Today in history
On July 22, 1991, police in Milwaukee arrested Jeffrey Dahmer, who later confessed to murdering 17 men and boys (Dahmer ended up being beaten to death by a fellow prison inmate).
In 1587, an English colony fated to vanish under mysterious circumstances was established on Roanoke Island off North Carolina.
In 1862, President Abraham Lincoln presented to his Cabinet a preliminary draft of the Emancipation Proclamation.
In 1934, bank robber John Dillinger was shot to death by federal agents outside Chicago’s Biograph Theater, where he had just seen the Clark Gable movie “Manhattan Melodrama.”
In 1937, the U.S. Senate rejected President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s proposal to add more justices to the Supreme Court.
In 1942, the Nazis began transporting Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto to the Treblinka concentration camp. Gasoline rationing involving the use of coupons began along the Atlantic seaboard.
In 1943, American forces led by Gen. George S. Patton captured Palermo, Sicily, during World War II.
In 1946, the militant Zionist group Irgun blew up a wing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing 91 people.
In 1975, the House of Representatives joined the Senate in voting to restore the American citizenship of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee.
In 1992, Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar escaped from his luxury prison near Medellin. (He was slain by security forces in December 1993.)
In 2005, a labor agreement ended an NHL lockout that canceled the previous hockey season.
In 2008, actress Estelle Getty died in Los Angeles at age 84.
In 2011, Anders Breivik, a self-described “militant nationalist,” massacred 69 people at a Norwegian island youth retreat after detonating a bomb in nearby Oslo that killed eight others in the nation’s worst violence since World War II.
Ten years ago: President Barack Obama told a prime-time press conference that Cambridge, Massachusetts, police had acted “stupidly” in the arrest of prominent black scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., and that despite racial progress, blacks and Hispanics were still singled out unfairly for arrest. Earlier, the president met at the White House with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Millions of Asians witnessed the longest solar eclipse of this century; in some areas, totality lasted as long as six minutes and 39 seconds.
Five years ago: Johann Breyer, an 89-year-old Nazi war crimes suspect, died at a Philadelphia hospital hours before a U.S. ruling that he should be extradited to Germany to face trial.
One year ago: The 17 people killed when a tourist boat sank in a Missouri lake three days earlier were remembered at a service attended by hundreds in the tourism community of Branson.