The Atavist

The Atavist Magazine publishes one incredible true story every month. We specialize in longform narratives — the kind you want to read to the very last word. Visit us here.

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When their parents ripped two young sisters from their privileged lives, gave them fake names, and took them on the lam, they thought it was because their father was in trouble with the IRS. It would be years before they learned the truth about his life of crime.

Our latest story, “You Can Run,” by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Barry Meier is now live:

Leah told her daughters that they wouldn’t be going back to Fox Chapel—not after the weekend, not ever—because the government had accused their father of not paying his taxes. It wasn’t true, Leah insisted. Still, with federal agents searching for John, the family had to leave. They would all disappear and start a new life elsewhere, under new names. Leah told her daughters that they would never see their friends again. They couldn’t even call them to say goodbye.

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My brother’s murder and its aftermath. 

A story originally published by Gawker in 2013, re-issued by The Atavist as part of our Revived series, which breathes new life into old stories.

Issue no. 175, “A Hollywood Ending,” is now available:

No longer would I be the younger sibling, squirming under his rule. Never again would he take an offhand remark about spilled water and turn it into an hour-long battle of wills that I was sure to lose. No more would I have to endure his dorky jokes. His too-loud squawk of a public laugh. His OCD-like finger-sniffing habit. His Grateful Dead bootlegs. His cajoling. His hectoring. His preternaturally stinky feet. His awkward and uncool way with girls. His insistence on making and then standing by claims I knew—I knew so hard—were not true. Impossible. The way he drew out my name, annoyingly, when he wanted something: “C’mon, Maaa-uhhhh-cccccc.” His never failing to upbraid me because he believed I ordered terribly in restaurants and should look the waiter in the eye and speak louder. His related feeling that he’d always ordered the best thing on the menu, far superior to what I’d gotten. His stoner friends. His egg breath. His egg farts. His tie-dyed T-shirts. His mirrored shades. His fondness for wizards. Fairies. Led Zeppelin tropes. His confidence in his own coolness. His unstoppable loyalty to me. His belief in me. His belief I could do better, try harder. His pushing me. To move, move, move to Los Angeles. Take acting lessons. Buy a motorcycle. Ride around in the endless summer. 

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Colorado’s San Luis Valley was a wildlife poacher’s paradise. Then an undercover federal agent arrived, posing as a taxidermist and ready to take down the valley’s worst offenders. 

Issue no. 174, “Big Game,” is now available:

Morrison didn’t want to create market conditions that fueled the very activities he sought to curb, so he bought meat and antlers selectively—just enough to gather evidence against each poacher he was after—and bargained relentlessly below market value. Still, what he offered was more than many in the valley had seen in several lean years. “Once they got faith in us, we couldn’t get rid of them,” Bensley said. “I mean, they just would not stop killing.”

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With thousands of soldiers dying in Vietnam, a group of young friends in New York embarked on a secret mission to bring the U.S. war machine to its knees. They did it in their underwear, using knitting needles, fondue forks, and an inflatable kiddie pool. 

Issue no. 173, “The Buffalo Raiders,” is now live:

In a world without computers, the physical documents containing the personal information of draft-eligible men might have been the only materials linking them to the Selective Service. “ I often thought, what about the women who worked in those offices?” Jim Good said. “Did they see those files as death certificates?” He and other peace activists came to view the contents of draft boards’ filing cabinets as no different from bombs or bullets: They were just tools that helped the government kill. Crucially, destroying files could be accomplished without any violence, unless you counted the destruction of property, which raiders did not. They believed that some property simply didn’t have a right to exist. 

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When a scraggly band of folk musicians arrived to tour the UK, residents of a small Welsh town were enamored with the group’s foot-stomping shows of traditional sea shanties. Then they learned that the band’s leader, known as the Captain, ruled with an iron fist.

