Shoko Asahara

Exterior view of the building known as Ransom Room, in Cajamarca where the Inca Atahualpa was confined.

Anti-immigrant protesters in Calais hold a sign in French reading "Diversity is a code word for white genocide", above a banner calling for remigration (8 November 2015).

Before releasing sarin on the Tokyo subway in 1995, Shoko Asahara sold his bathwater to followers for $800 a cup. He convinced a physician to murder members who tried to leave. He was hanged in 2018.

Ransom Room

Atahualpa filled a 22-foot room once with gold and twice with silver to purchase his freedom. Pizarro accepted the metal, pocketed the treasure, then had the Inca emperor strangled anyway in 1533.

Russell Wasendorf

Russell Wasendorf Sr. forged every single bank statement for Peregrine Financial Group — alone, with a scanner and a P.O. box — for twenty years. He confessed in a suicide note left running in a car outside his Iowa headquarters in 2012.

Braid (video game)

Braid's final level reverses time to reveal the princess the player has been chasing is not a captive — she is running from the player. The epilogue text identifies her as the atomic bomb. Jonathan Blow hid this in 2008.

Egill Skallagrímsson

Egil Skallagrímsson committed his first killing at age seven with an axe at a ball game. He later composed a poem so good it talked an enemy king out of executing him.

Siad Barre

Siad Barre fled Mogadishu in a tank in January 1991, leaving behind a capital he had shelled into ruins; the artillery campaign against his own city killed thousands and destroyed Somalia's central state for a generation.

Buckminsterfullerene

Sixty carbon atoms arranged as a perfect truncated icosahedron — identical to a FIFA football — were discovered in 1985 by Harry Kroto inside the soot of a carbon arc, winning a Nobel Prize eleven years later.

Briley brothers

James, Linwood, and Anthony Briley murdered 11 people across Richmond, Virginia, between 1971 and 1979 — then escaped from death row together in 1984, prompting a six-state manhunt that ended in Philadelphia six days later.

White genocide conspiracy theory

A claim of white genocide in South Africa — built on disputed murder statistics from Afrikaner advocacy sites — migrated from Boer forums to Brenton Tarrant's manifesto, cited by name before the Christchurch massacre.