The idea of dying together comes up at some point in most relationships. For many, the idea of living the rest of your life without your loving partner is unbearable. There have been countless documented cases of people ending their lives to escape their loneliness.

In these 10 cases, people weren’t given this choice. For those who were killed by others, it was not a planned event. For those who took their own lives, the alternative would have separated them from their partners in some way anyway.

10 Couples Who Mysteriously Vanished

10 Julius And Ethel Rosenberg

Julius And Ethel Rosenberg were an American couple with a huge secret: They were spies for Soviet Russia. During World War II, Julius worked for the Army Signal Corps. He had access to sensitive information about the development of the nuclear bomb, which was eventually used as a turning point in the war.

Through contacts made during his involvement with the Communist Party, Julius passed on information about the development of the bomb to the Soviet Union. In 1951, the Rosenbergs were found guilty of conspiracy to commit espionage.

In a move which would cause controversy to this day, they were both sentenced to execution in the electric chair. Although Julius’s sentence was met with little resistance, the decision to execute his wife was seen as a harsh move by those who believed that her involvement was minimal.

On June 19, 1953, 35-year-old Julius was strapped into the chair. He said nothing before the first jolt of electricity entered his body. He was pronounced dead after that first attempt.^[1]

Drawing the prison matron toward her as she was strapped into the chair, Ethel kissed the matron before being killed. After the initial shocks, she was examined by a doctor who found that she was still alive. Eventually, she died in the electric chair, too.

Julius’s guilt was later proven, but Ethel’s involvement is still thought to have been minimal.

9 Dennis And Merna Koula

Dennis Koula and his wife, Merna, were enjoying a peaceful retirement in the affluent, scenic area of La Crosse, Wisconsin. On Monday, May 24, 2010, their son, Eric, received a phone call from a local school where his mother worked as a substitute teacher. She had failed to turn up for a day’s work, and they were concerned.

Unable to contact his parents, Eric left for their house. When he arrived, he opened the door to find Dennis on the kitchen floor in a pool of blood. Clearly, Dennis hadn’t gotten far from the entrance to the house when he was shot down by whomever had committed the terrible crime.

Eric called 911 and described the scene to the dispatcher. Partway through the call, he walked further into the house and entered the room where the couple kept their computer. His mother was slumped over the desk with one hand on the keyboard. She had also been shot.

The scene was a mystery. Whoever had killed the Koulas hadn’t disturbed anything else in the house.^[2]

A few days after the murders, Eric found a haunting note in his mailbox. It simply read, “Fixed you.” The note wasn’t explained until police began digging a little deeper into Eric’s alibi. It was soon revealed that Eric had written the note himself after murdering his parents to inherit their money. He was in serious debt due to his unsuccessful day trading and saw the murders as the only way out.

In August 2012, Eric Koula was sentenced to two life sentences for the murders of his parents. He maintains his innocence.

8 Nikolai II Alexandrovich Romanov And Alexandra Feodorovna

Nikolai II Alexandrovich Romanov (aka “Nicholas the Bloody” due to his suppression of the 1905 uprising in which thousands died) met his wife, Alexandra (aka Alix of Hesse), through their intertwined families. (The couple was reportedly related to each other through several different lines of nobility).^[3]

Under Nicholas II’s rule, Russians watched their country go from one of the world’s major powers to an economic and military disaster. By 1917, the public saw him as responsible for the terrible economic and social conditions in Russia. Having massively fallen out of favor with the Russian people, Nicholas and his family were confined to a government house under guard (supposedly for their protection).

On July 17, 1918, the family was ordered to the basement by a leading “Old Bolshevik.” There, they were met by a number of communist soldiers, who formed a firing squad. A charge was read out loud by lead executioner Yakov Yurovsky. It stated that Nicholas and his family had been sentenced to death for crimes against the Russian people.

Nicholas was bewildered but had little time to comprehend the situation as the bullets were fired. Nicholas, Alexandra, their five children, and four of their faithful employees were killed. Although Nicholas was killed from the hail of bullets, others had to be dispatched with the bayonets of the soldiers’ guns.

Later, the bodies were hastily buried in an unmarked location after the truck carrying them to their intended destination broke down in the ice and snow. The location was only discovered in 1979.^[3]

7 Ethan Nichols And Carissa Horton

In 2011, Ethan Nichols, 21, And Carissa Horton, 18, met after Horton moved to Tulsa, Oklahoma. Ethan had a job at Blue Bell Creamery, and Carissa was a freshman at Oral Roberts University (ORU). The parents of the young couple had known each other in Iowa, and Ethan’s mother had asked him to help Carissa become comfortable with her new environment.

