On a summer morning in 1952, a young man named Bayard Peakes walked into the Physical Society’s Office at Columbia University. He was angry that his article had been rejected from their journal for being a ‘crackpot’ theory, and he was looking for revenge. Standing between him and possible academic glory was a teenage secretary working the front desk. Bayard shot 18 year old Eileen Fahen in the chest and fled. Pursued by police all the way back to his hometown of Boston, Bayard wanted the world to know that he was the ‘naughty boy’ who had murdered the secretary of one of the most renowned physics departments. His notoriety was short-lived. His tactics, however, prompted the Columbia Physical Society to change the way they view what they called ‘Crackpots’

Quebec experienced intensive social upheaval over the course of the 20th century, affecting everything from university structures to social commentary. In 1989, Quebec women were gaining more and more footholds in previously male dominated careers. And while the Ecole Polytechnique was at the forefront of female academic empowerment, one disgruntled young man was on a mission to eradicate feminism. In the span of twenty minutes, the enraged killer murdered ten women and injured several others for the crime of trying to graduate with degrees in engineering. In the aftermath of his violence, Quebec was forced to reckon with its national views on feminism, as well as its policies on firearms.

In 1977, a graduate student named Sigrid Stevenson was brutally murdered in the performance center at the College of New Jersey. Over forty years later, her killer is still at large, and little remains of Sigrid’s memory. But while nothing but ghost stories haunted the campus for several decades, another student, Johnny Fiocco, would mysteriously disappear in 2006. His body turned up months later in a Pennsylvania landfill, and his family is still hoping for answers almost twenty years later.