1377: Breton mercenaries commanded by Robert, Cardinal of Geneva, acting as the legate of Pope Gregory XI, executed between 2,500 and 5,000 people in Cesena, Italy, in a show of papal power. The next year, Cardinal Robert was elected (anti)Pope Clement VII.
1900: Newly elected Kentucky governor William Goebels died from an assassin's bullet wounds.
1904: American bank robber Charles "Pretty Boy" Floyd was born in Georgia. He was pursued and killed by federal agents in 1934 several months after the FBI declared him "Public Enemy No. 1."
1916: Fire destroyed Centre Block, the main building of Canada's parliamentary complex in Ottawa. Seven people died. Officially, a carelessly left cigar caused the blaze—or was it a German arsonist?
1950: British authorities arrested nuclear physicist Klaus Fuchs for passing top-secret information about the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union.
1953: Portuguese landowners and the colonial administration of Sao Tome Island in Central Africa massacred hundreds of native creoles to stop an alleged communist conspiracy.
1965: 105 U.S. Air Force Academy cadets resigned for cheating or for the theft and sale of exam papers.
1967: The Victorian government hanged Ronald Ryan, the last person to be executed in Australia. He was convicted of the shooting murder of a prison guard during an escape.
1971: Drug dealer Edgar Echevarria shot NYPD officer Frank Serpico in the face as Serpico was attempting an arrest. A 1972 jury convicted Echevarria of attempted murder, possession of dangerous weapons, and grand larceny. Serpico survived and testified about widespread corruption in the NYPD.
1982: A California court ordered porn star John Holmes to stand trial for murder. (He was tried and acquitted.)
1992: The defense team of deposed Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega opened its case in Miami, calling Noriega "our ally in war on drugs."
1998: Flying too low over an aerial tramway in Italy, a daredevil U.S. military pilot cut the cable supporting a gondola. It crashed to the ground, instantly killing the 20 people inside. A military court in the U.S. acquitted Captain Richard J. Ashby of 20 counts of involuntary manslaughter and negligent homicide.
1998: Texas executed Karla Faye Tucker for the pickax killings of two people during a burglary in 1983. She was the first woman to be executed in the U.S. since 1984.
2012: U.S. federal prosecutors dropped their investigation of cycling superstar Lance Armstrong after a nearly two-year attempt to establish whether he and his teammates had used performance-enhancing drugs. He won the Tour de France seven times.
2014: 15-year-old Sergey Gordeyev took 29 students hostage and shot and killed a teacher and a police officer at his high school in Moscow, Russia.
2016: A High Court judge granted a death certificate in the case of Lord Lucan, 42 years after he disappeared following the murder of nanny Sandra Rivett.
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