On June 27, 1844, Mormon leader Joseph Smith and his brother, Hyrum, were killed by a mob in Carthage, Illinois.

In 1957, Hurricane Audrey slammed into coastal Louisiana and Texas as a Category 4 storm, causing as many as 600 deaths.

In 1991, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, the first Black jurist to sit on the nation’s highest court, announced his retirement.

In 2005, BTK serial killer Dennis Rader pleaded guilty to 10 murders that had spread fear across Wichita, Kansas, beginning in the 1970s.

In 2011, former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich was convicted by a federal jury in Chicago on a range of corruption charges. (Blagojevich was later sentenced to 14 years in prison; his sentence was commuted by President Donald Trump in February 2020, and he received a pardon from Trump in February 2025.)