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.
Her story was chronicled in Mike Nichols‘s 1983 Academy
Award nominated film Silkwood (below) in which she was
portrayed by Meryl Streep.
Frank Frederick Borman II (March 14, 1928 – November 7, 2023)
BILLINGS, Mont. (AP) — Astronaut Frank Borman, who commanded Apollo 8’s historic Christmas 1968 flight that circled the moon 10
times and paved the way for the lunar landing the next year, died
Tuesday in Billings, Montana. He was 95.
John Emil List slaughtered his entire family in their
Westfield, New Jersey, home and then disappeared.
Though police quickly identified List as the most likely
suspect in the murders, it took 18 years for them to
locate him and close the case.
John Emil List (September 17, 1925 – March 21, 2008)
