The '90s Were Just Built Different — Here's 11 Shocking, Disturbing, And/Or Incredible Events To Prove It
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
Warning: This post contains mentions or suicide and rape.
1.In the middle of the night on March 18, 1990, two men posing as police officers arrived at Boston's Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. When security guards let them in, they tied the guards up and started robbing the place. They left 81 minutes later with 13 paintings by artists including Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Degas. The 2022 value of the paintings? 500 million dollars. I repeat, FIVE HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS.
Above are police sketches of the two men, with and without their mustaches (which the security guards said looked fake).
The FBI, as you can imagine, threw all of their resources into solving the crime, and quickly became convinced it was the doing of organized crime. One suspect? Legendary Boston mobster Whitey Bulger, who — according to a Scotland Yard investigator — most likely was responsible and gave the treasures to the Irish Republican Army, who are hiding them in Ireland. The Merlino Gang, among others, were also suspected. But despite the massive value and historical value of the paintings...they were never recovered. The case remains maddeningly unsolved.
2.On March 26, 1997, police officers stepped inside a rented, 9,200-square-foot mansion in the suburbs of San Diego where they were immediately greeted by an overwhelmingly "pungent odor." They soon discovered 39 dead bodies, each of which was laid in its bed covered by a purple shroud. The dead also wore matching black shirts and sweatpants, brand new Nike athletic shoes, and armbands reading: "Heaven's Gate Away Team."
What the heck happened? It turns out the deceased were members of a religious cult named Heaven's Gate, which believed that by committing ritual suicide, they could leave their human bodies and achieve the "evolutionary level above human" by having their souls transported to a spacecraft trailing Comet Hale-Bopp. Got all that?
Above is the cult leader Marshall Applewhite who went by the moniker "Do" (pronounced "Doe").
Comet Hale-Bopp was another major '90s story — an incredibly bright comet visible to the naked eye that had almost everyone gawking at the heavens. Some UFO enthusiasts, after examining photos of the comet, became convinced its tail was actually a trailing spacecraft.
When astronomer Alan Hale (one of the two people who discovered the comet) learned about the Heaven's Gate suicides and its connection to the comet that bore his name, he was alarmed.
'We are probably going to have some suicides as a result of this comet," he said. "The sad part is that I was really not surprised. Comets are lovely objects, but they don't have apocalyptic significance. We must use our minds, our reason."
Sadly, there were more suicides — at least three by former members of the Heaven's Gate cult, and one man unrelated to the group who left a suicide note reading, "I'm going on the spaceship with Hale-Bopp to be with those who have gone before me."
Here in 2022, the Heaven's Gate cult is still alive and well...at least digitally. Do's Final Exit — a 90-minute video by Applewhite filmed days before his death explaining why they were going to do what they did, is on YouTube. And their 1997 website is still up and running, kept online, it's believed, by former members.
3.On June 17, 1991, the body of 12th US President Zachary Taylor was exhumed — almost 141 years after his death! — to test to see if he was murdered.
Taylor had been president for just over a year when he died on July 9, 1850, after days of extreme gastrointestinal distress. Cholera was believed to be the cause of death, but there were whisperings that he was murdered. Why? Well, at the time, Southerners were pushing for Taylor to federally expand slavery into the newly acquired Southwestern territories (modern day California, Nevada, and Utah, plus parts of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming), but he resisted, wanting to leave it up to the soon-to-be formed states.
Could a pro-slavery Southerner have poisoned him with arsenic over this?
Following the disinterment, Dr. Richard Greenhouse, the coroner of Jefferson County, Kentucky (where Taylor was buried) gave an update: "We obtained all 10 fingernails, sideburns, hair — pubic hair even — and all of this was examined by three separate labs." The final determination? All three labs found Taylor had normal levels of arsenic in him.
Instead of murder, Taylor most likely died of "cholera morbus, or acute gastroenteritis." Dr. Greenhouse said Taylor's doctors likely made his condition worse by treating him with calomel and opium, and bloodletting.
4.At the start of 1997, Kenny and Bobbi McCaughey were trying to add to their family with help from the ovulation-stimulating drug Metrodin (used for infertility). Bobbi soon found out she was pregnant with not one, or two, or three fetuses — or even four or five or six — but seven!
