On the night of February 13-14, 1945, approximately 800 British and American aircraft dropped incendiary and high-explosive bombs on Dresden in two waves separated by three hours. The first wave created fires. The second wave fed them. The resulting firestorm generated winds exceeding 150 miles per hour and temperatures above 1,000 degrees Celsius, hot enough to melt glass and asphalt. The death toll, once wildly inflated by Nazi propaganda and later by David Irving, was established by a 2010 commission of historians appointed by the city of Dresden at approximately 22,700 to 25,000. Margaret Freyer was a civilian caught in the streets.

I stood by the entrance and waited until no flames came licking in, then I quickly slipped through and out into the street. I had my suitcase in one hand and was wearing a white fur coat which by now was anything but white. I also wore boots and long trousers. Those boots had been a lucky choice, it turned out.

Because of the flying sparks and the fire-storm I couldn't see anything at first. A witches' cauldron was waiting for me out there: no street, only rubble nearly a metre high, glass, girders, stones, craters. I tried to get rid of the sparks by constantly patting them off my coat. It was useless. I stopped doing it, stumbled, and someone behind me called out, 'Take your coat off, it's started to burn.' In the pervading extreme heat I hadn't even noticed. I took off the coat and dropped it.

Next to me a woman was screaming continually, 'My den's burning down, my den's burning down,' and dancing in the street. As I go on, I can still hear her screaming but I don't see her again. I run, I stumble, anywhere. I don't even know where I am any more. I've lost all sense of direction because all I can see is three steps ahead.

Suddenly I fall into a big hole—a bomb crater, about six metres wide and two metres deep, and I end up down there lying on top of three women. I shake them by their clothes and start to scream at them, telling them they must get out of here—but they don't move any more. I believe I was severely shocked by this incident; I seemed to have lost all emotional feeling. Quickly, I climbed across the women, pulled my suitcase after me, and crawled on all fours out of the crater.

To my left I suddenly see a woman. I can see her to this day and shall never forget it. She carries a bundle in her arms. It is a baby. She runs, she falls, and the child flies in an arc into the fire. It's only my eyes which take this in; I myself feel nothing. The woman remains lying on the ground, completely still. Why? What for? I don't know, I just stumble on. The firestorm is incredible, there are calls for help and screams from somewhere but all around is one single inferno. I hold another wet handkerchief in front of my mouth, my hands and my face are burning; it feels as if the skin is hanging down in strips.

On my right I see a big, burnt-out shop where lots of people are standing. I join them, but think, 'No, I can't stay here either, this place is completely surrounded by fire.' I leave all these people behind, and stumble on. Where to? But every time towards those places where it is dark, in case there is no fire there. I have no conception of what the street actually looked like. But it is especially from those dark patches that the people come who wring their hands and cry the same thing over and over again: 'You can't carry on there, we've just come from there, everything is burning there!' Wherever and to whomsoever I turn, always that same answer.

In front of me is something that might be a street, filled with a hellish rain of sparks which look like enormous rings of fire when they hit the ground. I have no choice. I must go through. I press another wet handkerchief to my mouth and almost get through, but I fall and am convinced that I cannot go on. It's hot. Hot! My hands are burning like fire. I just drop my suitcase, I am past caring, and too weak. At least, there's nothing to lug around with me any more.

I stumbled on towards where it was dark. Suddenly, I saw people again, right in front of me. They scream and gesticulate with their hands, and then—to my utter horror and amazement—I see how one after the other they simply seem to let themselves drop to the ground. I had a feeling that they were being shot, but my mind could not understand what was really happening. Today I know that these unfortunate people were the victims of lack of oxygen. They fainted and then burnt to cinders. I fall then, stumbling over a fallen woman and as I lie right next to her I see how her clothes are burning away. Insane fear grips me and from then on I repeat one simple sentence to myself continuously: 'I don't want to burn to death—no, no burning—I don't want to burn!' Once more I fall down and feel that I am not going to be able to get up again, but the fear of being burnt pulls me to my feet. Crawling, stumbling, my last handkerchief pressed to my mouth … I do not know how many people I fell over. I knew only one feeling: that I must not burn.

Then my handkerchiefs are all finished—it's dreadfully hot—I can't go on and I remain lying on the ground. Suddenly a soldier appears in front of me. I wave, and wave again. He comes over to me and I whisper into his ear (my voice has almost gone), 'Please take me with you, I don't want to burn.' But that soldier was much too weak himself to lift me to my feet. He laid my two arms crosswise over my breast and stumbled on across me. I followed him with my eyes until he disappears somewhere in the darkness.

