Born Robert LeRoy Parker in 1866, in Circleville, Utah to devout Mormons, the famed outlaw who later adopted the moniker Butch Cassidy grew up dirt poor, one of 13 children. As a teen, working on a nearby ranch to help feed his family, legend has it he met Mike Cassidy, a cattle rustler and mentor, who taught him, according to Time, "how to make a better, if distinctly dishonest, living."

Landing in the gold rush town of Telluride, Colorado, Cassidy, along with three other men, on June 24, 1889 committed the first crime attributed to him—a bank robbery, during which the trio made off with $20,000.

Adopting his new name (some say "Butch" comes from time spent working as a butcher) and hiding out in Wyoming, he began adding outlaw cowboys to his gang, known in the press as the "Wild Bunch." They included Harry Longabaugh, aka the Sundance Kid.

After spending 18 months in prison for horse theft in 1894, in 1896, Cassidy’s Wild Bunch robbed a Montpelier, Idaho bank, stealing $7,000. The gang went on to commit several other robberies in the Southwest, including a $70,000 haul during a Rio Grande train robbery in New Mexico.

With the authorities hot on their trail, Cassidy and Longabaugh eventually fled to Argentina. Eventually, Cassidy went back to robbing trains and payrolls up until his alleged death in 1908.

Now, about that death: Most historians say Butch and Sundance, immortalized in the Robert Redford/Paul Newman movie, died in a shootout in Bolivia, but others theorize the pair escaped, living out their lives under aliases.

On November 24, 1971, a man wearing a black raincoat, a dark suit and wraparound sunglasses took his seat on Northwest Orient Flight 305, scheduled to take off in Portland, Oregon, and arrive in Seattle, Washington. After takeoff, he handed a note to a flight attendant, who assumed he was hitting on her and placed it in her purse. He then told her he had a bomb in his briefcase and demanded $200,000, four parachutes and “no funny stuff.” The passenger identified himself as Dan Cooper, but thanks to a reporting error as the story was breaking he was forever immortalized as “D.B.” Cooper.

The plane landed at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport, where authorities handed over the items and evacuated most of the passengers. Cooper then instructed the pilot to fly toward Mexico City at a low altitude and ordered the remaining crew into the cockpit. A short time later, he jumped out of the plane and into a raging thunderstorm. He was never seen or heard from again. Since his disappearance, the FBI has investigated and subsequently ruled out more than a thousand suspects. While his body has never been recovered, in 1980 an 8-year-old boy found a stack of nearly $5,880 of the ransom money in the sands along the north bank of the Columbia River, five miles from Vancouver, Washington.

While the image of musical contemporary Bob Dylan appears on the “Sgt. Pepper” cover along with a Shirley Temple doll wearing a sweater that says “Welcome the Rolling Stones,” there is no reference to one of the Beatles’ biggest musical influences—Elvis Presley. “I’m an Elvis fan,” Lennon once said in a television interview, “because it was Elvis that really got me out of Liverpool.” The Beatles placed Presley on such a high pedestal that they didn’t want him to be just another face in the crowd on the “Sgt. Pepper” cover. “Elvis was too important and too far above the rest even to mention,” said McCartney. “He was more than a pop singer. He was Elvis the King.”

Emperor of Russia from 1801 to 1825, Alexander I allegedly planned to withdraw from state affairs toward the end of his reign, telling his friend and spiritual advisers that he hoped to vanish into obscurity. While visiting his seaside residence in the fall of 1825, he fell suddenly ill with a cold that quickly developed into typhus. Alexander’s sudden and mysterious demise at age 47, coupled with the fact that his coffin was kept closed during his funeral, sparked rumors that the emperor had faked his own death in order to spend the rest of his days in seclusion. Some have suggested that he reinvented himself as Fyodor Kuzmich, a pious hermit who appeared in Siberia in 1836, died in 1864 and was later canonized by the Russian Orthodox Church.

Legend says the Wild West outlaw Billy the Kid—cattle rustler, gunslinger, murderer, escape artist—killed 21 people before he turned 21 years old, his age at death. The reality may be closer to nine. But the early days of Henry McCarty, later known as William Bonney, "the Kid," are murky.

