5 famous murders in history

There are many characters who have gone down in history more for their tragic ending than for their biography. Killed mostly for political reasons, these crimes have changed the course of history. Next, we present you 5 of the most famous murders summarizing how these events that marked society occurred.

5 famous murders in history

Would the history of humanity have been different without the tragic disappearance of these characters? We will never know. What we can assure is that each and every one of the murders that we present below have had a weight (sometimes decisive) in the course of events.

1. Elizabeth of Bavaria, sissy (1837-1898)

The life of Elisabeth of Bavaria, better known as sissy, she has come down to us through the movies much more sugar-coated than she actually was. In fact, the empress of Austria-Hungary had an unstable character and she felt a terrible hatred towards the Viennese courtshe, from whom she tried to flee whenever possible.

In one of these "flights", when he was almost 61 years old, Sissi was on the shores of Lake Leman, in Switzerland. She had stayed at the Beau-Rivage Hotel in Geneva under the pseudonym she used to go unnoticed: Countess Hohenems. On the afternoon of September 10, she and her lady-in-waiting, Countess Irma Sztaray, were hurrying to get to the ship that was to take them to the other side of the lake.

On the way, a young man bumps into the Empress and runs off. Her lady-in-waiting approaches solicitously, fearful that the man has stolen the beautiful gold watch that Elisabeth wears pinned to her chest. The watch is still in her place, and the empress just looks scared. But a few minutes later, Sissi vanishes. When they try to unbutton her corset so she can breathe better, they realize that what looked like a robbery was actually a murder: the young man, who turned out to be the anarchist Luigi Lucheni, had stealthily plunged a stiletto into his heart.

Lucheni's desire to become a martyr to the anarchist cause was not satisfied, since capital punishment had already been abolished by then in Geneva. Lucheni was sentenced to life in prison. In 1910, he hanged himself in his cell.

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2. Jean-Paul Marat (1743-1793)

If there is a symbol of the French Revolution, that is the painting in which the painter Jacques-Louis David portrays his friend Marat shortly after he was assassinated. The canvas was made for the National Convention, and elevated the Jacobin to the altars of the "martyrs of the Revolution."

Marat had founded the newspaper L'ami du peuple (The friend of the people), from where he directed his incendiary harangues and from where she asked for more and more heads. The Revolution was at its bloodiest moment; the Jacobins' political rivals, the Girondins, had fled Paris. France was plunged into a kind of civil war.

In French Normandy lived a 25-year-old named Marie-Anne-Charlotte Corday, a fervent republican and staunch supporter of the Girondins. Disappointed at the defeatist attitude that they had adopted in the face of the Jacobin victory, the young woman decided to take the reins of the nation's destiny. Thus, in July 1793 she headed for Paris, with the intention of killing Marat, whom she considered guilty of all the revolutionary terror.

On July 13, she Charlotte went to Rue des Cordeliers, where the "friend of the people" lived. She asked for an audience to pass on sensitive information, which included several names of Girondin traitors. Confident, Marat let her pass. The man was submerged in his bathtub, as he suffered from a skin disease whose pain was only relieved with hot water. As she carefully wrote down the names of the traitors, Charlotte drew a dagger and quickly plunged it into his chest..

The young woman would soon go through the guillotine, vilified by some and admired by others, and her action became a legend. However, the Terror would still flood France with blood for a few more months.

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3. Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

On the night of April 14, 1865, the President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln, was with his wife at Ford's Theater in Washington. The couple, who were attending a performance of Tom Taylor's Our American Cousin, arrived somewhat late due to some last-minute business the president had to deal with. The actors paused for a few minutes while the audience greeted Lincoln and his wife with resounding applause.

The killer, John Wilkes Booth, had arrived at the building at about 9 p.m., where he entered through the artists' entrance. Booth was a professional actor; he perfectly knew the play that was being performed and knew what time was the right time to act. In the third act, there was a scene that always aroused loud laughter from the audience. It was then that he fired his gun at the president's head. The detonation was deafened by the laughter of the spectators.