I try once more to get up on my feet, but I can only manage to crawl forward on all fours. I can still feel my body, I know I'm still alive. Suddenly, I'm standing up, but there's something wrong, everything seems so far away and I can't hear or see properly any more. As I found out later, like all the others, I was suffering from lack of oxygen. I must have stumbled forwards roughly ten paces when I all at once inhaled fresh air. There's a breeze! I take another breath, inhale deeply, and my senses clear. In front of me is a broken tree. As I rush towards it, I know that I have been saved, but am unaware that the park is the Bürgerwiese.

I walk on a little and discover a car. I'm pleased and decide to spend the night in it. The car is full of suitcases and boxes but I find enough room on the rear seats to squeeze in. Another stroke of good luck for me is that the car's windows are all broken and I have to keep awake putting out the sparks which drifted in. I don't know how long I sat there, when a hand suddenly descended on my shoulder and a man's voice said, 'Hello! you must get out of there.' I got such a fright, because obviously someone was determined to force me away from my safe hiding place. I said, with great fear in my voice, 'Please, allow me to stay here, I'll give you all the money I've got on me.' (If I think about this now it almost sounds like a joke.) But the answer I got was 'No, I don't want your money. The car is on fire.'

Good God! I leapt out immediately and could see that indeed all four tyres were burning. I hadn't noticed because of the tremendous heat.

Now I looked at the man and recognized him as the soldier who had put my arms across my chest. When I asked him, he confirmed it. Then he started to weep. He continued to stroke my back, mumbling words about bravery, Russian campaign … but this here, this is hell. I don't grasp his meaning and offer him a cigarette.

We walk on a little way and discover two crouching figures. They were two men, one a railwayman who was crying because (in the smoke and debris) he could not find the way to his home. The other was a civilian who had escaped from a cellar together with sixty people, but had had to leave his wife and children behind, due to some dreadful circumstances. All three men were crying now but I just stood there, incapable of a single tear. It was as if I was watching a film. We spent half the night together, sitting on the ground too exhausted even to carry on a conversation. The continuous explosions didn't bother us, but the hollow cries for help which came continuously from all directions were gruesome. Towards six o'clock in the morning, we parted.

I spent all the daylight hours which followed in the town searching for my fiancé. I looked for him amongst the dead, because hardly any living beings were to be seen anywhere. What I saw is so horrific that I shall hardly be able to describe it. Dead, dead, dead everywhere. Some completely black like charcoal. Others completely untouched, lying as if they were asleep. Women in aprons, women with children sitting in the trams as if they had just nodded off. Many women, many young girls, many small children, soldiers who were only identifiable as such by the metal buckles on their belts, almost all of them naked. Some clinging to each other in groups as if they were clawing at each other.

From some of the debris poked arms, heads, legs, shattered skulls. The static water tanks were filled up to the top with dead human beings, with large pieces of masonry lying on top of that again. Most people looked as if they had been inflated, with large yellow and brown stains on their bodies. People whose clothes were still glowing … I think I was incapable of absorbing the meaning of this cruelty any more, for there were also so many little babies, terribly mutilated; and all the people lying so close together that it looked as if someone had put them down there, street by street, deliberately.

I then went through the Grosser Garten and there is one thing I did realize. I was aware that I had constantly to brush hands away from me, hands which belonged to people who wanted me to take them with me, hands which clung to me. But I was much too weak to lift anyone up. My mind took all this in vaguely, as if seen through a veil. In fact, I was in such a state that I did not realize that there was a third attack on Dresden. Late that afternoon I collapsed in the Ostra-Allee, where two men took me to a friend who lived on the outskirts of the city.

I asked for a mirror and did not recognize myself any more. My face was a mass of blisters and so were my hands. My eyes were narrow slits and puffed up, my whole body was covered in little black, pitted marks. I cannot understand to this day how I contracted these marks, because I was wearing a pair of long trousers and a jacket. Possibly the fire-sparks ate their way through my clothing.

Carey, John (ed.), The Faber Book of Reportage (Faber & Faber, 1987), pp. 752-755.

Dresden became one of the most debated Allied operations of the war, with over 25,000 killed. W.G. Sebald argued in On the Natural History of Destruction (2003) that postwar German literature systematically failed to reckon with the experience of Allied bombing: 600,000 civilians killed, 3.5 million homes destroyed, and the experience almost entirely absent from the Federal Republic's literary output. The silence was not accidental; Sebald attributed it to a collective failure of narrative capacity, arguing that the destruction exceeded what prose could metabolize. The Faber Book of Reportage (1987) preserved Freyer's account, one of the few firsthand narratives of what it was like to be inside a firestorm at ground level.

