Skip to main content

27

This date spans a striking breadth of criminality and violence across the twentieth century. Among those born here, Ed Gein — the Wisconsin killer whose crimes in the 1950s would shape decades of American popular culture around the figure of the disturbed rural murderer — stands alongside Paul Bernardo, the Canadian rapist and killer whose attacks on young women in the late 1980s and early 1990s horrified the country and exposed failures of law enforcement coordination. The range extends further: Gundolf Köhler carried out the deadliest postwar terrorist attack on German soil when he bombed the 1980 Munich Oktoberfest, while Talduwe Somarama, a Buddhist monk, assassinated Sri Lankan Prime Minister S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike in 1959 — a killing notable both for its political consequence and its improbable perpetrator.

August 27, 1948 - Peter Tobin

Tobin's crimes spanned decades and emerged only gradually, as investigations following his 2006 arrest uncovered victims dating back to 1991 — teenagers whose remains had been buried at a former residence. The pattern of violence, concealment, and geographic mobility made him difficult to identify as a serial offender for many years, and the full scope of his actions may never be known.

Read more …August 27, 1948 - Peter Tobin

  • Last updated on .

August 27, 1964 - Paul Bernardo

Bernardo's crimes unfolded across two distinct phases — a years-long series of sexual assaults in suburban Toronto, followed by murders carried out with his then-partner — giving investigators an unusually complex case that exposed significant failures in how early forensic evidence was handled. The involvement of Karla Homolka, and the plea arrangement that secured her relatively brief sentence in exchange for testimony, drew lasting controversy about how the justice system weighed culpability between the two. The murders of three young women, including Homolka's own sister, and the videotaped evidence that later emerged, made the case one of the most disturbing in Canadian criminal history.

Read more …August 27, 1964 - Paul Bernardo

  • Last updated on .

August 27, 1978 - Rustaman Makhauri

A close associate of Doku Umarov within the Chechen insurgency, Makhauri operated at the intersection of two volatile republics — Chechnya and Ingushetia — where sustained pressure against pro-government forces carried serious consequences for regional stability. His suspected role in a series of coordinated attacks reflects the nature of the underground conflict that persisted long after the formal end of the Second Chechen War.

Read more …August 27, 1978 - Rustaman Makhauri

  • Last updated on .

August 27, 1915 - Talduwe Somarama

The act that places him here was as much about access as intent — his saffron robes allowed him to walk unchallenged into the prime minister's home, where religious custom itself became cover. Allegedly drawn into the conspiracy by a powerful monk who framed Bandaranaike's assassination as a nationalist necessity, Somarama carried out the shooting at point-blank range during a routine public audience. The case exposed how political grievance and religious authority had intertwined in postcolonial Ceylon, implicating a chief monk and a businessman alongside the man who pulled the trigger. A legislative drafting error ultimately meant that Somarama alone was hanged, while the architects of the conspiracy served prison sentences instead.

Read more …August 27, 1915 - Talduwe Somarama

  • Last updated on .

August 27, 1959 - Gundolf Köhler

At twenty years old, he carried out what remains the deadliest peacetime bombing attack on German soil in the postwar era. His trajectory — from teenage NPD events and paramilitary exercises to a calculated act of political violence — reflects a radicalization rooted in the far-right milieu of 1970s West Germany. The evidence gathered after his death pointed to a deliberate attempt to stage the attack as a false flag, designed to shift the 1980 federal election toward the right.

Read more …August 27, 1959 - Gundolf Köhler

  • Last updated on .

August 27, 1927 - Morris Levy

His empire stretched across nearly every layer of the American music industry — clubs, labels, pressing plants, distribution, retail — but the architecture of control it represented was as much a mechanism for extraction as for commerce. Levy systematically claimed writing and performance credits he had not earned, siphoning royalties from artists, disproportionately Black R&B performers, who had little recourse against him. His influence over the independent record business was so pervasive that Variety dubbed him "The Octopus." A 1988 extortion conviction, arising from an FBI investigation into organized crime's infiltration of the record industry, brought a formal legal reckoning near the end of his life.

Read more …August 27, 1927 - Morris Levy

  • Last updated on .

August 27, 1906 - Ed Gein

Gein's significance in American criminal history lies less in the number of his victims than in what investigators found when they searched his farmhouse — a collection of artifacts fashioned from exhumed human remains that shocked a nation and reshaped cultural understanding of what domestic violence could look like. His case prompted serious reconsideration of how rural isolation, psychological deterioration, and institutional failures could intersect without detection. The details uncovered in Plainfield in 1957 would go on to influence a generation of crime fiction, film, and forensic practice in ways that outlasted the legal proceedings against him.

Read more …August 27, 1906 - Ed Gein

  • Last updated on .