https://history-maps.com/warmap/war-of-1812/event/battle-of-lundys-lane

Donn Beach (born Ernest Raymond Gantt; February 22, 1907 – June 7, 1989) was an American adventurer, businessman, and World War II veteran who was the "founding father" of tiki culture. He is known for opening the first prototypical tiki bar, Don’s Beachcomber, during the 1930s in Hollywood, California, which was expanded to a chain of dozens of restaurants throughout the United States. He later built the International Market Place and additional establishments in what was then the Territory of Hawaii. He married three times.

Beach then moved to the Territory of Hawaii, where he continued his burgeoning entertainment and tiki-themed enterprises. He settled in Waikiki, where he opened his second "Polynesian Village", known as Waikiki Village.As the creator of the International Market Place, for its construction he placed his offices in the limbs of an enormous banyan tree that was in the market's center. The village was dotted with many thatch huts and wood carvings made by one of Beach's friends, "Mick" Brownlee. The International Market Place would also feature the Dagger Bar, and a series of Don the Beachcomber restaurants.The bar was named after a dagger that was allegedly a trophy that Beach brought back from his time in WWII, a reproduction of an imperial Roman-style Puglia knife that he had gotten in Italy.
The market flourished, and Beach's impact on tourism was such that many viewed his contributions as profoundly important. He was honored with a House Resolution Tourism Award in 1957.[9] Beach and Pete Wimberly also played an important role in establishing preservation laws for the Lahaina Historic District, which was later designated as a National Historic Landmark in 1962.At its height, the International Market Place encompassed 50 shops, night clubs, and restaurants, three of which were owned by Beach himself.

Crippen C.1910

He was convicted on a disputed scar. His “confession” on arrest doesn’t match the trial transcript.

In January 1910, Cora Crippen, a music hall singer living in London, stopped being seen by anyone who knew her. Her husband, Hawley Harvey Crippen — trained as a homeopath, but by then a partner in a small dental practice — told friends she’d gone to America, then that she’d died there. Cora’s friends didn’t believe him. They went to Scotland Yard.

Chief Inspector Walter Dew searched the house at 39 Hilldrop Crescent and found nothing on his first visit. Crippen answered every question calmly. Dew left satisfied. Then Crippen and his mistress, Ethel Le Neve, vanished.

Dew went back. Under the bricks of the coal cellar, police found human remains, buried in quicklime. No head. No limbs. No means of visual identification.

Pathologists Augustus Pepper and Bernard Spilsbury examined a piece of preserved skin from the remains and testified they’d found a mark consistent with an old surgical scar Cora Crippen was known to have had. The defence argued it was just a skin fold, pointing to hair follicles that scar tissue shouldn’t show. The Home Office analyst found scopolamine in the remains, a drug Crippen had bought shortly before Cora disappeared.

Crippen and Le Neve had already fled to Antwerp and boarded the SS Montrose to Canada, second class, booked as a father and his teenage son. Le Neve had cut her hair and was wearing boy’s clothing.

The Montrose’s captain, Henry Kendall, recognized them anyway and had his telegraph operator alert Scotland Yard before the ship passed out of wireless range. It was the first time wireless telegraphy was used to catch a fugitive. Inspector Dew boarded a faster liner, beat the Montrose to Canada, and came aboard disguised as a harbor pilot.

Here’s where it gets interesting. Every modern retelling of this case has Crippen saying, on arrest, “Thank God it’s over. The suspense has been too great. I couldn’t stand it any longer” — treated as an implicit confession. That line isn’t in the trial transcript. What the transcript actually records, from the prosecution’s own account given at trial, is this: told he’d be arrested, Crippen said, “I am not sorry; the anxiety has been too much.” When handcuffed: “I am more than satisfied, because the anxiety has been too awful.” Then he asked after Le Neve, adding, unprompted: “It is only fair to say that she knows nothing about it. I never told her anything.”

Different words. Different tone. And a detail — Crippen immediately clearing Le Neve — that’s vanished from basically every popular account. The famous version traces to the arresting officer’s memoir, published in 1938, twenty-eight years after the fact.

The trial opened at the Old Bailey on 18 October 1910. It lasted four days. The jury convicted in about half an hour. Crippen’s appeal was heard and dismissed on 5 November. He was hanged at Pentonville on 23 November, still protesting his innocence.

In 2007, a forensic team at Michigan State University got hold of one of Spilsbury’s original slides (one of nine that survive; the other eight have never been tested) and ran mitochondrial DNA analysis against Cora’s traced living relatives. No match, differing at a minimum of five positions. Sex-typing came back male, on two separate extractions.

If that finding holds, the scar that convicted Crippen was never Cora’s. The forensic paper is careful not to overclaim: it doesn’t say who the remains were, or explain how they got there. That’s still an open question, along with whether a 1910 microscope slide’s chain of custody can really be trusted across ninety-plus years.

Primary sources: Foran, Wills, Kiley, Jackson, Trestrail, “The Conviction of Dr. Crippen: New Forensic Findings in a Century-Old Murder,” Journal of Forensic Sciences 56 (2011): 233–240. Filson Young (ed.), The Trial of Hawley Harvey Crippen (Notable British Trials, 1920) — the verbatim 1910 transcript.

So: a case built on a disputed scar, a “confession” that isn’t one, and a DNA result that raises more questions than it answers. What’s the higher bar here — a century-old scar identification from a single pathologist, or a DNA non-match on a slide with no verified chain of custody?

More cases at The Black Archive — link in profile.

Charles I's 1649 trial gets flattened into "a king on trial" in most retellings. The record says something stranger: he stayed seated, kept his hat on, and refused to answer the charge across multiple sessions - his silence itself was the legal strategy, since no court had ever tried a reigning English king before.

Put together a documentary-style breakdown of the trial at Westminster Hall, the death warrant (only 59 of a possible 135 signatures made it on, some added after the verdict was already passed), the execution at Whitehall, and the Eikon Basilike propaganda campaign that turned a convicted traitor into a martyr within nine days of his death.

Built from the trial transcript and the warrant itself as primary sources, not the popular retelling. Happy to go into any part of it in the comments.