Slashing Throats for 170 Years: The “Real” Sweeney Todd

To most people, Sweeney Todd needs no introduction, thanks in part to Tim Burton’s 2007 adaptation of Stephen Sondheim’s musical, starring Johnny Depp as the throat-slashing barber of Fleet Street. In the movie, Todd dumps the bodies of his victims into the basement, where their bones are stripped of flesh and made into pies by […]

Dead Men’s Eyes: A History of Optography

Aurora, Illinois. 16 February 1914. It was a cold, wintery night when Theresa Hollander’s father discovered her broken and bloodied body near a shed in St. Nicholas’s Cemetery. The 20-year-old (pictured below) had been brutally beaten to death with a wooden club, which had been discarded along with the girl’s corpse amongst the tombstones. Much to her father’s horror, Theresa’s eyes were wide open, her hands clutched in frozen agony.