Cold Case: History

In 2012, palaeopathologist Albert Zink and colleagues examined the mummy of Ramses III, the last ruler of Ancient Egypt, using computer tomography and discover a seven-centimeter wound on the king's neck that strongly suggests he was murdered. Who was behind the assassination?

Experts have believed for more than 100 years that madness drove Vincent van Gogh to suicide. Pulitzer Prize winner and van Gogh biographer Steven Naifeh seeks to prove that van Gogh was accidentally shot by 16-year-old René Secrétan.

In August 1962 Marilyn Monroe died under mysterious circumstances. Police were not called until six hours after her body was discovered. There were indications the scene had been tampered with, and today there are no police files to be found. Some of the men playing shadow roles in this drama include Marilyn's psychiatrist, President John F. Kennedy, and Attorney General Bobby Kennedy.

The Medici family dominated politics and the economy in Renaissance Florence. To break the Medici influence, the old-established Pazzi family attempts to assassinate brothers Giuliano and Lorenzo de Medici. They succeed only partially, leading to the capture of the perpetrators and a search for the conspirators. In a present-day investigation, Florence Kasumba together with historians such as Marcello Simonetta gathers clues from medicine, psychology, and art history.

In the summer of 1483 two boys reside in the Tower of London while the elder, aged 12, awaits crowning as the King of England. But doubts about the boy's right of succession result in his uncle receiving the crown, after which the two boys disappear. What happened to them? A cold case from the age of the knights in England, in which numerous new clues have been found in recent years.

On 1 November 1957, 24-year-old luxury call girl Rosemarie Nitribitt was found dead in a flat in Frankfurt's Stiftstraße. Her services were popular among male guests of the noble hotels and the moneyed aristocracy. Nitribitt's death hit like a bomb in the middle of the economic miracle of the 1950s, yet her murderer was never found. Cold Case reopens the case.