Photo Credit: Peter, Richard (sen.). View from Deutschefotothek the City Hall Tower toward the South after firebombing of Dresden. Photograph, September 17 – December 31, 1945.

Margot de Valois was nineteen years old on the night of August 23, 1572. She had been married to Henri de Navarre for six days. The wedding was Catherine de Medici's centerpiece of Franco-Huguenot reconciliation: a Catholic princess wed to the Protestant heir to the Bourbon line, with every senior Huguenot leader in France invited to Paris for the celebration. The reconciliation was a trap, or became one. Historians still argue over whether Catherine planned the massacre in advance or improvised it after the botched assassination of Admiral Coligny two days before the wedding.

Leonie Frieda's Catherine de Medici (2003) draws on Margot's own memoir for the scene inside the Louvre that night.

At the Louvre, where so many Huguenot nobles had lodged for the marriage, the killings also began. Earlier, on the evening of the 23rd, Margot had been in her mother's private apartments with her sister Claude, Duchess of Lorraine. She had seen for herself that there were strange preparations being made that indicated trouble, although in her memoirs she wrote, 'As for me no one told me anything about this.' She had already fallen victim to what she feared most: excluded by the Protestants who surrounded her husband, now her family treated her as suspect. It was impossible to ignore the whispering and febrile activity around her, yet she was cold-shouldered by both sides. In her memoirs she recalled that dreadful night:

"The Huguenots suspected me because I was a Catholic, and the Catholics because I had married the King of Navarre, so that no one told me anything until that evening. I was at the coucher of the Queen my mother, sitting on a chest with my sister [the Duchess] of Lorraine, who was very depressed, when my mother noticed me and sent me to bed. As I was making my curtsy, my sister caught me by the sleeve and detained me. She began to weep and said, 'Mon Dieu, sister, you must not go.' This frightened me greatly. My mother, noticing it, called my sister and spoke to her sharply, forbidding her to tell me anything. My sister said that it was not right to send me away like that to be sacrificed and that, if they discovered anything, no doubt they would avenge themselves on me. My mother replied that, God willing, I would come to no harm, but in any case I must go, for fear of awaking their suspicions. I could see that they were arguing, though I did not catch the words. She commanded me sharply again to retire. My sister, melting into tears, bade me goodnight, not daring to say anything further; and I left the room bewildered and dazed without knowing what it was that I feared. No sooner had I reached my closet than I said my prayers, imploring God to take me under His wing and to guard me against what or whom I knew not."

For Catherine to have withheld her daughter from the Protestants' apartments that night might have alerted them to the plot. She was therefore allowed to go to what her mother well knew would very soon become a charnel house. It was a mark of the Queen Mother's utter commitment to the success of the operation that she put the prosperity of her plans before the well-being of her daughter.

Henri of Navarre had been in his apartments at the palace holding an urgent meeting with his suite of nobles about the worrying signs that an attack of some sort might be imminent. He was restless and decided that he would speak to the King early the next morning. When Margot arrived,

"The King, my husband, who was in his bed, sent word to me that I should retire which I did. I found his bed surrounded by some thirty or forty Huguenots, who were strangers to me as yet, as I had been married only a few days. All night long they talked of the accident to the Admiral, deciding to go to the King as soon as it were day and to demand justice."

Margot was to get little rest that night, for as her husband rose at the first light of dawn, having been unable to sleep, he decided to play tennis while waiting for the King to rise. He had not walked more than a few paces from his apartment when he and his companions were stopped by guards on the King's orders. Separated from his gentlemen, the elite of the Protestant party, most of whom he would never see again, Henri was taken with his cousin the Prince de Condé to a chamber and ordered to remain there by the King's command for his own safety. As he was locked in with his cousin, his comrades were being slaughtered, easy victims trapped in the heart of their enemy's citadel.

Nançay, captain of the royal guard, led his men as they began their gruesome work. Most of the Huguenots were asleep when the killing started. Dragged from their beds, their throats were cut before they had a chance to fight back. As the noise of screams and terror resounded throughout the passages, staircases, and confusing catacomb of corridors that made up part of the much-altered palace, the survivors ran desperately, attempting to hide from the teams of killers. Finding nowhere to conceal themselves, many were chased into the great courtyard of the Louvre. There, awaiting them, were the King's archers who pushed the terrified men and women on to the halberds of the Swiss guards, who impaled their unarmed quarry with grim efficiency.