The couple declined selective reduction (to reduce the number of fetuses), which was taking quite a risk because the more fetuses one person carries, the greater the risk of prematurity or child death.
On November 19, 1997, the septuplets — four boys and three girls — were born prematurely ranging from two pounds, five ounces to three pounds, four ounces. Incredibly, all seven McCaughey septuplets survived...and turn 25 this month!
Even more incredibly, last year, a family from Mali gave birth to nonuplets — that's NINE babies! They all were healthy and alive on their one year birthday.
5.On June 23, 1993, 24-year-old Lorena Bobbitt carried a 12-inch kitchen knife (seen below) into the bedroom she shared with her 26-year-old husband John Wayne Bobbitt and cut off his penis. She then fled the apartment (with the penis still in hand), and drove until she tossed the penis out the window into a field. Soon, though, she called 911, and the police (with Lorena's help) were able to locate the penis and get it to the hospital where — in a grueling nine and a half hour surgery — it was successfully reattached to John Wayne.
A trial followed where Lorena was tried for "malicious wounding," which could have put her behind bars for 20 years. She pleaded not guilty, saying that her actions were spurred by the fact John Wayne had raped her that evening and long been abusive. John Wayne disputed this, saying she was upset he'd said he was going to leave her. In the end, the jury found Lorena not guilty due to temporary insanity. As the New York Times wrote at the time: "The jury agreed...that Mrs. Bobbitt, flooded with nightmarish images of her husband's abuse and suffering from a variety of mental illnesses, snapped psychologically after her husband raped her and yielded to an 'irresistible impulse' to strike back."
If you were alive in the '90s, you certainly remember all of the above, and also the bizarre manner in which most people viewed this disturbing story — mainly as comedy fodder. Saturday Night Live, The Tonight Show, and people around the proverbial water cooler couldn't stop yucking it up. I have to believe the public and media perception would be much different today.
But what people who lived through the '90s probably don't remember is what happened next — John Wayne (and his reattached penis) became a porn star, making the adult films John Wayne Bobbitt Uncut and Frankenpenis. And if that wasn't strange enough, he also appeared on the WWF's (now WWE) Monday Night Raw Is War and the Howard Stern Show, and fronted a rock band called "The Severed Parts."
Above Bobbitt is with a costar from John Wayne Bobbitt Uncut.
For a time, he was celebrated as a celebrity (of sorts) despite the allegations of rape and abuse that came out at the trial (he was, it should be mentioned, later acquitted of marital rape at his own trial). It's all super disturbing and weird. ... I mean, look at the photo below where he's at some party where the bread is shaped like a penis, and guests are supposed to cut it into pieces. Like I said...DISTURBING AND WEIRD!
6.On June 15, 1992, Vice President Dan Quayle made a cringey gaffe that went absolutely viral in the days before social media. The bonehead error cemented his perception as an intellectual lightweight after years of verbal gaffes (such as "I believe I've made good judgments in the past, and I think I've made good judgments in the future.") and likely played a role in the Bush/Quayle ticket not winning re-election less than five months later.
So, what was the gaffe, you ask? It happened during a campaign stop at a New Jersey middle school where the then-vice president was overseeing a mock spelling bee. He called 12-year-old William Figueroa to the board to spell the word "potato” — and after the boy accurately wrote P-O-T-A-T-O — Quayle said “Hold on now, add a little to the end there.” The confused boy added an "e" to the end, to which Quayle replied, "There you go!" That's right, he didn't know how to spell the word potatoe. I mean, potato!
Quayle later claimed he was only going off the cue cards the school gave him (which incorrectly read "potatoe"), but it didn't matter. The damage was done.
He later wrote in his memoirs: “It was more than a gaffe. It was a ‘defining moment’ of the worst imaginable kind. I can’t overstate how discouraging and exasperating the whole event was.”
(Note to younger readers: If it's hard to understand from the vantage of 2022 why this was such a big deal — especially when today's politicians regularly say and do stupid things, and President Trump's tweets were riddled with spelling errors — you have to understand it was a different time. For all of the problems back then, politicians were held to a higher standard, and expectations of decorum and competence for leaders were much higher than they are now.)
7.In a 1997 rematch between WBA heavyweight champion Evander Holyfield and former champion Mike Tyson, a frustrated Tyson lost it and bit off part of Holyfield's ear! The gigantic worldwide audience (it was at the time the biggest pay-per-view fight ever) then watched Tyson spit a one-inch piece of cartilage onto the mat. Yikes!