Issue no. 172, “Master and Commander,” is now live:

The rules in the contract the musicians had signed stated that they could not “take food from the refrigerator outside of the assigned meal times.” As a result, the musicians were constantly hungry. Ordóñez told me that there were times he begged strangers for food. Several musicians fell ill from the exhausting performance schedule. Ordóñez recalled playing a show in Cardiff with a fever of 105 degrees. “It was as if they were testing how far we could go, constantly pushing the limits of the human body,” he said.

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Three mothers, one struggle: saving their children with schizophrenia. 

From issue no. 171, “‘That’s Somebody’s Son,’” by Mary Margaret Alvarado:

Imagine this: While you are showering, or making your coffee, or listening to music, a voice or several, known or new to you, quiet or very loud, are saying things so vile that you do not want to disturb anyone else with what you are hearing. Those voices are more insistent than the music playing, the coffee brewing, or the water running in the shower. They seem to know you. Now try to think while you’re hearing those voices. Now try to act.

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We’re excited to introduce Revived, a project breathing new life into old stories. Periodically, the magazine will release previously published features that can no longer be found online—our goal is to celebrate existing work otherwise lost to dead outlets and dead links.

  First up, “The Two Face of Lummie Jenkins,” originally published by Topic magazine (RIP). The longtime sheriff of Wilcox County, Alabama, was a god or a monster—it just depends on who you ask:

“He was the lawless lawman,” said Sheryl Threadgill Matthews, who at 15 became one of the first of two Black students to integrate Wilcox County High School. There was no police protection for students like Matthews, and no punishment for the classmates who verbally and physically abused her. She wasn’t getting much of an education, she said, so her enrollment lasted only a year before she returned to Camden Academy, the Black Presbyterian secondary school where her father, the Reverend Thomas Threadgill, was a chaplain. “Lummie didn’t play by the book,” Matthews told me. “He did whatever he wanted.”

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Inside a Texas school nurse’s quest to document the life and death of every woman killed by a man in America.

Issue no. 169, “14,445 and Counting,” is now live:

Few people in the United States were talking about femicide. There were no official inquiries, no sustained mass protests, no mobilization against misogynistic murders, even as the #MeToo movement against sexual harassment and assault accelerated. Men killing women was more often the subject of entertainment—podcasts, documentaries, entire TV networks—than public action or legislation. This was in keeping with a long history in the United States of treating women’s murders as everyday tragedies. Caroline Davidson, a law professor at Willamette University, told me that when Congress was drafting hate-crime legislation decades ago, gender-based violence was considered “too prevalent and too common” to merit inclusion. “It would wind up swallowing the entire category of hate crimes,” she said.

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The ‘Social Register’ was a who’s who of America’s rich and powerful—the heirs of robber barons, scions of political dynasties, and descendants of ‘Mayflower’ passengers. It was also the perfect hit list for the country’s hardest-working art thief.

Atavist issue no. 168, “The Blue Book Burglar,” is now live:

Law enforcement also became convinced that there was a link among the victims. Not just their wealth and the location of their homes—something more singular. Detectives in Fairfield County, Connecticut, and Westchester County, New York, cross-referenced their cases. Did the victims belong to any clubs? Only the most exclusive yacht and country clubs in the country, but there wasn’t one they all belonged to. What about academic affiliations? Collectively, they’d been to every elite boarding school and Ivy League university, but they weren’t all, say, graduates of Yale. Did they use the same arborist? Was the same individual collecting their trash? No and no. The police did notice one thing: Many of the victims’ phone numbers were not publicly listed, which made the fifty-ring calls odd—to say nothing of the hang-up calls some targets had received prior to being robbed.

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2,000 miles. Dozens of strangers. One epic therapy session with an ailing nation. Author Masha Hamilton and photographer Cheney Orr—a mother-son duo—drive the length of Interstate 95 and ask people at rest stops where they think America is headed.