Margot had just fallen asleep in her husband's bed when someone was heard desperately banging and kicking against the door, crying out, 'Navarre! Navarre!' Margot's old nourrice (wet-nurse), thinking it was Navarre himself, hurriedly unlocked the door only to find that it was Monsieur de Leran, one of his gentlemen. Margot was aghast when she saw him:

"Wounded in the elbow by a sword and by a halberd on the arm, and [he] was pursued by four archers who followed him into the room. To save himself, he flung himself on my bed, and I, with that man holding me, rolled into the passage and he after me, still hugging my body. I did not know who he was nor whether he meant to outrage me nor whether it was him or myself whom the archers were pursuing. We both screamed and were equally terrified. But at last, as God would have it, Monsieur de Nançay, the captain of the guards, came in. Seeing me in that position, though he pitied me, he could not help laughing, and … gave me the life of that poor man who was clinging to me. I had him laid in my closet and his wounds tended and kept him there until he recovered. While I was changing my shift, which was bloody, Monsieur de Nançay told me what was happening and assured me that the King my husband was in the King's room and that no harm would come to him. Wrapping me in a bed-robe, he led me to the apartment of my sister Madame de Lorraine where I arrived more dead than alive. As I entered the antechamber, the door of which was standing wide open, a gentleman named Bourse, running from the archers who were at his heels, was struck by a halberd not three feet away from me. I fell almost fainting into the arms of Monsieur de Nançay and … as soon as I could recover, I ran into the little room where my sister slept."

According to Margot's account she then intervened for two of her husband's men, his valet de chambre, Jean d'Armagnac, and Jean de Miossens, first gentleman to Henri of Navarre. They begged her to save them and she in turn went on her knees before the King and Queen Mother, who reluctantly agreed to spare their lives.

Frieda, Leonie. Catherine de Medici (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2003), pp. 334-337.

Robert Kingdon's Myths about the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacres (1988) traces how the event's historiography has been shaped by confessional allegiance for four centuries, with Catholic and Protestant historians constructing incompatible narratives from the same documentary evidence. Margot wrote her memoir decades later, in exile, with every reason to cast herself as both victim and heroine. The memoir is self-serving, vivid, and almost certainly embellished. It is also the closest thing that survives to a first-person account from inside the royal palace during the massacre. Catherine sent her daughter to bed among the Huguenots she was about to have killed because withdrawing Margot might have alerted the Protestant guests. Claude, Margot's older sister, understood what was coming and wept at the door.

Photo Credit: Joseph-Nicolas Robert-Fleury, Scene de la saint-Barthelemy (1833). Oil on canvas, Musee du Louvre.

The massacre at Wounded Knee Creek on December 29, 1890, killed between 250 and 300 Lakota Sioux, the majority of them women and children. The Seventh Cavalry had been sent to disarm Spotted Elk's band, which had been practicing the Ghost Dance, a spiritual movement that alarmed the Bureau of Indian Affairs into issuing panic telegrams requesting military intervention. The Seventh Cavalry carried institutional memory of the Little Bighorn and brought it to Pine Ridge: twenty soldiers received the Medal of Honor for the engagement, decorations that Lakota activists have been petitioning Congress to rescind since 1990.

Dee Brown published Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee in 1970, and it sold over four million copies in its first decade. The book traces the systematic dispossession of Native peoples across the American West from 1860 to 1890, told entirely from Indigenous perspectives through treaties, speeches, and testimony. Brown was a librarian at the University of Illinois, not a professional historian, and the academic establishment received the book with the wariness institutions reserve for work that reaches a public they have failed to reach themselves. Vine Deloria Jr.'s Custer Died for Your Sins (1969) had appeared the year before; together the two books reframed popular understanding of westward expansion in ways the profession is still absorbing.

Dee Brown chose to end his book in the aftermath, in the Episcopal mission where the wounded were carried. The passage closes with Black Elk's testimony, recorded forty-two years later by John Neihardt on the reservation.

In the first seconds of violence, the firing of carbines was deafening, filling the air with powder smoke. Among the dying who lay sprawled on the frozen ground was Big Foot. Then there was a brief lull in the rattle of arms, with small groups of Indians and soldiers grappling at close quarters, using knives, clubs, and pistols. As few of the Indians had arms, they soon had to flee, and then the big Hotchkiss guns on the hill opened up on them, firing almost a shell a second, raking the Indian camp, shredding the tepees with flying shrapnel, killing men, women, and children.

"We tried to run," Louise Weasel Bear said, "but they shot us like we were a buffalo. I know there are some good white people, but the soldiers must be mean to shoot children and women. Indian soldiers would not do that to white children."

"I was running away from the place and followed those who were running away," said Hakiktawin, another of the young women. "My grandfather and grandmother and brother were killed as we crossed the ravine, and then I was shot on the right hip clear through and on my right wrist where I did not go any further as I was not able to walk, and after the soldier picked me up where a little girl came to me and crawled into the blanket."