Billy the Kid was likely born in New York City in 1859, later moving to Indiana, Kansas and Denver before his family settled in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Orphaned as a teen after his mother died of tuberculosis, Henry was separated from his brother and placed in foster homes. It wasn’t long before he fell into petty theft. After a September 1875 arrest for stealing clothing from a Chinese laundry, Henry reportedly shimmied up the jailhouse chimney and escaped, ultimately making his way to southeast Arizona.

In 1876, he took up with an Arizona gang known for stealing horses. In 1877, after being charged with murdering a blacksmith, he fled home to New Mexico and joined another band of thieves. In 1878, he joined a posse called the Regulators set on revenge for a cattleman's murder in what came to be called the Lincoln County War. By 1880, his name was spread across tabloid newspapers.

“Billy became the symbol of the American loner: the little guy fighting against all odds; the misunderstood youth who battled the combined corrupt government and business forces hell-bent on his destruction,” wrote Markley. “Everyone wanted to be associated with Billy the Kid—he stayed at their ranch or he stole one of their horses.”

With a $500 reward on his head, the fugitive was gunned down by New Mexico Sheriff Pat Garrett on July 14, 1881.

The son of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, Louis XVII became king of France—at least in the eyes of his royalist supporters—after his parents were executed during the French Revolution. Imprisoned under miserable conditions in Paris’ medieval Temple prison, he reportedly died there after a long struggle with tuberculosis on June 8, 1795, at the age of 10. Speculation immediately began that sympathizers had smuggled out the young heir, leaving a commoner in his place. When France’s monarchy was restored in 1815, dozens of “lost dauphin” claimants came forward, including a Wisconsin missionary and a German clockmaker. In 2004, DNA testing indicated that a heart removed from the body of the boy who died in prison in 1795 was almost certainly that of Louis XVII.

Famous for playing Latka Gravas on the sitcom “Taxi” and for staging elaborate stunts, the comedian and actor Andy Kaufman died of lung cancer on May 16, 1984, at 35. Because of his penchant for hoaxes and his decision to keep his illness under wraps, many of Kaufman’s fans believed he had staged his death. His friend and writing partner Bob Zmuda revealed that Kaufman had frequently discussed pulling such a prank during his lifetime. Though sightings of the entertainer have been reported in recent years, it is now widely accepted that he died 27 years ago.

Born in Clay County, Missouri in 1847, Jesse James grew up as part of a Confederacy-supporting, slave-owning family. As a teen in 1864, James and his brother Frank joined a guerrilla unit responsible for murdering dozens of Union soldiers.

For some historians, James never stopped fighting the Civil War, translating his fury over the defeat of the secessionist cause into a career sticking up banks, trains and stagecoaches. At times, he saw himself as a modern Robin Hood, robbing from the politically progressive Reconstruction supporters and giving to the poor.

According to the State Historical Society of Missouri, the James-Younger gang operated widely, from Iowa to Texas to West Virginia. Overall, between 1860 and 1882, they are believed to have committed more than 20 bank and train robberies, with a combined haul estimated at around $200,000. While they usually focused more on robbing train safes than individual passengers, they did ruthlessly murder countless people who got in their way.

As newspapers began to mention James, his love for the attention grew.

"He was audacious, planning and robbing banks in the middle of the day and stopping the most powerful machines of the time—railroad engines—to rob their trains and successfully get away,” wrote Bill Markley in Billy the Kid and Jesse James: Outlaws of the Legendary West.

The James legend grew with the help of newspaper editor John Newman Edwards, a Confederate sympathizer who perpetuated James's Robin Hood mythology. "We are not thieves, we are bold robbers,” James wrote in a letter Edwards published. "I am proud of the name, for Alexander the Great was a bold robber, and Julius Caesar, and Napoleon Bonaparte."

But while he did steal from the rich, there's no evidence James gave to the poor.

In 1881, the governor of Missouri issued a $10,000 reward for the capture of Jesse and Frank James. On April 3, 1882, at the age of 34, James was shot and killed by one of his accomplices, Robert Ford, who was found guilty of murder but pardoned by the governor.

The youngest daughter of Czar Nicholas II, Anastasia was executed with the rest of her family by their Bolshevik captors on July 16, 1918, though stories spread throughout Europe that the 17-year-old had survived the carnage. A series of women emerged claiming to be the missing grand duchess, most famously the German-born Anna Anderson, who died in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1984. A decade later, DNA analysis established that Anderson was not a member of the ousted royal family. Rumors persisted until Russian scientists uncovered and positively identified Anastasia’s remains in 2007.