Unidentified court transcript quoted by Rodney R. Jones in Disorderly Conduct: Verbatim Excerpts From Actual Cases, 1987:

Counsel: Could you briefly describe the type of construction equipment used in your business?

Witness: Four tractors.

Counsel: What kind of tractors are they?

Witness: Fords.

Counsel: Did you say “four”?

Witness: Ford. Ford. Like the Ford. It is a Ford tractor.

Counsel: You didn’t say “four,” you just said “Ford”?

Witness: Yes, Ford. That is what you asked me, what kind of tractors.

Counsel: Are there four Ford tractors? Is that what it is?

Witness: No, no. You asked me what kind of a tractor it was and I said Ford tractors.

Counsel: How many tractors are there?

Witness: Four.

On the evening of Jan. 19, 1931, the Liverpool Chess Club took a telephone message for one of its members. The caller, an R.M. Qualtrough, said he wanted William Wallace to visit him the following evening at 25 Menlove Gardens East to discuss insurance.

Wallace arrived 25 minutes later and took the message. The following evening he made his way into Liverpool by tram, only to discover that no such address existed. He made inquiries with a local policeman and a newsagent, then returned home and found that his wife had been beaten to death in their sitting room.

Had Wallace manufactured an alibi and then killed her himself? The telephone call had been placed from a box only 400 yards from Wallace’s house, but the message taker was certain the caller had not been Wallace. The crime scene was quite bloody, but no traces of blood were found on Wallace’s suit. A milk delivery boy insisted he had spoken to Julia Wallace only minutes before her husband would have had to leave to catch the tram.

Wallace was found guilty and sentenced to death, but an appeals court quashed the verdict on the grounds that it was unsupported by evidence. Wallace went free and died in Wirral in 1933. The crime remains unsolved.

If Wallace killed his wife, how did he manage it? If he didn’t … who did?

On Dec. 28, 1885, London grocer Edwin Bartlett was discovered dead in his bed. In his stomach was a fatal quantity of chloroform, but, strangely, his throat and larynx showed no signs of the burning that liquid chloroform should have caused.

Bartlett’s wife, Adelaide, was having an open romance with George Dyson, a local minister. It transpired that she had induced him to buy chloroform at local pharmacies in quantities too small to provoke suspicion, ostensibly to help treat Edwin, who was undergoing painful dental surgeries.

At trial, Adelaide’s defense was simply that she had no way to get the chloroform into Edwin’s stomach without passing it down his throat. The jury let her go.

“Now that Mrs. Bartlett has been acquitted,” remarked pathologist Sir James Paget afterward, “she should tell us, in the interests of science, how she did it.” Adelaide made no response. The puzzle of Edwin’s death has never been solved.

On July 12, 1942, someone shot Max Geller, the owner of Harlem’s Green Parrot Restaurant. The restaurant was locally famous for its namesake parrot, who had a useful vocabulary and could greet regular patrons by name.

No customer could identify the killer, and the agitated bird would cry only “Robber! Robber!” As the investigation foundered, someone suggested that perhaps it was saying “Robert! Robert!”

On the list of Geller’s regular customers detectives found a Robert Butler, a cab driver who had disappeared after the shooting. They traced him to the Bethlehem Steel plant in Baltimore, and he confessed: He’d shot Geller in a drunken rage for refusing to serve him. He was convicted in February 1944 and sentenced to 15 years.

He said, “I never did like that bird.”

In 1902, 42-year-old Norwegian emigrant Belle Gunness bought an Indiana farm with $8,500 in insurance money she’d received when her husband and two children died. A second husband died after only nine months, and over the next six years a succession of prosperous suitors visited her farm and failed to return.

When the brother of one of these men grew suspicious, the farmhouse suddenly burned to the ground in April 1908. Firemen discovered the remains of four people stacked in the cellar: Three were Gunness’ children, but the fourth — an adult woman — was unidentifiable because its head was missing.

Investigation began to turn up butchered corpses buried around the property. Under questioning, farmhand Ray Lamphere said that Gunness would lure her victims to the farmhouse, drug them, kill them with an ax, and bury them in the hog pen or around the grounds.

It’s estimated that Gunness killed more than 40 people, making her one of America’s most prolific serial killers of either sex. Curiously, her own fate is uncertain — officially she was declared dead, but neighbors insisted the headless remains could not have been hers. Lamphere claimed she had staged her own death and absconded with $100,000 in stolen money. He may be right — there’s not enough surviving DNA to decide for certain.

The concept of forgery seems to be peculiarly inapplicable to the performing arts. It would be quite nonsensical to say, for example, that the man who played the Bach suites for unaccompanied cello and whom at the time we took to be Pablo Casals was in fact a forger. Similarly, we should want to argue that the term forgery was misused if we should read in the newspaper that Margot Fonteyn’s performance in Swan Lake last night was a forgery because as a matter of fact it was not Margot Fonteyn who danced last night, but rather some unknown person whom everyone mistook for Margot Fonteyn. Again, it is difficult to see in what sense a performance of, say, Oedipus Rex or Hamlet could be termed a forgery.

— Alfred Lessing, “What Is Wrong With a Forgery?” in Alex Neill and Aaron Ridley, eds., Arguing About Art, 1995