Issue no. 167 is now live:

This story unfolds like our experience of the road: not a straight shot but a series of quick confessions, bitter jokes, whispered memories. Strangers laying themselves bare, then moving on. No two encounters were alike; wherever they went, we followed.

In every conversation, and the silences in between, I listened for the shape of an answer to my question: Are we breaking apart, or is there enough left to bind us?

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The worst air disaster you’ve never heard of.

Issue no. 166, “American Hindenburg,” is now live: 

Deep inside there was no question: The Akron was coming apart. As Deal ran for the bow, the incline became so severe that he was forced to climb the gangway like a ladder, hand over hand. Erwin was about 30 feet behind him. They both looked up to see a helium tank break away from its mooring. As the 120-gallon cylinder came crashing down, Erwin ducked; it missed him by inches. Deal was spared, too.

It occurred to Deal, who had not been near a window for an hour, that he had no idea if they were over land or water. He didn’t know which would be worse, not realizing that there were no life preservers on the ship.

Six other crew members were near Deal and Erwin, hanging on to girders as wires snapped and the ship’s interior frame shattered. No one screamed. No one said a word, perhaps because there was nothing they could do.

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He made his name in Al Capone’s Chicago investigating racial violence, solving crimes, and exposing corruption. But America’s first Black private detective was hiding secrets of his own.

Issue no. 165, “The Talented Mr. Bruseaux,” is now live: 

In September 1919, Bruseaux opened the doors of the Keystone Detective Agency at 3333 South State, a popular address among Black entrepreneurs. The agency was the first of its kind to be owned by a Black man. The Chicago Defender, the city’s leading Black newspaper, boasted that Keystone was the first detective agency to be run by “our group.”

Tall and broad shouldered, with his short hair conked and split into a stylish side part, Bruseaux cultivated an air of old money, wearing the finely cut suits favored by bankers. (He’d one day be included on a list of the city’s best-dressed men.) Along with other investigative services, Bruseaux offered to shadow unfaithful spouses and locate lost relatives—a common concern for families whose members had been separated during the migration north. His agency made use of emerging technologies like fingerprinting, listening devices, and hidden cameras. Ambitious from the start, Bruseaux made it known that he was available for jobs anywhere in the country, publicizing his business with the slogan “We Cover the World.”

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A former FBI agent traveled to Louisiana to ask a hired killer about a murder that haunted him. Then Larry Thompson started talking about a different case altogether.

Issue no. 164, “Conversations With a Hit Man,” is now live:

If the police were given the name of a nonexistent person, that would raise suspicion. So Thompson could have used an alias that didn’t require him to invent a new identity. He could have borrowed the name of a real person—someone he knew would be quickly dismissed as a suspect, and whose name was commonplace to boot. When I advance this idea, Thompson, arms folded, says: “Might’ve happened just like that.”

Fuller and I sit, thunderstruck. This, it occurs to me, is literally how you get away with murder.

Read the full story. 

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Australia had never seen a criminal like this. He could rob a bank, then pop up at another one a dozen miles away minutes later. What was his secret? 

Issue no. 158, "The After Dark Bandit," is now live:

Hasty knelt down, opened the suitcase, and rifled through it. There was a can of Coca-Cola, a newspaper, and—inside a drawstring sack—a sawed-off shotgun, stacks of money, and a mask that looked like an old man’s face. Hasty turned to Morgan, who now had a Browning pistol aimed at him.

It’s a toy, Hasty thought. Then: No, it’s death.

Morgan shoved his pistol into Hasty’s stomach, and the two men wrestled in silence. Morgan pulled the trigger twice, but there wasn’t a bullet in the chamber. Hasty forced his adversary’s gun hand upward and the pistol fell. (Later he would claim that he pried the gun away, and Morgan that he dropped it in surrender.) Hasty then pushed Morgan up against the wall and grabbed him by the throat.

“You’ve got me,” Morgan said. “I just made you a hero.”

“If you fucking move,” Hasty replied, “I’ll kill you as you stand there.”