Immediately forming a bond, they spent more and more time together. On a late September evening in 2011, the young couple was taking a stroll through Hicks Park. They were approached by two young men and forced to hand over their valuables.

This is where most stories of robbery would begin and end. However, instead of allowing the couple to go, the robbers shot Nichols and Horton execution style. Then the perpetrators took Nichols’s car and left the scene. The victims’ bodies were discovered in the park the next day.

The news crew of a local ABC affiliate arrived on the scene soon after the couple was discovered by a jogger. One man seemingly eager to be interviewed was Darren Price, a local resident who expressed his shock at the murder. He stated that he no longer felt safe living in the area.

Police immediately began the search for the stolen car. It wasn’t long before it was discovered at a local apartment complex. As officers watched closely, Price and Jerard Davis got into the vehicle. The police tried to stop the men, but they sped away. After crashing the vehicle during their escape attempt, Price and Davis were arrested.

The pair was soon charged with the murders. Davis pleaded guilty to the shootings, and Price was convicted at trial. Both were given life sentences.^[4]

6 Alexander Obrenovic And Draga Masin

King Alexander I (aka Alexander Obrenovic) ruled Serbia from 1889 until he and his wife, Queen Draga, were assassinated in 1903. Alexander had assumed the throne under a regency after his father, King Milan I, unexpectedly abdicated when Alexander was only 12 years old.

Upon reaching his 16th birthday in 1893, Alexander officially declared himself of age (which would normally happen at 18) and dismissed the regents. In summer 1900, Alexander announced his intended marriage to Draga Masin, a beautiful (and disreputable) widow 10 years his senior. This proved an unpopular move, particularly with Alexander’s parents.

Meanwhile, in France, an exiled Serbian prince, sixtyish Peter Karageorgevich, was gaining momentum in his attempts to overthrow the young King Alexander I. Peter intended to rule Serbia himself. Earlier, he had gone into exile with his father, Prince Alexander, who had ruled Serbia until his abdication in 1858. That occurred after he refused to enter the Crimean War, which made him unpopular with his Council.

Near midnight on June 10, 1903, army officers under orders from Karageorgevich entered the palace of King Alexander I and Queen Draga. To save themselves, the king and queen hid in an upstairs cupboard. However, they were discovered by the group after hours of searching. In the early morning of June 11, the couple was shot dead, disemboweled, and thrown from a second-floor window. They were later buried in a crypt in Belgrade.^[5]

10 Deadliest Serial Killer Couples By Kill Count

5 Siddiqa And Khayyam

In 2010, newspapers across the world began reporting the story of two Afghan nationals who were found by the Taliban to have committed adultery. Their punishment shocked the world.

On a Sunday morning in August 2010, the Taliban arrested Siddiqa, 19, and Khayyam, 25, in their village in northern Kunduz Province and brought them to an open area. They were surrounded by members of their community, who had been coerced to attend the public event by leaders of the local Taliban militia.

Dressed in a burka, Siddiqa had been placed in a hole up to her waist. Meanwhile, Khayyam was blindfolded and had his hands tied behind his back. The charge of breaking Islamic law was read to them.

Apparently, Siddiqa had been sold to a rich family with the intention of marriage. Unhappy with this, she ran off and married her true love, Khayyam. Leaders of the local, usually peaceful community responded calmly. They stated that if the couple returned and Khayyam’s family came up with $9,000 (the amount originally paid for Siddiqa’s marriage to the other man), then Siddiqa and Khayyam would be allowed to marry.

Unfortunately, the Taliban intervened. As the charges against the couple were read, members of the crowd began picking up large rocks to commence the punishment.

Siddiqa was murdered first. The rocks smashed against her body, including her head, until she fell. She was also shot. After her death, the crowd moved on to Khayyam. He cried as he was murdered by the same punishment. The crowd then dispersed.

With their murders, Siddiqa and Khayyam had joined a long list of Afghans killed in the most brutal fashion in the name of religion.^[6]

4 Nicolae And Elena Ceausescu

Like many ousted political couples, Nicolae and Elena Ceausescu enjoyed a brief popularity when he first rose to power. But their popularity faded long before their country ultimately turned on them in a violent and dramatic denouement to Romanian communism. Nicolae ruled the country from 1967 to 1989 and saw his people suffer terrible economic hardship, which he ignored while living a life of luxury.

The couple lived in a mansion with huge collections of art and antiques. Elena was noted as being the most unashamedly extravagant of the two. She collected furs, couture gowns, and hundreds of pairs of expensive shoes.

