Although Goodfellas famously depicted the murder of Gambino mobster William "Billy Batts" Bentvena, the real story was far too bloody for the movie to portray.

Also known as Edward Mordake, Edward Mordrake was a 19th-century Englishman born with an extra face on the back of his head — or so the legends claim.

In Mommie Dearest, Christina Crawford claimed that her mother was a sadistic abuser — but those closest to Joan Crawford disagreed.

The Special Operations Executive was founded in 1940 to sabotage the Nazis using any means necessary, from exploding rats to itching powder.

Police ruled George Reeves' death in June 1959 a suicide, but a series of suspicious events surrounding the incident led some people to point a finger at the actor's fiancee — or even the Mafia.

When Mt. Vesuvius erupted near Pompeii and Herculaneum in 79 C.E., the volcanic ash left the bodies of the victims frozen in time.

From drugs to violence to betrayal, the real-life story of Karen Friedman Hill and her mobster husband Henry Hill was much darker than what "Goodfellas" depicted.

When a plane carrying a rugby team crashed in the Andes Mountains in October 1972, Nando Parrado risked his life to save the surviving passengers from starvation — and cannibalism.

Though the world now knows the Christian Messiah as Jesus, his real name in the original Hebrew was Yeshoshua or Yeshua, meaning "salvation."

On August 22, 1972, John Wojtowicz tried to rob a Brooklyn bank to pay for his lover's gender-reassignment surgery — before the heist went terribly wrong.

During the Black Hawk Down incident that sparked the Battle of Mogadishu, 18 American soldiers were killed by Somali forces between October 3 and 4, 1993.