should not have been involved.”

On April 12, 2026, 30-year-old Grecia Guadalupe Orantes Mendoza disappeared in Chiapas, Mexico. Police launched an urgent search. Then they ran into an unexpected problem. The photographs being circulated of Grecia were so heavily filtered that they looked dramatically different from her real face. Authorities and members of the public were effectively searching for a woman who didn’t look like the person on the poster. The Alba Protocol was activated, and search teams spread out across the region while her photograph circulated online. Three days later, Grecia was found alive and unharmed on a highway between Ocozocoautla and Jiquipilas. She was given medical attention and taken to authorities to explain the circumstances of her disappearance.

In March 1978, just two months after Charlie Chaplin was buried in Switzerland, two unemployed mechanics dug up his coffin and tried to ransom his body back to his widow. The men were 24-year-old Polish mechanic Roman Wardas and 38-year-old Bulgarian mechanic Gantscho Ganev. They stole Chaplin’s 135kg oak coffin from the cemetery at Corsier-sur-Vevey and buried it in a cornfield roughly 12 miles away. Then Wardas began calling Chaplin’s widow, Oona, demanding around $600,000. She refused to pay. Instead, police tapped the family’s phone while Oona’s lawyer pretended to negotiate. The kidnappers kept calling from different public payphones, forcing police to simultaneously watch around 200 phone booths across Lausanne. On May 16, officers finally caught Wardas as he made another ransom call. There was one problem. The men could no longer remember exactly where they had buried Chaplin. Police eventually used metal detectors to locate the coffin’s metal handles beneath the cornfield. Chaplin was reburied in his original cemetery, this time beneath roughly two metres of reinforced concrete to make sure nobody could steal him again. Wardas received four-and-a-half years in prison, while Ganev received an 18-month suspended sentence.

Christa Pike is still alive more than an hour after receiving two doses of lethal injection drugs. Pike had been on death row for three decades for the 1995 murder of 19-year-old student Colleen Slemmer. Pike was just 18 when she and two other teenagers lured Slemmer into woods in Knoxville, where she was beaten, cut and ultimately killed. A pentagram was carved into her body. In 1996, Pike was sentenced to death at age 20, becoming the youngest woman sentenced to death in Tennessee’s modern era. Thirty years later, she was scheduled to become the first woman executed by Tennessee in at least two centuries. A federal appeals court issued a last-minute stay, but the U.S. Supreme Court later cleared the state to proceed. Officials then gave Pike two doses of pentobarbital. At 7:49 p.m., witnesses could hear her loudly snoring. The curtain was closed again at 8:06 p.m. She continued to be heard breathing and snoring behind it until officials cut the microphone at around 8:53 p.m. and escorted media witnesses from the prison.

Texas mother Alyse Ogletree donated so much breast milk that her donations have helped provide milk for more than 350,000 premature babies. It started in 2010 after the birth of her first son. Alyse realised she was producing far more milk than he needed and was initially throwing the excess away. Then a hospital nurse told her she could donate it. She began pumping consistently, often every three to four hours, and continued donating after later pregnancies and even after serving as a surrogate. By July 2023, Alyse had donated 2,645.58 litres to Mothers’ Milk Bank of North Texas alone. That was enough to reclaim the Guinness World Record at the time, nearly doubling the 1,569.79 litres that had first earned her the title in 2014. She also donated tens of thousands of additional ounces through another milk bank and directly to families. Mothers’ Milk Bank told Alyse that one donated ounce could provide feedings for roughly three premature babies. Using that estimate, she calculated that her milk had helped feed more than 350,000 babies. For Alyse, it was simply the most valuable thing she could give away for free.

On May 2, 2026, 39-year-old Yanira Nafin was allegedly shot dead by her husband after he became angry that she wasn’t taking his back pain seriously enough. Deputies were called to the couple’s home in Cloverleaf, Texas, shortly after 1 p.m. Inside, they found Yanira suffering from a gunshot wound. She was pronounced dead at the scene. Her husband, 43-year-old Jose Arquimides Romero, remained at the house and was taken into custody. Harris County Sheriff Ed Gonzalez said investigators believe the argument escalated because Romero felt Yanira was dismissing the pain in his back. Their three children were also inside the home. When the shooting began, they ran and hid. None of them were physically injured. Romero was charged with murder and booked into the Harris County Jail.

On April 17, 2026, 43-year-old Matthew Lee Pasco rushed to help his wife as she was being mauled by dogs near a homeless camp in Leesburg, Florida, then allegedly shot the dogs’ owner dead. Pasco reportedly heard his wife screaming, grabbed a handgun from his tent and went outside intending to stop the attack. But according to a later police affidavit, when 36-year-old Shawn Cyriacks told him not to shoot the dogs, Pasco allegedly replied: “You think I won’t shoot you, too?” Investigators say Pasco then pointed the gun at Cyriacks and shot him in the chest. Cyriacks was rushed to hospital but died from his injuries. Pasco allegedly fled on a bicycle while police launched a search involving helicopters, drones and K-9 units. He was arrested two days later. A grand jury later indicted him for premeditated first-degree murder with a firearm and possession of a firearm by a convicted felon. What first appeared to be a shooting during an attempt to stop a dog attack is now being prosecuted as an intentional killing.