In 1989, after years of hardship at the expense of Ceausescu’s economic policies, the populace revolted and the couple was arrested. On Christmas Day, television cameras rolled as the couple was convicted and sentenced in what could only be described as a show trial. Their death sentences were quickly announced. The couple was moved together to an open area and immediately shot by the waiting firing squad.

The events happened so quickly that the TV cameras failed to capture the moment of the execution. Instead, they only recorded Nicolae and Elena’s lifeless bodies in the dust left by the bullets. For Romania, communism was over. The couple was buried on opposite sides of a path in a Bucharest cemetery.^[7]

3 The Sumter County Does

We have no idea who these people were—and we may never know. But they met their unfortunate fates together.

On August 9, 1976, trucker Martin Durant made a grisly discovery on a dirt road 0.8 kilometers (0.5 mi) from Interstate 95 and Highway 341 in Sumter County, South Carolina. A man and a woman, both in their twenties, lay on their backs in the dirt. Each had three gunshot wounds: one in the back, one in the chest, and one under the chin (which appeared to have been used to ensure their demise after the other bullets would have sent them to the ground).

Neither victim had identification on them. But police hoped that artist drawings of the young couple would bring witnesses in and at least solve the mystery of their identities.

There were a few clues at the scene. Both were wearing expensive-looking jewelry. The man had a Bulova Accutron watch and a 14-karat ring with the initials “JPF” on the inside. Neither was wearing underwear.

Despite the clues and a witness stating that the couple had been seen at a fruit stand shortly before their deaths, nothing more was forthcoming. The jewelry could not be traced, and even dental records and autopsies revealed nothing new. A suspect was arrested but provided a solid alibi for the time of the murders. The Sumter County Does remain unknown.^[8]

2 Adolf Hitler And Eva Braun

Eva Braun’s life could have turned out very differently if she had not become the focus of Adolf Hitler’s attention. Braun was a photographer and, by all accounts, a talented one. She became close to Hitler during his Berghof days and became a regular part of his household high in the Berchtesgaden mountains in the mid-1930s.

Hitler had a notoriously strange relationship with women. His previous obsession, his half-niece Geli Raubal, had killed herself in his Munich apartment, possibly to escape his obsessive, restrictive clutches.

Although Braun had also attempted suicide early in her relationship with Hitler, she eventually swore her undying loyalty to him. By early 1945, World War II was all but lost for Germany. As the Russians closed in on the German capital, Hitler and Braun—as well as numerous servants, assistants, and other leading Nazis—holed up in his bunker. They were determined to avoid capture.

Collectively understanding their unavoidable fates, Hitler and Braun married in the bunker in the early hours of April 29, 1945. Braun enjoyed only 40 hours of being Eva Anna Paula Hitler.

The last sightings of the newly married couple occurred the next day in the mid-afternoon. They said solemn goodbyes to their comrades and staff before shutting themselves away in a room. Shortly after, gunshots were heard, followed by eerie silence.

According to witness reports, Hitler and Braun had bitten down on cyanide capsules. Hitler had also fired a bullet into his own head. (However, there are differing viewpoints as to how Hitler died.)

SS officers later moved the corpses into the open and set them alight to destroy the remains. This was done to prevent them from ending up in the hands of the encroaching Soviets.^[9]

1 Joseph And Magda Goebbels

Although Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun’s suicides may have seemed like a simple decision under the circumstances, the fates of Joseph Goebbels and his wife, Magda, are harder to comprehend because they took their innocent children with them.

Joseph Goebbels had been Hitler’s propaganda minister since 1933. Hitler valued Goebbels greatly; his skills at convincing the German public to stand by while the Nazi Party committed unthinkable atrocities were unparalleled.

Magda began dating Joseph in 1930. She had recently split from Gunther Quandt, her husband from 1921 to 1929. Joseph and Magda married (with Hitler as a witness) in 1931. The couple also had six children before their eventual move into the Fuhrerbunker with Hitler and Braun in 1945.

While Joseph’s allegiance to the Fuhrer was unshakable, Magda had become openly critical of Hitler as she watched him take Germany to annihilation at the hands of the Allies. A day after the deaths of Hitler and Braun, Joseph Goebbels realized that the only way out for him was a similar fate.

There are conflicting theories as to how Joseph and Magda Goebbels killed themselves and their children, but we know they all died on May 1, 1945. According to one account, Goebbels ordered his doctor to administer morphine to his six children and crush cyanide capsules in their mouths as they lost consciousness. Another report claimed that Magda administered the capsules. Afterward, the couple retired to the garden of the chancellery and killed themselves.^[10]

10 Unsolved Cases Involving Murdered Couples

About The Author: John Sampson is an Internet author who writes about anything that piques his interest. He does not use social networking as he believes this makes him more mysterious and interesting. He is wrong.

