Crime

A Washington Post reporter rented his house off Foxhall Road in 1978. His tenant was the FBI, and the basement became the Washington set for Abscam.

In 1895 the Washington Post said only the bravest went through Dead Man’s Hollow at night. The prosecutor who raided the gambling dens nearby later crashed there.

One of Washington’s policewomen went to a Saturday night dance in March 1919 “all dolled up.” Her tip had a raider whispering “Riley” at an apartment door by morning.

The Treasury’s basement range had electric targets and an air lock. Two men in its 1940 photograph had corresponded about the investigation of Al Capone.

In December 1973, Tip O’Neill’s birthday dinner at the George Town Club ran $23 a plate. Tongsun Park picked up the check.

On the night of June 14, 1966, the Pagans and the Avengers turned the Safeway lot at Arlington’s Lee-Harrison Shopping Center into a gunfight. Police had been tipped off hours earlier and were watching when the first shots rang out.

Gambling houses, speakeasies and Sunday crowds lined Conduit Road just past the District line, and Montgomery County spent three decades trying to shut them down.

A radio reporter stepped off an elevator on the fifth floor of the District Building and into a shotgun blast. The councilman down the hall was hit too.

Detective Arthur Scrivener was found shot in a Georgetown alley on his wedding day in 1926. One jury said murder. Another said suicide. Here’s the evidence.

Around 1 a.m. on July 1, 1973, Israeli air attaché Yosef Alon was shot five times in his Chevy Chase driveway. The case has officially been closed for fifty years, but Fred Burton, Carlos the Jackal, and Alon’s daughters each have a different idea about who pulled the trigger and why.

For sixty years a reform school for girls stood on the Palisades hill where Sibley Hospital is today. The troubled history of the National Training School for Girls, 1893 to 1953.

On December 28, 1938, in a small alley off 6th Street NW, a 31-year-old woman named Ruth McDonald accepted a drink from a young chemistry student and was dead within the hour.

On March 1, 1976, a Foreign Service officer killed his family in their Carderock Springs home and vanished. As of 2026, the manhunt is still open.

Before dawn on March 11, 1926, 19-year-old Francis Aebersold blazed out of Anacostia in a Peerless touring car carrying 180 quarts of corn whiskey, four DC officers chasing him north at 60 miles an hour, guns drawn.

A reader’s family connection led to a 1907 Evening Star report on Raleigh Luckett’s suicide attempt at the Garrick Club.

On Chinese New Year 1919, three Chinese diplomats were shot dead at the Mission house on Kalorama Road, and the case set in motion the Brandeis opinion that helped build Miranda.

Five forgotten people, robbed, slashed, shot, or stabbed in Washington’s Murder Bay slum between 1865 and 1868. We pulled their names out of the old Evening Star: named victims, named killers, and real intersections that no longer exist.

She walked into the Treasury Building on a Monday afternoon in 1865, shot the clerk who had courted her since she was twelve, and walked free in five minutes.

Twice in twenty years, someone climbed into a stolen aircraft and put it down on the White House South Lawn. In 1974 it was a 20-year-old Army private in a stolen Huey. In 1994 it was a depressed truck driver in a stolen Cessna. Both times, the president was away. Both times, the Secret Service had to rewrite the rules.

In January 1973, Senator John Stennis of Mississippi was shot in the chest and leg outside his Northwest DC home. He survived 6 1/2 hours of surgery and two Washington teenagers were charged.