Police searched the apartment and immediately caught the smell of decomposing flesh. They played interrogation cat and mouse for a bit, but then the officer asked point-blank where the rest of the body was. Nilsen pointed to his wardrobe. They took him to the station and asked whether he'd killed one person or two. "15 or 16 since 1978," he said.

He was eventually convicted of six murders, but that estimate of his seems about right, based on all the bodies they ended up finding. He'd buried some in a garden near an older address of his, and others beneath that place's floorboards. In Muswell Hill, neither of these options were available, so he chopped them up and flushed them -- a slow process that left parts piling up, so he stuck them in the cupboard. He also did all kinds of weird sex stuff to the bodies, but I won't go into that, because that would just be putting a hat on a hat when it comes to this story.

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It was a lot of dust -- enough that the plant couldn't just send Cliff over to the showers, but had to order a whole evacuation. Apparently, something had gone horribly wrong. But Cliff figured Forsmark couldn't be the source of the dust, because he hadn't gone to the "controlled area" of the plant, where all the fun stuff happens. He stayed behind as the plant was evacuated, brought a shoe to the lab for further analysis, and found that some of the elements responsible for the radiation didn't even exist in Forsmark. They were created through nuclear reactions of some kind. Had someone secretly set off a nuclear bomb?

The radiation had indeed come from a nuclear plant, just not Forsmark. Based on the wind direction, the dust had to have come from the southeast, all the way over the Baltic Sea. They considered Lithuania at first, but then eyes turned to a plant in Ukraine, almost 1,000 miles away. Once contacted, Moscow was like "Nah, we cool! Please stop asking immediately, or suffer consequences." Sweden said they were going to inform the International Atomic Energy Authority either way, and Moscow reluctantly admitted that, um, yeah, something had happened at Chernobyl.

The Chernobyl plant had just experienced history's worst nuclear disaster, as seen in the recent super-popular HBO miniseries Chernobyl. The show doesn't include anything about Cliff or Forsmark, but it does invent a new scientist in a distant nuclear plant who detects Chernobyl's radiation. HBO put her in Minsk, 250 miles from the plant, because setting the scene all the way in Sweden would have seemed unrealistic, right?

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But after he did his job, Doc Anon received a call from an angry CDC. They hadn't wanted him to diagnose the patient, they said, and they definitely didn't want him treated. The man was a subject in an experiment of theirs, in which syphilitic black men were told they had a vague condition called "bad blood," and further told they were receiving treatment for it, but they actually received none. The experiment, originally supposed to last just six months, ran swimmingly for over 30 years, with patients needlessly passing their diseases on to their wives and children. Over a hundred people died as a result.

Doc Anon had stumbled upon the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, which would go down as perhaps the most unethical study in American history, which is full of wildly unethical studies. The doctor's superiors made their position known, explaining that he could face further repercussions for speaking out. So Doc Anon gathered up the information he'd collected and ... stayed silent.

Seriously, that's the end of Doc Anon's story. He never spoke up, and we know nothing more about him. But when a senior public health officer was speaking to a few nurses about Doc Anon's misgivings over lunch one day, a co-worker overheard him. It was this guy, Peter Buxtun, who then revealed the experiment to the world. Yes, the whistleblower for the Tuskegee study hadn't been involved with it in any way, and only learned about it by listening in on this chance conversation. Thanks, random eavesdropper. Fuck you, anonymous doctor?

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Julian Webb, a physicist at Kodak, decided to find out what was going on. He headed over to the mill and determined that the strawboard there was indeed contaminated with radioactivity, though only in the run that started on July 16, 1945. He also tracked down one other mill whose paper products reported the same issue. However, the source of their radioactivity wasn't radium, but Cerium-141 -- an isotope that does not exist in nature. In theory, it could be produced through nuclear fission. This left him with one important question you never think you'll have to ask when working for a camera company: Had someone secretly set off a nuclear bomb?

Yes, America had just conducted the first successful atomic bomb test. Fallout from the Trinity explosion had spread across the country, carried in particular by water (both the mills stood alongside rivers). The military had always been somewhat aware of the fallout risk, and would later consider moving tests to the East Coast so the wind would send any fallout out over the ocean instead of the populated continent. But in the end, they stuck with Nevada and the desert around Alamogordo because it was conveniently close to existing weapons labs.

It took a while for Webb to put the puzzle together, since the Manhattan Project was double super secret when he was first poking around those mills. But by 1951, Webb was head of the company's physics division, and Kodak threatened to sue the U.S. government for damaging their equipment. They finally convinced the Atomic Energy Commission to cut a deal: They would give Webb the dates and locations of future atomic tests so Kodak could alter their manufacturing accordingly, and in return, Kodak would keep what they knew about the fallout secret from the public. Kodak agreed, because massive corporations have always been pretty much evil.

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Morel's Congo Reform Association gained all kinds of support from folks like Mark Twain, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Joseph Conrad. After a few years of lobbying, Belgium moved the Congo to governmental control, ending those particular atrocities. But it's not totally clear how much of Leopold's willingness to step back was due to said lobbying, and how much was due to the Congo no longer being profitable, since he had killed half the population. No no, it was probably just the goodness of his heart. That scans.

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