TODAY IN HISTORY: Notorious murder trial brought undone because police forgot to ask key question
US woman Beulah Annan shot her lover Harry Kalsted on April 3, 1924, triggering one of the most high-profile murder trials in Chicago history.
Annan was grilled by police over the death, but at no point during the interrogation did detectives remember to ask her why she shot him.
That oversight proved problematic for the government case, with prosecutors unable to get their story straight on the motive.
The case resulted in an acquittal.
She died four years later of tuberculosis, aged 28.
Locals in the English town of Almondsbury came across a woman dressed in exotic clothes and speaking a strange language on April 3, 1817.
Using the help of a Portuguese sailor translating for her, she identified herself as Caraboo, a princess from the island of Javasu.
She said she had been kidnapped by pirates and had jumped overboard, swimming ashore.
For ten weeks, she became a local celebrity, astonishing wealthy locals with her exotic and unusual behaviour.
But a boarding-house keeper soon recognised her as Mary Willcocks, a cobbler's daughter from the nearby town of Witheridge.
Willcocks had concocted the false identity as a means of getting away from her impoverished past.
She unsuccessfully toured the US and UK as a curiosity, but with little success.
Willcocks later made a living selling leeches to Bristol Infirmary Hospital.
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