It seems obvious that a former president should be given an appropriate and honorable final resting place. For most who have served their country, that has been true. But there have also been a surprising number of issues with former leaders’ deaths. From George Washington to the present day, presidents have been memorialized in some strange ways. Worse still, some of their remains haven’t been allowed to rest as they should.

Here are ten tales of the strange fates of former presidents after death.

Related: Top 10 Faux Pas Committed By US Presidents

10 George Washington

When George Washington died in 1799, his will was clear: He wanted to be buried close to his Virginia home. But the mausoleum at his plantation, Mount Vernon, needed considerable renovation to hold the first President’s remains. Prior to his death, Washington himself laid out the issue. He wrote about repairs that had to be done to the vault: “I desire that a new [tomb] of Brick, and upon a larger Scale, may be built at the foot of what is commonly called the Vineyard Inclosure… In which my remains, with those of my deceased relatives… may be deposited.”

Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. Congress ignored his request and conspired to erect a crypt in the U.S. Capitol building. But by 1830, three decades after Washington’s death, that memorial hadn’t been built. Washington’s remains were still in Mount Vernon—but no renovation had been done on the vault there, either.

That’s when things got strange. That year, Washington’s nephew and last surviving heir, John Augustine Washington II, fired a gardener who had been employed at Mount Vernon. The landscaper was upset about the dismissal and sought revenge. He crept into the crypt with the intention of stealing the late president’s skull. Thankfully, Washington’s body had been encased in lead to prevent post-death tampering. Even so, the crypt was in such bad shape that the bones of dozens of people were scattered and mixed together inside. Instead of taking a piece of Washington, the gardener swiped the skull of one of his distant relatives. A year later, the surviving Washington heir erected a new crypt to honor the president, and—pardon the pun—the rest is history.^[1]

9 James K. Polk

James K. Polk died only a few months after his term ended in 1849. The nation’s 11th President died of cholera, which at the time meant a quick burial in a mass grave to slow the disease’s aggressive spread. That burial was unbecoming for a former president, though. After a year in a common grave in a city cemetery in Nashville, lawmakers in Tennessee ordered the remains moved. The intended final resting spot was to be Polk Place, where the president died. And for a while, that was that. But in 1893, the Polk family sold the expansive property. When that happened, Tennessee officials moved Polk’s remains to the State Capitol in Nashville—and again, for a while, that was that.

In 2017, Polk’s final resting place came back into question. At issue this time was the late president’s last will and testament. In the document, he requested to be buried at Polk Place. That property was demolished not long after his family sold it back in 1893, though. So state lawmakers began the process of moving the remains to a property in the city of Columbia, an hour outside Nashville.

Polk had also owned that home during his life, and politicians reasoned the move would essentially fulfill the request in his will. In 2018, the Tennessee legislature passed a resolution to move Polk yet again. However, six months later, it was put on hold when the Tennessee Historical Commission refused to grant permission to disturb the remains. Today, Polk rests at the State Capitol Building—for now.^[2]

8 Zachary Taylor

Not long after Polk’s death, his successor died. Zachary Taylor had the unfortunate distinction of dying in office when he perished a year into his term in 1850. He was 65 years old upon death, which was an advanced age at the time. However, just days before passing, he was in good spirits at a Fourth of July ceremony. The sudden death left supporters wondering if he was poisoned. Taylor had been strongly against allowing slavery in the west at the time. Thus, his supporters wondered whether pro-slavery insurgents poisoned the milk and cherries he ate on the Fourth of July. But no definitive proof of poisoning was ever revealed.

Taylor was buried in his home state of Kentucky. For a while, he rested peacefully. But over the next century, the possibility of poisoning continued to be debated. In 1991, the former President was exhumed for an autopsy. Kentucky’s chief medical examiner performed the procedure. He conclusively found Taylor had not been poisoned. In his report, the death doc wrote Taylor died of “a myriad of natural diseases which could have produced the symptoms of gastroenteritis.” Satisfied at the conclusion, 140 years later, lawmakers had Taylor reburied. Today, he rests in the National Cemetery that bears his name in Louisville.^[3]

7 John Tyler

John Tyler was America’s tenth President, serving before Polk. The Southerner died in 1862, during the middle of the Civil War. He had been elected to the insurgent Confederacy’s legislature in his final days. Thus, rebels held the Virginia native’s body on their side of the horrifically bloody war. This riled up men on both fronts of the conflict and altered how Tyler’s final resting place was designated. The write-up of Tyler’s passing in The New York Times was vicious, asserting he went “down to death amid the ruins of his native State.” The obituary continued: “[Tyler] himself was one of the architects of its ruin; and beneath that melancholy wreck his name will be buried, instead of being inscribed on the Capitol’s monumental marble, as a year ago he so much desired.”

