Envar Korek

In all likelihood, the forty-ton pile of rubble concealed a concrete cave that allowed him to stroll to safety. Seen by witnesses within a month of the explosion, bidding on his impounded Datsun at a police auction.

Vivian Lapriere

According to videotape records, did not sing “The Old Folks at Home” during the siege. Did not use her retainer to jam the gears of the Ferris wheel. Braided none of the children’s hair.

Tuba Billy

A revised map of the village square shows the trampling could not have occurred without his own complicity.

Aunt Rena

Who’s stupid enough to answer the door at that hour?

Bettina Mouske and Larry Valmer

So-called “love pact” turns out to be cynical and self-dramatizing when read from the level-headed perspective of the following decade’s more robust economy.

Guy MacMorris

Bystanders who claimed to have heard him whisper “Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan” before the convulsions halted his speech likely misheard the familiar gambler’s argot: “My deuce on green, sailing it low!”

Little Lucy Vance

Was asked to stop jumping up and down on the bumper of Mr. Friedkin’s limousine at least three times before the driver started the car: c’mon!

LaValle Colbert

In recorded conversations with prison snitches, he can be heard to admit, “Oh, those radical ideas? I just like to hear myself talk! I’m as bourgeois as your Uncle Henry.”

Most Rhesus monkeys

Observations in the wild provide firm evidence that these monkeys carry out painful and destructive experiments, with little apparent value to science, on their own young. And as they say, what’s sauce for the goose is just more so for the gander.

Lindbergh baby

Was really a small robot covered in fleshy dough and tufts of mule hair.

“Zepher”

Didn’t really live by the Skater’s Creed. Brewed up some sort of hocus-pocus that he was all that stood between us and Armageddon, which is just ludicrous. He was no more likely to stand up in the face of arbitrary authority than he was to return that pair of corduroys he took from your bedroom last December.

St. Betain

Truly a loopy individual: said one thing one minute and something completely different the next. The question is not whether his heart was cut out of his chest and hoisted, still beating, on an oaken spear—it was—but why.

Schoolteacher Wan

Who weeps for the enemy of the people? He hoarded the plastic reindeer that Mao had sent for the children.