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The Nazis feared journalist Carl von Ossietzky so much that they sent him to a concentration camp. Could winning the Nobel Peace Prize save his life?

Issue no. 158, “The Good Traitor,” is now live:

Ossietzky’s health had worsened. Karl Wloch, a journalist for the communist newspaper Die Rote Fahne who was interned at Esterwegen in 1936, was “shocked to his core” the first time he met Ossietzky. “What I saw living on that sack of hay were just his eyes; he hardly moved his mouth when he asked me short questions,” Wloch later said. “I had to listen carefully in order to understand him.” Ossietzky asked for the latest news from Berlin and listened closely as Wloch reported what he knew. “He wasn’t at all world-weary,” Wloch recalled, “although he knew how difficult it would be to come out of the grasp of the SS executioners alive.”

Their conversation turned to cases of suicide in the camps. “Whether we survive is neither certain nor the main point,” Ossietzky insisted. “But how people think about us later is as important as that they think about us. In that, our future lies. Thus, we have to keep living here as long as we breathe. A Germany that thinks of us will be a better Germany.”

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On the eve of (the latest) most important election of our lifetimes, Mira Ptacin tells the story of the journalists, World War II veterans, rabble-rousers, lumberjacks, and policymakers who, when he tried to build a training compound for fellow fascists, ran a neo-Nazi out of rural Maine.  

Issue no. 156, "The Crash of the Hammer," is now live: 

Once he’d settled in Maine, Hammer kept his followers abreast of his progress breaking ground, frequently posting photos and uploading videos to Telegram. There was Hammer standing next to a pile of freshly chopped wood, snowshoeing through the forest, holding a beer in front of a bonfire. Followers saw him cradling an AK-47 in his arms. (Caption: “All this Slavic war training in the Maine woods has me exhausted!”) Hammer posted footage from a celebration he held with about eight of his followers, where he claimed they sacrificed a goat. Another clip showed Hammer helping a man in a balaclava slice the palm of his hand as part of an initiation ritual.

Hammer appeared excited, optimistic. He was careful—or thought that he was careful—not to reveal his exact location, lest it attract unwanted attention from his enemies, including the media and the FBI. If people wanted to join him at the compound, they could get in touch directly.

But unbeknownst to Hammer, he was being followed. A longtime Mainer was determined to wipe the smirk off the neo-Nazi’s face.

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Before the January 6 insurrection, there was the November 25 arson campaign, when violent anti-government conspirators tried to burn down Manhattan. 

Issue no. 155, “City on Fire,” is now live:

The first fire bell rang out at the St. James Hotel at a quarter to nine in the evening. A guest had noticed smoke curling under the door of the room next to his and rushed to the front desk to report it. Upon entering the room, hotel staff found flames spreading across the bedding, which reeked of turpentine. Matchsticks littered the floor alongside a black satchel holding a small glass bottle of liquid. The fire, which was still small, was quickly put out. The man who was staying in the room, who had given his name as John School, was nowhere to be found.

Ten minutes later, a similar discovery was made nearly two miles away at the St. Nicholas Hotel. A bystander claimed to have seen two mysterious men hurrying out of the lobby. Soon after, a fire was discovered on an upper floor of the nearby Lafarge House hotel.

It was November 25, 1864, a clear, cool Friday just after Thanksgiving, and New York City was thick with crowds of people headed out for the night or just enjoying a downtown stroll. The jovial mood shifted sharply as the sounds of alarms erupted in the streets of Manhattan. Frantic guests and staff found rooms aflame at hotel after hotel, including the Metropolitan, the Belmont, Lovejoy’s, Tammany Hall, and the Fifth Avenue. At most of these establishments the particulars were largely the same: sheets, blankets, and furniture piled atop mattresses in a tinder heap; apothecary vials left behind at the scene; guestbook listings indicating that a young man with a generic name had checked into the room.