That obituary writer would be proven correct. Tyler had requested a simple funeral at Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, Virgina. That did not happen. Seeing an opportunity to promote rebel pride, Confederate President Jefferson Davis threw a “grand event” for Tyler. Davis even draped Tyler’s coffin in a Confederate flag. In response, Union lawmakers refused to acknowledge the former president’s resting place. Today, Tyler is still interred in Richmond. The old bitterness has carried on, too. According to cemetery officials, he is still the only former president whose resting place is not recognized in Washington.^[4]

6 Abraham Lincoln

After Abraham Lincoln’s 1865 assassination, his body was taken by train around the country. Millions of Americans mourned their murdered leader. The body was embalmed for the trip—a relatively new procedure at the time. It hadn’t been perfected yet, though. The 19-day rail journey required morticians to travel with Lincoln’s corpse and re-embalm it at every stop. However, the experts were unable to prevent the corpse’s ultimate decay. When the train stopped in New York, a reporter wrote: “It will not be possible, despite the effection of the embalming, to continue much longer the exhibition, as the constant shaking of the body aided by the exposure to the air, and the increasing of dust, has already undone much of the… workmanship.” Thankfully, after three weeks, Lincoln was finally laid to rest in an Illinois tomb.

A decade later, in 1876, a group of criminals devised a plan to steal Lincoln’s remains and hold them for ransom. There were no guards at the late president’s tomb, and the marble sarcophagus serving as his resting place had only been lightly sealed. Unbeknownst to the group, they revealed their scheme to a man who was a government informant. He told the Secret Service, and on the day the crew went to the tomb, officers were waiting. Following that near-theft, Lincoln’s remains were secretly buried in the vault’s basement. In 1901, he was disinterred once more and reburied inside a steel cage under ten feet of concrete.^[5]

5 Warren G. Harding

Warren G. Harding suddenly died at a San Francisco hotel in 1923. At the time, he was in the midst of a nationwide speaking tour. He’d also recently suffered food poisoning. But nobody expected him to pass without warning. His wife, Florence, was adamant about the aftermath: no autopsy and immediate embalming. Harding’s doctors were furious. They wanted to know what had suddenly killed the sitting President. One frustrated medical professional even wrote: “We shall never know exactly the immediate cause of President Harding’s death since every effort that was made to secure an autopsy met with complete and final refusal.” The grieving widow was unmoved, though, and her late husband was buried.

For a while, the public blamed Harding’s doctors for his death. But a few years later, the truth started to come out. In 1928, a woman named Nan Britton wrote a tell-all book about an alleged affair she had with Harding. And in 1930, a former administration staffer wrote a book alleging Florence poisoned her husband after learning of the infidelity. Then, almost a century later, Britton’s descendants wanted answers about their lineage. Ancestry documentation linked them to Harding, and they took the late president’s offspring to court over it. Before Harding’s body could be exhumed for DNA proof, though, his progeny relented. They admitted Harding did indeed have an affair with Britton that produced a child.^[6]

4 Franklin D. Roosevelt

Franklin D. Roosevelt was one of America’s greatest presidents. He saw the country through a bit more than three terms spanning much of the Great Depression and World War II. When he died in 1945, he had been very sick for a very long time. Still, his death was not expected. Roosevelt had been at one of his vacation homes with an alleged mistress when he perished. He told her he felt “a terrific pain in the back of my head” and passed out. Three hours later, he was dead. But while officials knew the importance of embalming quickly after death, their response was slow. An undertaker wasn’t contacted until four hours after the president’s death. All the while, aides waited on Eleanor Roosevelt to arrive as the next of kin.

Nine hours later, the embalming process finally began. The undertaker, F. Haden Snoderly, recorded a detailed 15-page memo about the significant issues he faced at that point. “Rigor mortis had set in,” he wrote, and Roosevelt’s abdomen had been “noticeably distended” by the time embalming began. Worse still, FDR’s “arteries were sclerotic,” which meant it was nearly impossible for Snoderly to get embalming fluid into the great man’s veins. The process was so difficult that accusations later appeared in books that Roosevelt had been poisoned and his body had turned black upon death. Those claims were false, but rumors persisted. As for FDR’s afterlife, the president wanted to keep things simple. He wrote out a very detailed set of instructions demanding a bare-bones coffin, a low-key funeral, and no lying in state.^[7]

3 John F. Kennedy

John F. Kennedy’s body rests in the Arlington National Cemetery. His brain, however, is missing. Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. During the autopsy, his brain was placed in “a stainless-steel container with a screw-top lid.” Secret Service agents stored it in a secured file cabinet for safekeeping. From there, it was later brought to a “secure room” within the National Archives. But then something horrible happened. Three years after Kennedy’s death, officials discovered the late President’s brain had vanished. But nobody knew when or how it had been removed from the National Archives.