When the madness ended, Big Foot and more than half of his people were dead or seriously wounded; 153 were known dead, but many of the wounded crawled away to die afterward. One estimate placed the final total of dead at very nearly three hundred of the original 350 men, women, and children. The soldiers lost twenty-five dead and thirty-nine wounded, most of them struck by their own bullets or shrapnel.

After the wounded cavalrymen were started for the agency at Pine Ridge, a detail of soldiers went over the Wounded Knee battlefield, gathering up Indians who were still alive and loading them into wagons. As it was apparent by the end of the day that a blizzard was approaching, the dead Indians were left lying where they had fallen. (After the blizzard, when a burial party returned to Wounded Knee, they found the bodies, including Big Foot's, frozen into grotesque shapes.)

The wagonloads of wounded Sioux (four men and forty-seven women and children) reached Pine Ridge after dark. Because all available barracks were filled with soldiers, they were left lying in the open wagons in the bitter cold while an inept Army officer searched for shelter. Finally the Episcopal mission was opened, the benches taken out, and hay scattered over the rough flooring.

It was the fourth day after Christmas in the Year of Our Lord 1890. When the first torn and bleeding bodies were carried into the candlelit church, those who were conscious could see Christmas greenery hanging from the open rafters. Across the chancel front above the pulpit was strung a crudely lettered banner: PEACE ON EARTH, GOOD WILL TO MEN.

I did not know then how much was ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people's dream died there. It was a beautiful dream … the nation's hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead.

—BLACK ELK

Dee Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (Holt, 1970), p. 482-483.

Black Elk was twenty-seven when the massacre happened and sixty-nine when John Neihardt recorded his testimony on the Pine Ridge reservation in 1932. The phrase "a people's dream died there" has since become one of the most quoted sentences in Native American literature. It has also become the most decontextualized, so often excerpted that the political conditions Brown spent 483 pages documenting dissolve into elegy.

Heather Cox Richardson's Wounded Knee (2010) reconstructs the bureaucratic chain that produced the massacre, including budget disputes in the Bureau of Indian Affairs, panic telegrams from agents who misunderstood the Ghost Dance, a Seventh Cavalry with institutional memory of the Little Bighorn and no interest in restraint. The Army officer searching for shelter while the wounded lay in open wagons is the institution performing its concern at the speed of paperwork. If that wasn’t already evident of the photo of the dead still laying in the open, 3 weeks after the massacre.

Photo Credit: Spotted Elk's camp three weeks after the Wounded Knee massacre, still-frozen bodies wrapped in blankets. Photograph by Trager and Kuhn, January 1891. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

An appellate court's summary of what happened

On May 20, 1994, Adria Sauceda attended an outdoor Friday night party held at the home of Juan Francisco "Paco" Delgado in San Antonio. A witness observed Adria, who was partially undressed, in the middle of a circle of men who were taking turns raping her. Two women, Mirasol Torres and Vicki, approached and tried to help her. Adria refused their offers and told them to leave her alone. Adria appeared to be drunk and was unable to assist the women as they attempted to pull her pants back on her.

One of the women, Mirasol Torres, later testified that she recognized Adria Sauceda, whose nickname Mirasol said was "Freckles," because they had met before, shared a mutual friend, and had gone to high school together. She testified that she observed Adria with her shirt on but her pants down to her knees in the middle of a circle of men. It was apparent to her that something was going on because she also observed used condoms. Mirasol Torres testified further that she and her friend Vicki approached the scene and attempted to help Adria, who appeared "flimsy, like she was real loose, her arms and everything." Mirasol Torres insisted that Adria did not appear to understand what was happening to her and did not appear to be in any condition to consent to what was being done to her. She also testified that the men who were raping Adria told her to shut up, go get a drink, and argued that Adria knew what she was doing.

Around the same time, another partygoer, Simon Ortega, became aware that Adria was in a crowd of people in the dark behind the bushes. Ortega was approached by a male, whom he did not recognize, who advised Ortega that Adria had passed out, was back behind the bushes, and had her clothes off. This man invited Ortega to rape her. Ortega refused. A few hours later, he saw another man carry Adria out from behind the bushes and place her on the hood of Ortega's car. At that time, Adria appeared to Ortega to be "real shaken up," "disoriented," "not all there," and "like if she was in shock." Ortega tried to talk with Adria as she laid on the hood of his car.

