Mysteries

The most enduring and romantic legend of the Russian Revolution -- that two children of Czar Nicholas II and his wife, Alexandra, survived the slaughter that killed the rest of their family -- may finally be put to rest with the positive identification of bone fragments from a lonely Russian grave.

On a clear day, the expanse of blue ocean seen from the living room of this San Clemente home seems almost endless. Sometimes, as day gives way to evening, a line of pink stretches like a crayon scrawl in the sky. When night falls, the sea is an abyss of black. Margrit Ucar fell instantly for the panorama. Even before her husband, Manas, had a chance to see the house, she knew it was where they would raise their two young daughters, twins Margo and Grace.

His name might not rank with Amelia Earhart's and Judge Crater's, but the disappearance of Everett Ruess has been an enduring legend of the Southwest for 75 years. Only 20 at the time of his disappearance, the writer, artist and environmentalist who has been compared to a young John Muir was last seen near Utah's Davis Gulch in 1934. Numerous search parties failed to find him, and authors have speculated widely about his demise. Many believed he drowned in the Colorado River.

In an old photograph, Albert Clark Reed looks like just another balding man in a coat and tie, a 45-year-old husband and father from the 1950s. He has a thin mustache and a pleasant half-smile that looks as if he were being coached by some portrait photographer. His wife, Florence, called him a "cool, levelheaded scientist and test pilot." He graduated from Caltech in 1929 and returned for more studies in 1932.

There are times, especially when he's struggling to walk uphill, that Leroy Richmond still can almost feel the anthrax that nearly killed him in 2001. He senses how it saps his 64-year-old body of strength, how it forces him to rest for two or three minutes. And now with reports that government scientist Bruce E. Ivins, who died last week in an apparent suicide, has been linked by authorities to the anthrax attacks, Richmond has another feeling. He feels like this is the end of the mystery.

The last time she saw Chris Chichester, they sat in the backyard outside his San Marino guesthouse drinking iced tea and playing Trivial Pursuit. It was the mid-1980s. They were friends, movie buffs who loved classics. "Double Indemnity" was Chichester's favorite. Chichester, Dana Farrar recalled, acted like just another one of the old-money scions who inhabited the area. But Farrar, then a USC student, suspected there was more -- or perhaps less -- to his story.

Francesco de Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany, and his wife, Bianca Cappello, died in 1587 of arsenic poisoning and not malaria, as was claimed at the time, according to a new study by Italian researchers. Known as Francesco I, he ruled for 13 years before he died at age 46 at his villa at Poggio a Caiano, 11 days after falling ill. His second wife, Bianca, died the next day.

A body -- spontaneously -- bursts into flames, leaving behind nothing but ash and a leg, a head or (in one alleged case) a prosthetic hip. In the three centuries since spontaneous human combustion was first discussed by researchers and investigators, heavy drinking, smoking, body fat, static electricity and the wrath of God have all been blamed. These days, most experts have dismissed the phenomenon as a myth.

A mysterious illness is killing tens of thousands of honeybee colonies across the country, threatening honey production and possibly crops that need bees for pollination. Researchers are scrambling to find the cause of the ailment, called Colony Collapse Disorder. Reports of unusual colony deaths have come from at least 22 states. Some commercial beekeepers have reported losing more than 50% of their bees.

HIS wife and daughter were murdered last summer on a remote hiking trail 70 miles from home, in the middle of the day, at the height of their lives, among mountains they had always regarded as a sanctuary. David Stodden doesn't know who did it or why. He doesn't know whether his wife and daughter were beaten, raped or mutilated; whether they fell quickly or fought to the end. He knows the essentials, that each was shot in the head and left just off-trail where anybody could see them.