Author James Swanson reported on the macabre caper in the book End Of Days, writing: “the brain, the tissue slides, and other autopsy materials were missing—and they have never been seen since.” There is no shortage of conspiracy theories focused on Kennedy’s death, but his missing brain has only added to the lore. Swanson played right into it with his own theory too. The author claimed JFK’s brother Robert F. Kennedy was the one who swiped the organ. “My conclusion is that Robert Kennedy did take his brother’s brain—not to conceal evidence of a conspiracy but perhaps to conceal evidence of the true extent of President Kennedy’s illnesses,” Swanson wrote, “or perhaps to conceal evidence of the number of medications that President Kennedy was taking.”^[8]

2 Tassos Papadopoulos

Tassos Papadopoulos, the former President of Cyprus, succumbed to lung cancer in 2008. Papadopoulos had been a political hero in the island nation. After his death, his body was interred in a cemetery in the city of Nicosia. But on the day before the first anniversary of his passing, the remains were stolen. On the morning of December 11, 2009, one of Papadopoulos’s former bodyguards went to the gravesite to light a candle of remembrance. It had rained hard the night before. When the mourning man arrived, he found an empty hole and a pile of dirt where the grave had been. The shocked man immediately called the police.

Officials were baffled by the heist. For weeks, they failed to determine any suspects. Then, three months later, an anonymous tip led police to a different cemetery in Nicosia. There, they found Papadopoulos’s body reburied in another grave. The tip gave investigators a lead, too. It turned out the late president’s body had been dug up by a man seeking leverage to ask for his brother’s release from prison. The scheme came apart after another accomplice called Papadopolous’s family and asked for money instead. The grave robbers were caught and quickly punished. Each man received less than two years in jail for the crime. Thankfully, Papadopoulos was reburied peacefully.^[9]

1 José Eduardo dos Santos

When José Eduardo dos Santos died in early July 2022, it kicked off a series of tense exchanges. Dos Santos had ruled over Angola for decades after taking power in 1979. During that time, his regime oversaw a brutal civil war. He died in Spain, thousands of miles away from his political opponents. But the geography and timing were both tough: Angola was on the eve of an already-tense election campaign when dos Santos succumbed in Barcelona.

His daughter openly claimed foul play had felled the 79-year-old man. She demanded an autopsy in Spain to determine his cause of death. The autopsy was performed, but the evidence of misdeed was not there. Certain of an unsuspicious death, a Spanish judge ruled weeks later that dos Santos was not the victim of foul play. The judge also ordered dos Santos’s body be released to his widow, Ana Paula, and not his children. The grieving wife flew it back to his homeland days before the August elections.

The current Angolan government protested that choice but eventually allowed it. Longtime supporters met the late president’s casket at the airport in Luanda and mourned as it traveled through the city. Finally, in August, dos Santos was laid to rest in the capital “after a long waiting period.”^[10]

We envision the history of our cities to be a step-by-step sequence of accomplishments, from small settlements to towns to the sprawling metropolises we see today. The darker parts are remembered as merely interludes – ‘dark ages’ – in the grand story, when in reality those dark ages have had a much larger impact on the course of our history than most periods of peace and prosperity.

10. Delhi

Timur, or Tamerlane, was one of the more successful Turko-Mongol rulers that swept across Asia in the aftermath of the Mongol conquests. At its extent in the 15th century, the Timurid empire stretched from Russia to the southern coast of Iran. The Timurid Renaissance – a golden age of arts, culture and science across the empire – would have a lasting impact on the region for centuries to come.

Timur was also, to change the subject a bit, extremely brutal and fanatical in his conquests, and that’s saying something for a Mongol ruler. One of Timur’s most brutal campaigns was staged against the Delhi Sultanate in 1398, ruled by the Tughluq dynasty from their capital at New Delhi. The Tughluqs were, according to Timur, too soft on their non-Muslim subjects, making them a fitting target for brutal conquest and enslavement.

The Battle of Delhi was short-lived and hardly noteworthy, as Timur’s forces soundly defeated Tughluq defenses and proceeded to sack the city. For weeks, up to 100,000 citizens were put to the sword, along with widespread looting, arson, rape and systematic destruction of Delhi Sultanate infrastructure. 