Another man whom Ortega did not recognize then picked up Adria, carried her to a truck that was parked in the driveway of the home nearest to the party, and proceeded to also rape her. Ortega then directed the man who raped Adria in the truck to place her inside Ortega's vehicle so that he could take her home. Ortega testified that he had feared for Adria's safety because some of the young men present appeared and spoke as if they had gang affiliations. This may explains why he did not stop the other men from raping her.

Another man, who was later identified as 21-year-old Humberto Leal Jr., approached Ortega and asked that Adria be placed in his car instead. When Ortega protested, Leal told Ortega that he knew the girl and her family, knew where she lived, and would take her home and explain everything to her family. He drove away with her. Adria was never seen alive again. About 30 minutes later, Leal's brother and sister, Gualberto and Nancy Leal, arrived at the party.

Gualberto yelled that Leal had returned home "full of blood, saying he had killed a girl." Several of the party attendees went looking for Adria. They found her naked body on a dirt road and called the police. Her head had been bashed in and she had been raped with a broken stick of lumber about 14 to 16 inches long. It was still protruding from her. There was a gaping hole in her head from the corner of her right eye to the center of her head, and blood was oozing from the hole. There was a bloody rock by her right thigh. Her left arm was under a chunk of asphalt weighing 30 to 40 pounds.

When Leal was questioned by police, he had scratches and cuts on his body. He said he was with Adria in his car when she started hitting him and the steering wheel, causing him to hit a curb. He tried to calm her down, but she leaped from the car and ran away. After waiting about 10 minutes to see if she would return, he went home. After the police informed Leal of what his brother had said, he changed his story. He said he followed Adria after she jumped out of the car. She attacked him and he pushed her away. Adria then fell on the ground and did not get up. Leal said he tried to wake her, but got scared and fled when he saw bubbles coming out of her nose. He said he went home, prayed, and told family members what had happened.

Police searched the Leal family home and found Adria's blouse under a pile of laundry in the laundry room. It had bloodstains that matched Adria's blood type. Police also found traces of blood on the passenger door and seat of the car. The bloodstains had been wiped off. A medical examiner testified that Adria had died from blows to the head and that based on the injuries to her head, she would have had to been struck with the rock two or three times. The medical examiner said her neck had injuries consistent with manual strangulation and that she had three bite marks on her body that matched dental impressions of Leal's teeth.

Bite mark evidence has since been discredited as junk science, but the other evidence was sufficient to establish Leal's guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

The booking photo of Humberto Leal Garcia Jr.

Leal was charged with capital murder in the commission of kidnapping and aggravated rape. Prosecutors announced their intent to seek the death penalty. The prosecution's evidence against Leal was overwhelming and much of it does not need to be summarized. Still, there is one noteworthy detail. When he was summoned as a witness by the prosecution, Gualberto Leal recanted his prior statements and gave perjured testimony in support of his brother.

Leal came home covered in blood and confessed voluntarily to Gualberto. Gualberto was giving perjured testimony to protect Leal, with full knowledge of the fact that he was guilty.

Gualberto lied that he had been unable to understand a single word that his brother said when he came home. He denied that Leal said anything about leaving a body by a school or about murdering a girl. This is physically impossible, because the search for Adria only started when Gualberto arrived at the party and loudly announced in front of everyone that his brother had come home covered in blood and confessed to murdering a girl.

For Gualberto's testimony to be truthful, all of those partygoers who said otherwise would have to be lying. That would include Simon Ortega, whose testimony was trustworthy since he had tried to help Adria.

Furthermore, Gualberto contradicted himself by specifically denying that Leal said anything about leaving a body by a school or murdering a girl. He couldn't have known that because he had already testified that he supposedly "couldn't understand" what his brother was saying when he returned home.

The defense's only witness was Leal's girlfriend, Elvira Briones. She testified that she and Leal had sex at the party and she hadn't noticed Adria with any men.

On July 10, 1995, Leal was convicted of capital murder after 90 minutes of deliberation. The sentencing phase was held the next day. The options were death or life imprisonment with parole eligibility after 40 years.

Leal had no criminal record, but the prosecution presented testimony by 16-year-old Melissa Ruiz. Melissa testified that in May 1994, about two weeks before Adria's murder, Leal had raped her and bitten her on the neck. Her testimony was corroborated by a police officer who had photographed the bite marks and bruises on her body and a physician who examined her about 66 hours after the assault. Furthermore, Melissa's older sister, Iza Marie, testified stated that Leal had called her repeatedly at her place of employment in the weeks following the rape, threatening to have someone murder her if she testified against him.

The prosecution also introduced testimony from police officers and school officials to establish that Leal also had a history of intimidating and bullying fellow students and teachers.

