The Backstory with Patty Steele

It seems like iconic, larger-than-life folks should meet larger-than-life demises. But that's not always the case. There are huge names who died from all sorts of ridiculous and messy mistakes.

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Hearing about a panel on an Alaska Airlines jet popping off mid-air gives us all a serious case of the creeps. But imagine you’re in a jet at almost 35,000 feet when a terrorist’s bomb blows it into pieces. You free fall to Earth…and survive.

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On a beautiful summer morning in 1908, a massive explosion hit Siberia. It downed 80 million trees and lit the night sky 3,000 miles away in Sweden. But to this day, no one knows what caused it.

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Depression is nothing new, although we call it by a different name than they did centuries ago, and we have some new ways of treating it. But some of our greatest minds, like JFK, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and Abe Lincoln have been strengthened by their battles with depression.

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It’s the Wild West and the first democratic governor of Wyoming, as well as the state's first female doctor, have ties to vicious train robber Big Nose George Parrott. And you won’t believe the mementos they kept.

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We’ll do anything to look fabulous these days, but we have nothing on our ancestors. They used face creams made from animal and human pee. They glued animal pelts on unusual body parts. And they literally poisoned themselves in their quest for perfect skin and hair.

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We all have our Christmas traditions, but how did Santa Claus, Christmas trees, and George Washington’s recipe for heavily spiked eggnog rule the season?

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Beauty intrigues everyone, but a desire for control, massive ego, and hatred drive some to steal beauty belonging to others. That was Hitler’s motivation as he rampaged through Europe attempting to steal art, architecture, and even a spectacular race car.

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We take our beds for granted. But how and where we slept, as well as who we were with and what we did while in bed, has changed dramatically over the centuries.

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Criminal forensics has seen some pretty amazing advances over the past decade. But less than a century ago, investigators were attempting to nab killers through "optography," a process that involved dissecting a murder victim's eyes to harvest an actual image of the last thing the victim saw.

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