9. Herculaneum

The eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 AD has come to be associated with the city of Pompeii, as its preserved artifacts and bodies give us a visual sense of the tragedy. Most of the victims died due to the thermal shock caused by the burning hot debris and lava, though the temperature wasn’t high enough to burn them. While we wouldn’t call them ‘lucky’ by any definition of the word, they certainly got off light compared to the folks over at Herculaneum.

A Roman town settled at the base of the mountain, Herculaneum was a prosperous trading center at the time, though all that (obviously) changed on the day of the eruption. The remains here are much harder to dig up, as they’re covered in about five times the amount of ash as Pompeii. There are no well-preserved bodies, either. Only bones.

One recent study on the bones suggests that the victims died due to volcanic heat, as many of the bones have signs of fracture caused by severe heat. More disturbingly, they also found fragments of skulls. Unlike the people of Pompeii, citizens of Herculaneum were hit by a much more severe burst of heat, which made their blood boil to the point that their heads exploded. 

8. Constantinople

The Plague of Justinian – named after the Byzantine emperor Justinian I, for some reason – was the first documented outbreak of the bubonic plague caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis. It was the same disease that would return to decimate the European population in the 14th century, also known as the Black Death. It was almost as deadly, too, killing about one-third of the affected population within a few months of the outbreak. 

Constantinople – now Istanbul – was the worst affected city. At its peak, the plague was claiming more than 10,000 lives per day, which was comparable to numbers recorded during the worst phases of the Black Death. The few records we have from that time describe a scene of utter horror and destruction, with scores of bodies just lying unclaimed throughout the city’s streets for months on end. 

At one point, city officials were just throwing the bodies – which were often fully covered in infectious blood and pus and had to be tied to keep all that from disintegrating – into the sea, as the cemeteries and other burial grounds were filled to the brim. 

7. Tokyo

The firebombing raids carried out across major Japanese cities at the end of WW2 are rarely, if ever, remembered in the same vein as the atomic bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The latter still provokes questions about the morality of deliberately using weapons of mass devastation against a civilian population, while the former is usually only mentioned in passing as wartime collateral damage.

Yet, the raids were as devastating and horrific as the atomic bombs – if not more so – both in scale and their intended aims: to create terror among the civilian population to force their military to surrender. The only difference was the speed of the massacre – as the atom bombs were almost instant in their execution – though that difference hardly matters to someone burning to death in the streets.

The casualty figures for the entire campaign were as high as about 387,000 civilians, out of which about 97,000 died in a matter of a six-hour period on the night of March 9, 1945. The Great Tokyo Air Raid, as it’d come to be known in the post-war period, leveled everything in a 16 square mile region of the city. Most of its structures were made up of wood and paper, intentionally chosen to inflict maximum damage to the citizenry.

A total of 1,665 tons of incendiary bombs were dropped on Tokyo that night, erupting in huge, violent walls of firestorms that trapped and burned people alive inside. People died from all sorts of reasons, too – severe burns, getting trampled under stampeding crowds, carbon monoxide asphyxiation, and even being boiled alive, as some people had taken refuge in swimming pools and other bodies of water. American pilots flying overhead reported a strong stench of burning flesh whenever they opened the hatch, along with high turbulence caused by winds generated by the firestorm. Many of the survivors that were found only managed to survive by being buried under huge piles of burning bodies, which would have been the only effective shelter against the flames at the time. 

6. Leningrad

The siege of Leningrad – now St.Petersburg – by German and Finnish forces in September 1941 was the longest siege of the war, lasting for a total of 872 days. As the previous capital of Russia, the site of the Bolshevik revolution, and the home base for the dreaded Baltic Sea fleet, the city held strategic and ideological importance for both Germany and Russia. While it was lifted by the ending stages of the war, those 872 days were perhaps one of the worst 872 days experienced by any civilian population in history.

Accurate figures are hard to come by, though even by the most conservative estimates, more than 800,000 Russians lost their lives during the siege. Extreme hunger and lack of supplies were the primary causes – it wasn’t uncommon for people to boil household items like upholstery, wood, paint off the walls or anything they could find to make a meal. Cannibalism was shockingly common, too; more than 2,000 people were arrested for eating or attempting to eat human flesh in just the first half of 1942. 

5. Jerusalem

Romans were known for their ruthlessness on the battlefield, though their most brutal campaigns were reserved for rebelling populations. The Jewish citizens of Jerusalem had the misfortune of finding that out firsthand in 70 AD – four years after the Jerusalem riots of 66 AD that overthrew the Romans and installed a revolutionary government.