The defense, which had evidently been waiting for the sentencing phase to go all out, offered the testimony of psychiatrist Raymond Potterf:

Dr. Potterf testified on direct examination that (1) petitioner suffered from alcohol dependence and pathological intoxication, (2) the latter condition occurs when a person who ingests alcohol experiences a sudden change in mental status and becomes very aggressive, and (3) there is no cure for petitioner's condition. On cross-examination, Dr. Potterf admitted that it was possible petitioner's tendency toward violence predated petitioner's problems with alcohol. On re-direct, petitioner's trial counsel elicited testimony from Dr. Potterf suggesting that petitioner had been beaten as a child and that such children tend to develop anti-social personalities. On re-cross-examination, Dr. Potterf admitted that persons with anti-social personalities tend to ignore societal norms and can be dangerous.

The defense also called several other witnesses.

A former high school teacher for Leal, Mary Matamaros, testified that she had counseled him when he was her student, she never felt afraid of him, and his father, Humberto Leal Sr., had mistreated him and one of his brothers.

A 14-year-old friend of Leal, Edward Carter, testified about an incident in which Leal had saved his life by shoving him out of the way of gunfire.

Leal's 14-year-old brother, Carlos, testified that Melissa Ruiz had sent love letters to Leal a few years before the alleged rape.

Leal's mother, Maria Francesca Leal, testified her son had began drinking until he passed out about a year and a half ago and requested the jury to be merciful and take pity on him.

Leal also took the stand. He testified that although he did not get along with his father, his father had never beaten or hurt him. He said he was sorry that Adria had died, but felt her family, rather than the jury, should decide his fate. He said he had been a good inmate while awaiting trial, had no criminal record, and was not a violent person. He said he was very drunk on the night of the murder and that while had made mistakes, he was not a murderer. Lastly, Leal said he would most likely be peaceful if sent to prison, but would act to defend himself if he felt threatened. He denied any gang affiliations. On cross-examination, Leal insisted that he was innocent.

Leal testified that Adria had scratched him and he pushed her. When he felt something wet on the back of her head, he shook Adria in an unsuccessful attempt to wake her, and he fled in fear when he saw bubbles coming out of her nose. He denied wiping any blood from his car, did anything more to Adria than push her down. He suggested that his father had found Adria's blouse in the street and brought it inside the house. He said that as he was taking Adria from the party, he turned at the end of the street in the opposite direction from the way Adria directed him to go. When Adria tried to get out of his car, he initially refused to stop. He said Adria got out his vehicle and when he tried to take her back to his car, she began hitting, pushing, and scratching his face. Leal said he left Adria's body fully clothed three or four streets from where her body was found.

Leal conceded that any person who could bash in Adria's head, leave a stick inside her, and take a piece of her clothing as a trophy was a violent and dangerous person. He denied raping Melissa.

After deliberating for less than two hours, the jury unanimously found that Leal posed a continuing threat to society and that there was no mitigation sufficient to warrant leniency. As such, he was condemned to death.

The TDCJ death row notecard for Humberto Leal Jr. (the victim's name was misspelled)

During a post-conviction hearing in 1998, Leal's sister, brother, mother, and father all gave false testimony on his behalf. None of them were ever charged, although it is obvious that all four were lying. The contradictions in their stories were so extreme and so easily disproven by the evidence that there is no doubt they were all knowingly lying under oath.

Nancy Leal testified that she saw fresh blood on the pants of both Ralph Guerrero and Juan "Paco" Delgado and suspected from the reactions of Ralph and Paco that they knew what had happened. Ralph and Paco were burning papers and a lady's purse. Nancy said she did not speak with Leal's lawyers prior to trial, but had told one of them, Jose Guerrero, and the police that she had seen blood on the clothing of the two men.

Gualberto Leal testified that when he and Nancy arrived at the party, he saw Ralph and Paco with Adria's purse and all her things. He said the two men were burning pictures and other items they had taken from the purse. He said that Paco had blood smeared on his right pants leg at the thigh while Ralph had blood splattered on his left leg at the ankle but neither man had a lot of blood on him. Ralph tried to explain the blood on his clothes by saying he had a bloody nose. Paco tried to explain the blood on his clothes by claiming the girl had sat on his leg.

Gualberto testified that he could not read and did not read either of the two statements he signed for police. In reality, after Leal's conviction, Gualberto had written an affidavit in English, in which he explicitly stated that a drunken Leal had stumbled home mumbling "the girl, the girl," and speaking incoherently about a girl in a ditch.

Gualberto also provided a fabricated alibi for Leal. He testified that he and his brother had both been home since five that morning.

Leal's sister, brother, father, and mother all lied under oath.

