Barrel murder

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Gasoline in a glass jar

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A merchant named Benedetto Madonia was folded into a barrel and left on East 11th Street in 1903 — America's first documented Mafia homicide, solved by a detective who matched a barrel stave to a sawdust trail.

In 1857, Mormon militiamen and Paiute allies killed 120 Arkansas emigrants at Mountain Meadows, Utah — then blamed the Paiutes for twenty years. Only one man, John D. Lee, was ever executed, in 1877, shot at the site.

Sejanus ran the Roman Empire as Tiberius's viceroy for a decade — then a single letter from the emperor, read aloud in the Senate, ended it. The Roman crowd tore his body apart in the street before nightfall.

Thomas Midgley Jr. invented both leaded gasoline in 1921 and Freon in 1928 — one poisoned global blood lead levels for fifty years, one carved a hole in the ozone layer. One man, two planetary-scale mistakes.

Jimmy Hoffa walked into the parking lot of the Machus Red Fox restaurant in Bloomfield Township, Michigan on July 30, 1975, and was never seen again. Over 50 years later, no body, no confirmed killer.

Isaac Newton, who calculated planetary orbits, invested and withdrew from the South Sea Company in profit — then reinvested at the peak, losing £20,000. He reportedly said he could not calculate the madness of men.

In July 1950, U.S. soldiers opened fire on hundreds of South Korean refugees sheltering beneath the double arch of the No Gun Ri railroad bridge. Survivors described three days of killing. Survivors existed.

Otto Dix served 4 years in WWI trenches and painted decomposing soldiers face-down in Flanders mud, maggots visible at the collar — the German government tried to buy and then quietly bury the canvas.

Utahraptor weighed as much as a grizzly bear and carried a 9-inch hooked claw on each foot — the weapon that made Jurassic Park's Velociraptors look like the timid cousins they actually were.