On November 21, 1980, 350 million people around the world
tuned in to television’s popular primetime drama “Dallas” to
find out who shot J.R. Ewing, the character fans loved to hate.
J.R. had been shot on the season-ending episode the previous
March 21, which now stands as one of television’s most famous cliffhangers.

The plot twist inspired widespread media coverage and left
America wondering “Who shot J.R.?” for the next eight
months.

The November 21 episode solved the mystery, identifying Kristin Shepard, J.R.’s wife’s sister-in-law and his former mistress, as
the culprit.

Eleanor Rosalynn Carter (1927 – 2023)

Rosalynn and Jimmy Carter- the early years.

On November 18, 1978, Peoples Temple cult founder Jim
Jones (above) led hundreds of his followers in a mass
murder-suicide at their agricultural commune in a remote
part of the South American nation of Guyana. Many of
Jones’ followers willingly ingested a poison-laced punch
while others were forced to do so at gunpoint. The final
death toll at Jonestown that day was 909; a third of those
who perished were children.

The car wreck.

On November 13, 1974, 28-year-old Karen Silkwood was killed in
a car accident near Crescent, Oklahoma, north of Oklahoma City. Silkwood worked as a technician at a plutonium plant operated
by the Kerr-McGee Corporation, and she had been critical of the
plant’s health and safety procedures. In September, she had
complained to the Atomic Energy Commission about unsafe
conditions at the plant (a week before her death, plant monitors
had found that she was contaminated with radioactivity herself),
and the night she died, she was on her way to a meeting with a
union representative and a reporter for The New York Times,
reportedly with a folder full of documents that proved that Kerr-
McGee was acting negligently when it came to worker safety at
the plant. However, no such folder was found in the wreckage
of her car, lending credence to the theory that someone had
forced her off the road to prevent her from telling what she
knew.