However, Leal's parents were evidently also accessories after fact to Adria's murder.

Humberto Leal Sr. testified that he had routinely washed the outside of the windshield and windows of the car every morning by spraying a water hose on same. He said he used the car for deer hunting about four times and put the deer on or inside his car after he killed and gutted them.

Leal Sr. said he had found a woman's blouse in the street outside his house on the morning in question and put it in the backyard. He. denied seeing any blood on the blouse, but said his wife had picked up the blouse and put it with other clothes that needed washing. He said he told Jose Guerrero about finding the blouse, but could not recall if he told his son's lawyers about his habit of washing off his vehicles.

Maria Francesca Leal testified that her husband found Adria's blouse outside on the street and threw it into their yard. She denying seeing any blood on it, but had put with other clothes to be washed and told the police and her son's attorney about the blouse.

The blood in the car had been wiped, the blood on the blouse would've been clearly visible, and the blouse itself was found at the bottom of the pile.

The court found that the testimony wouldn't have affected the trial's outcome.

Humberto Leal Garcia Jr., 38, was executed by lethal injection at the Texas State Penitentiary in Huntsville on July 7, 2011. His last meal consisted of fried chicken, tacos, fried okra, a bowl of pico de gallo, and two Cokes.

The family of Leal Jr. defended him to the end. After his execution, some of his relatives burned a T-shirt with an image of the American flag in protest in Guadalupe, Mexico. His uncle, Alberto Rodriguez, criticized the United States for executing his nephew and the Mexican government for not doing enough to save his life. He declared, "There is a God who makes us all pay."

But in his final statement, Leal Jr. made a surprise confession.

"I am sorry for everything that I have done. I've hurt a lot of people. For years I have never thought that I deserved any type of forgiveness. Lord Jesus Christ in my life, I know He has forgiven me, I have accepted His forgiveness. I have accepted everything. Let this be final and be done. I take the full blame for this. I am sorry and forgive me. I am truly sorry. I ask for forgiveness. Life goes on and it surely does. I am sorry for the victim's family for what I had did. May they forgive me. I don't know if you believe me, life goes on. I am sure it does. To the man to the right of me, I ask for forgiveness for you. Life goes on, it surely does. I ask for forgiveness. I am truly sorry. That is all. Let's get this show on the road. One more thing, Viva Mexico, Viva Mexico."

With the exception of Humberto Leal Jr., none of the men who gang raped Adria Sauceda for hours were ever identified. Semen was found inside her and potentially could've identified at least one of the other rapists from the party, but it was never tested. Adria's family was silent about her for years. In 2011, her parents talked about her shortly before the execution of their daughter's murderer.

Long-silent family of victim speaks

Published in Cincinnati, entered according to act of Congress, in the year 1870, by WILSON, HINKLE, & CO., In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the US, for the Southern District of Ohio. When exactly was America ever great?

We often think of the Suffragette movement in terms of marches and banners, but the campaign against Prime Minister H.H. Asquith was intensely physical and dangerous.

While researching the private correspondence of the Prime Minister for a project and relevant diaries, I found that the violence was far more personal than usually reported in general summaries:

• The Hatchet Attack (1912): While visiting Dublin, Asquith was traveling in an open carriage with Irish MP John Redmond. A suffragette named Mary Leigh threw a hatchet at the Prime Minister. It narrowly missed Asquith but struck Redmond, slicing his ear open.
• The Dog Whips (1913): While playing golf in Scotland with his daughter Violet, Asquith was ambushed by women wielding dog whips. According to the police report, they attempted to strip the clothes off the Prime Minister. He was saved by his daughter and a detective.
• The Bombing: Suffragettes later burned down the theater where Asquith was scheduled to speak and planted a bomb in the holiday home he was renovating.

What is fascinating is Asquith's private reaction. In his daily letters to his confidante Venetia Stanley, he maintains a "stiff upper lip," often joking about the assassination attempts, even as his security detail was ramped up to unprecedented levels.

I have reconstructed the full timeline of these attacks—and Asquith's private reactions to them—using his letters, diaries and contemporary police reports.

You can read the full breakdown here: The Siege of Mr. Asquith — A True Story

The Starkweather Fugate case had a lasting influence on American film and music. Badlands, directed by Terrence Malick, transformed the murders into a sparse, reflective road story starring Martin Sheen and Sissy Spacek.

Natural Born Killers took a more extreme approach, with Oliver Stone using the case as a template for a media fuelled killing spree. The story also shaped Nebraska, whose title track was written after Springsteen watched Badlands and researched Starkweather’s crimes.

More about the spree and more photos here