While there's no excusing Tyson's shocking behavior, he was enraged that in both this fight and their previous one, Holyfield — in Tyson's view — had illegally head butted him. The referees, however, didn't agree.
What most people don't remember is that — after the bite — the fight continued! They tried to complete the third round only to have Tyson bite Holyfield's OTHER ear! Holyfield then won by disqualification, and Tyson ended up losing his boxing license for a year and being fined $3 million.
As you can still see in the above photo taken years later, part of Holyfield's ear is still missing.
In 2009, the two fighters reunited on The Oprah Winfrey Show where Tyson apologized (sort of) to Holyfield.
8.In August of 1990, a group of collectors were searching for fossils in South Dakota when they found some Edmontosaurus bones. Pretty cool, right? Well, they thought so, and were preparing to leave when they discovered their truck had a flat tire. While waiting for it to be fixed, a member of the group named Sue Hendrickson decided to check out the nearby cliffs (which they hadn't searched) and came across something way cooler than Edmontosaurus bones: the largest and best preserved specimen of a Tyrannosaurus Rex ever found!
The specimen is nicknamed "Sue" after Hendrickson (pictured above), and is more than 40 feet long and 13 feet tall at the hip. It's also around 90 percent complete!
On October 4, 1997, "Sue" was put up for auction, with many fearing it would end up in a private collection. Thankfully, the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago — with financial help from the California State University system, Walt Disney Parks and Resorts, McDonald's, and others — had the winning bid of a whopping $8.4 million!
The museum spent nearly two years preparing the fossil for display, and it can be seen there today.
9.In 1994, a clerk in the Texas Legislature named Gregory Watson discovered this highly unfortunate fact: MISSISSIPPI STILL HAD NOT RATIFIED THE 13TH AMENDMENT OUTLAWING SLAVERY! A little history: In 1865, Mississippi was among four states that rejected the amendment (along with New Jersey, Delaware, and Kentucky), but the other states later ratified it. Not so for Mississippi. So, Watson reached out to the Black members of the Mississippi legislature, and in 1995 — 130 years after the amendment became the law of the land — Mississippi finally joined the rest of the states in ratifying it as well.
Above is a photo of the actual Thirteenth Amendment on display at the New York Historical Society in New York.
That takes care of that, right? Well, no. As it turns out, despite ratifying the amendment, Mississippi never sent the required documentation to the federal government! It remained unratified until 2012 when two Mississippi residents — inspired by Steven Spielberg's film Lincoln — did some research and discovered Mississippi STILL had not ratified the amendment! (Good Lord, Mississippi, get it together.)
The residents contacted Mississippi's Secretary of State who finally sent on the documentation to the Federal Registrar making the ratification official (148 years late).
10.In December of 1993 — 20 years after the Soviet Union landed the lunar rover Lunokhod 2 on the moon and used it to send back TV images of its surface — a computer gaming entrepreneur named Richard Garriott bought the spacecraft at a Sotheby's auction in New York for $68,500. There was just one catch...the Lunokhod 2 rover WAS STILL ON THE MOON, parked on the floor of the crater Le Monnier!
Garriott said in an interview, "I purchased Lunokhod 2 from the Russians. I am now the world's only private owner of an object on a foreign celestial body."
Garriott is an interesting character. Not only was his father a NASA astronaut (who went to space in 1973, the same year the Lunokhod 2 did), but in 2008, he paid the Russians $30 million to send him on his own journey into space. Garriott spent 12 days on the International Space Station where he even made a short science fiction film.
Garriott's trip to space may have brought him closer to his Lunokhod 2, but he was still far, far away from it: While the International Space Station is 250 miles away from the surface of the earth, the moon is roughly 250,000 miles away!
11.Lastly, it may be hard to believe, but at the start of the wild decade that was the '90s, people could still smoke on airplanes! It wasn't until February 25, 1990 that smoking was banned in the air — and that was only for US domestic flights! Soon, though, this change inspired airlines worldwide to add the "no smoking" sign to their planes as well.
The above photo is from the '50s, but if any of these people were still alive at the start of 1990, they could still light up at 10,000 feet. Wild!