The Roman response to the rebellion also happens to be one of the darkest chapters in the history of Jerusalem. Led by Titus, the city was put under an unrelenting siege for over four months, as thousands of its citizens gradually lost their lives to famine, disease, and even cannibalism. One particularly harrowing account speaks of a woman in the streets killing and roasting her own child for a meal. When the siege was lifted, the city’s citizens were murdered or sold into slavery once the soldiers got tired of killing. 

4. Sarajevo

The Bosnian War was one of the many conflicts that erupted in the wake of the dissolution of Yugoslavia. It was marked by systematic ethnic cleansing, mass rape and a degree of brutality not seen in European warfare since WW2. Tensions from WW2 also played a prominent role, as Yugoslavia saw some of the worst violence of the war in the European theater.

One of its worst episodes was the siege of Sarajevo – the capital of the newly formed republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina – by nationalist Bosnian Serb forces in April 1992. While the war was multi-faceted and rather difficult to wrap your head around without a keen study of the region’s long history, the siege itself was quite easy to understand. 

For more than three years, Serb forces – stationed in the picturesque hills surrounding the city – bombarded the city’s population with sniper rifles, artillery shells and air strikes. Their aim was to force the Bosnian government – primarily made up of Bosniak, Croat and Serb officials – to surrender and make way for a Greater Serbian empire. 

Throughout that time, the civilians were indiscriminately bombed or shot from a distance, making everyday chores like going to the market a terrifying, life-threatening affair. By the end of it in February, 1996, the siege had claimed the lives of more than 5,000 civilians, making it the longest, deadliest siege of any city in the modern era of warfare. 

3. Warsaw

When Nazi forces invaded the Polish capital of Warsaw in October 1939, Heinrich Himmler’s orders to his officers were devilishly simple – raze it to the ground and convert it to a transport hub for the Wehrmacht, or ‘no stone to remain standing’. During the course of the next five years or so – before it was finally liberated by Soviet soldiers in January 1945 – those orders were put into effect with the sort of efficiency you only associate with Germans. 

The first Red Army soldiers into the city described a scene of complete and absolute destruction. Buildings had been systematically leveled to ensure that they can’t be repaired or built upon, and that was repeated with every structure – no matter how large or small – down to the brick. It was perhaps the only city in the war that was completely destroyed – it won’t be a stretch to say that pre-WW2 Warsaw ceased to exist during the occupation. The war – or more specifically the Nazis – turned Warsaw from a multiethnic, cosmopolitan capital to a war-torn wasteland that would take decades to completely rebuilt. 

2. Baghdad

The Baghdad of 1258, by all accounts, was a city without parallel in the known world. Easily the largest and most prosperous city in the world at the time, it was the epicenter of the Golden Age of Islam – a nearly five-century-long period of renaissance in fields like medicine, military technology, philosophy, culture, and art, among others. House of Wisdom – the city’s central library – was said to be the largest repository of knowledge ever put together in one place by that time, including knowledge that was once thought to be lost after the fall of ancient civilizations like China, India and Rome. 

Unfortunately, 1258 was also the year Hulagu Khan – a feared-yet-brilliant Mongol commander – decided that he wanted to conquer the Levant, and amassed perhaps the largest Mongol army ever put together to conquer Baghdad. This proved to be rather unnecessary, however, as the siege lasted for barely 12 days. 

For about a week after the conquest, Mongol soldiers raped, murdered and pillaged across Baghdad, reducing its world-class infrastructure to unrecognizable rubble. This was the fate of most Mongol adversaries that didn’t surrender and chose to fight. The Caliph himself was rolled inside a carpet and trampled to death, bringing a brutal and sudden end to the golden Islamic age, as well as the Abbasid dynasty.

By the end of it, the House of Wisdom – like most other buildings in the city – was utterly destroyed, with all of its books burned or thrown into the river Tigris. The destruction was so complete that it would be centuries before the city was even rebuilt, let alone completely restored to its former glory. 

1. Nanking

The invasion of China by Japanese forces in 1937 didn’t come as a surprise, as they had already invaded Manchuria – or northeastern China – and installed a puppet government there back in 1931. What was surprising, however, was the sheer degree of brutality and violence Chinese civilians were subjected to throughout the length of the occupation.

The Rape of Nanking – as its worst episode would come to be known – started in December, 1937, and claimed the lives of over 300,000 civilians over the next six weeks. The victims were often bayoneted to death in various ways, though beheading, disemboweling, impaling and cutting into pieces using swords was quite common, too. Rape of women of all ages was particularly widespread, and the victims were often mutilated and violently killed in the aftermath. 

Over the course of the massacre, people were buried alive, ran over by tanks, nailed to walls or burned to death. Two Japanese soldiers were even competing for the total number of people they could behead with their swords, as their exploits were regularly recorded by a photographer and published in newspapers back in Japan.