Immediately, Henry Reed Rathbone, a soldier who was accompanying the president that night, tried to catch the assassin, but he wounded him and managed to get rid of Rathbone. Wilkes Booth jumped from the box and landed on the stage, where, according to some historians, he exclaimed: "Sic Semper tyrannis!” (Always like this to tyrants!), although other versions suggest that the phrase was “The south has been avenged!”. Booth managed to escape from the theater, while Lincoln lay dying in the box, treated as an emergency by a surgeon who was in the audience. He died a few hours later, on the morning of April 15.

John Wilkes Booth and his accomplices were arrested a few days later. All of them were loyal to the southern cause, despairing over the recent defeat of the southern Confederate States. Lincoln's assassin was shot at the farm where he had hidden.

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4. Franz Ferdinand of Austria (1863-1914)

It is possibly one of the best-known murders and one that has had the greatest impact in history, since was the direct trigger of nothing less than the First World War.

On June 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, nephew of Emperor Franz Joseph of Austria and heir to his empire, he was in the city of Sarajevo, the capital of the Austrian province of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Around 10 in the morning, a bomb bounced off the back of the car in which the Archduke and his wife, Sofía Chotek, were traveling. The archdukes managed to reach the Sarajevo City Hall unharmed.

Fearing for his safety, Francisco Fernando and his wife canceled the visiting schedule and decided to drive through other streets, always avoiding the center of the city. Bad luck meant that the driver was not aware of the instructions and took the usual route. It was then that Gavrilo Princip, one of the terrorists, approached the car and fired two shots at point blank range that hit the archduke's neck and Sofia's abdomen. Both passed away a few minutes later.

Princip was part of a group of radical Serb nationalists who advocated for the liberation of Bosnia of the Austrian empire. What would have ended “just” with a war between Austria and Serbia, ended up becoming a war that involved the entire continent. A dangerous game of dominoes that resulted in 4 years of war and more than 17 million deaths.

5. Grigori Rasputin (1869-1916)

From an illiterate peasant to a cheap mystic and, finally, a confidant of the Russian tsars. That was the lightning rise of this sinister character, whose presence at the Russian court was one more piece in the gear that would unleash the Russian Revolution.

Womanizer, drunk and rowdy, Rasputin (literally, "the depraved" in Russian) came to St. Petersburg walking and selling religion and sex at the same time. His great success was reaching the side of Empress Alexandra, whose son, Tsarevich Alexei, suffered from terrible hemophilia. The tsarina felt tremendously guilty, since it was she who had transmitted this disease to her little girl, inherited from her, in turn, from her grandmother Queen Victoria. Rasputin took advantage of Alejandra's emotional weakness and her exalted religiosity to offer her a comfort that she considered unique. Much more than that; when Rasputin was near him, the boy miraculously healed from his lethal bleeding.

Some historians claim that Rasputin knew about hypnosis and that he used it to induce the Tsarevich into a state of total calm., which made his body react positively. Be that as it may, Alejandra soon demanded that the starets, that is, the “holy old man”, remained by his side. Quickly, Rasputin's influence was not limited to healing and religion, but extended to politics.

The nobles who made up the tsar's coterie knew this, and for that they hated him. A plot was soon formed to end Rasputin's nefarious influence over the tsars. On the night of December 30, 1916, Prince Yusupov summoned the starets to an intimate dinner in his palace on the banks of the Neva. Yusupov knew Rasputin's weakness for beautiful women, and Irina Yusupova, the prince's wife, happened to be one of the most admired beauties in the city. So Rasputin went to the appointment, encouraged by the drink, the sweets and Irina.

The cakes had been carefully poisoned, but the conspirators watched with their mouths open as Rasputin devoured them, one after the other, without fainting. After a while it became clear that the poison had no effect, so Yusupov decided to cut his losses. He took a revolver and shot his guest, who collapsed to the ground. They closed the room with the supposed corpse inside and began to deliberate what to do next.

When they opened the door again, the body had disappeared.. Suddenly, and to everyone's astonishment, they saw a figure running through the gardens. Yusupov and his colleagues lost their minds. They went out into the garden and shot again at Rasputin, who fell to the ground again. This time, he seemed dead.

The conspirators surrounded the body with chains and threw it into the icy waters of the Neva. When the corpse was discovered, the lungs were found to be filled with water, indicating that Rasputin was still alive when he plunged into the river... and that, after the poison and the shots, he had died drowned.