On this day, February 5, 1885, news reached London that the Mahdists had taken Khartoum and killed General Charles George Gordon. The news would prompt an expedition to rescue Emin Pasha, the Governor of the Egyptian province of Equatoria.
The “Murder at the Regatta” was a story of jealousy, passion, and some say even madness that shocked and fascinated the nation, and changed the very nature of how murder was seen and prosecuted in the United States.