On this day in conspiracies

According to later accounts, people on the shore at Margate, South Africa, watch an enormous pale animal in the surf apparently battling two killer whales. The fight is said to last around three hours, with the creature lashing its tail and rearing up out of the water.

The Daily Mail publishes the letter under alarmist headlines, four days before polling. The Foreign Office simultaneously releases a stiff note of protest to the Soviet charge d'affaires, Christian Rakovsky, which lends the document an air of official authenticity.

President Jomo Kenyatta visits Kisumu, the main town of Luo Nyanza, to open a hospital. The crowd, still enraged over Mboya's death, turns hostile; a confrontation with opposition leader Oginga Odinga escalates and security forces open fire. The Kisumu massacre leaves an official 11 dead, with other estimates far higher.

Judge Philip Romiti acquits all fourteen defendants at a bench trial, ruling the evidence insufficient to prove a conspiracy. No one is ever criminally convicted in connection with the raid. Hanrahan is voted out of office the same year.

The United States, with a small coalition of Caribbean states, invades Grenada in Operation Urgent Fury. Around 1,200 US troops land in the first assault, citing the safety of American medical students and the collapse of civil order. Austin and Coard are captured within days.

DNA testing identifies Maria's biological parents as Sasha (Sashka) Ruseva and Atanas Rusev, a destitute Bulgarian Roma couple with many other children. Ruseva says she gave birth while working as an olive-picker in Greece and left the child in 2009 because she could not afford to raise her. No abduction had taken place.

Court-ordered release of the sealed 1999 grand jury documents confirms for the first time that the panel had voted to indict the parents on child-abuse and accessory counts, a fact withheld for fourteen years, reigniting public argument even though the DA had declined to prosecute.