Execution by electrocution, performed using an electric chair, is a method of execution originating in the United States in which the condemned person is strapped to a specially built wooden chair and electrocuted through electrodes fastened on the head and leg. This execution method, conceived in 1881 by a Buffalo, New York, dentist named Alfred P. Southwick, was developed throughout the 1880s as a supposed humane alternative to hanging and was first used in 1890. This execution method has been used in the United States and, for several decades, in the Philippines. While death was originally theorized to result from damage to the brain, it was shown in 1899 that it primarily results from ventricular fibrillation and eventually cardiac arrest.

Etan Kalil Patz was an American boy who was six years old on May 25, 1979, when he disappeared on his way to his school bus stop in the SoHo neighborhood of Lower Manhattan. His disappearance helped launch the missing children movement, which included new legislation and new methods for tracking down missing children. Several years after he disappeared, Patz was one of the first children to be profiled in the "Photo on a milk carton" campaigns of the early 1980s. In 1983, President Ronald Reagan designated May 25—the anniversary of Etan's disappearance—as National Missing Children's Day in the United States.

A French court sentenced Thierry Tilly, dubbed "The Guru," to eight years in prison Tuesday for cheating an aristocratic family out of their wealth and château after convincing them their lives were under threat from a secret plot by the Freemasons.

Heaven's Gate was an American new religious movement, often described as a cult. It was founded in 1974 and led by Bonnie Nettles and Marshall Applewhite, known within the movement as Ti and Do, respectively. Nettles and Applewhite first met in 1972, and went on a journey of spiritual discovery, identifying themselves as the two witnesses of Revelation, attracting a following of several hundred people in the mid-1970s. In 1976, the group stopped recruiting and instituted a monastic lifestyle. Scholars have described the theology of Heaven's Gate as a mixture of Christian millenarianism, New Age, and Ufology, and as such it has been characterized as a UFO religion. The central belief of the group was that followers could transform themselves into immortal extraterrestrial beings by rejecting their human nature, and they would ascend to heaven, referred to as the "Next Level" or "The Evolutionary Level Above Human". The death of Nettles to cancer in 1985 challenged the group's views on ascension, where they originally believed that they would ascend to heaven while alive aboard a UFO, later coming to believe that the body was merely a "container" or "vehicle" for the soul and that their consciousness would be transferred to new "Next Level bodies" upon death.

Ken Rex McElroy was a resident of Skidmore, Missouri. Known as "the town bully", his unsolved killing became the focus of international attention.

Sandra Renee Cantu was an American girl who attracted national attention at the age of eight after she disappeared from Tracy, California, on March 27, 2009. Her body was discovered ten days later inside a suitcase in a local irrigation pond. On April 10, police arrested a local woman, 28-year-old Melissa Huckaby, and charged her with the kidnapping and murder of Cantu. Huckaby pleaded guilty to the kidnapping and murder of Cantu and was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole in 2010.

Martin John Bryant is a convicted Australian mass shooter who murdered 35 people and injured 23 others in the Port Arthur massacre, one of the world's deadliest shooting sprees, in Port Arthur, Tasmania, between 28 and 29 April 1996. He is concurrently serving 35 life sentences, plus 1,652 years, all without the possibility of parole, at Risdon Prison in Hobart.

The Shark Arm case refers to a series of incidents that began in Sydney, Australia, on 25 April 1935 when a human arm was regurgitated by a captive 3.5-meter tiger shark, subsequently leading to a murder investigation and trial.

A compilation of strange deaths caused by everyday objects.

A collection of unusual deaths of the 20th century.