Crimes that Made History

In 1888, a series of gruesome murders shocked London. The perpetrator was dubbed "Jack the Ripper". This was the Victorian era, when Puritanism reigned and forensic science was in its infancy. How did these factors combine to create one of the most renowned crime stories in history, resulting in the construction of the serial killer?

In 1929, seven members of Bugs Moran's gang are assassinated in a garage by Al Capone's henchmen. This event was taken up by the press who named it the "Saint Valentine's day Massacre". Carried out during the prohibition, those killings became the newsworthy symbol of gang wars - they consolidated the image of the Italian mobster in the American collective imaginary.

On 8 July 1947, the US Air Force announced the discovery of a "flying disc" which had crashed in the Roswell area of New Mexico. This was the birth of the flying saucer phenomenon. Against the backdrop of the Cold War, when conspiracy theories abounded, the myth of the UFO gradually took shape to become a recurrent theme in science-fiction movies and popular culture.

1978 Guyana: Reverend Jim Jones holds an apocalyptic mass. Its outcome was the sacrifice of 918 members of the Peoples Temple - an American cult founded in the middle of the 1950s. The entire world was horrified by the journalists' accounts and the images from Jonestown. This tragedy haunted the hopes of small communities and alternative spirituality's in the 70s.

On 31 August 1997, Princess Diana died alongside her companion, Dodi Al-Fayed, in a car crash in Paris, whilst being pursued by paparazzi. Her untimely death prompted an outpouring of grief in Britain and elsewhere in the world, and made her a symbol of the excesses of media intrusion, that was ironically echoed in the coverage of her funeral, broadcast live around the globe.