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It sounds like it could have been an episode of “Law & Order: SVU”, but the story of Cheryl Crane that rocked Hollywood in 1958 was all too true. It wasn’t “ripped from the headlines,” it was the headlines.

Cheryl Crane is the daughter of movie legend Lana Turner.

And at age 14, in 1958, Cheryl stabbed and killed her mother’s abusive gangster lover, Johnny Stompanato, during a domestic struggle.

His death was later ruled a justifiable homicide.

Cheryl Crane wrote a book called “Detour” in 1988 — and I met her just a few weeks before the thirtieth anniversary of the incident that changed her life.

Brian Welch grew up in Bakersfield, California in the ’70s and 80s, an Ozzy Osborne fan who took up the guitar at age 10.

Somewhere along the way, as he tells it, “guys said his head looked like it was too big for his body, and so they started calling him ‘Head.'”

Head co-founded the legendary band Korn. And in 2004, he was ranked 26th on Guitar World’s list of the 100 Greatest Heavy Metal Guitarists of All Time.

But his life would take some seriously sharp turns, before I met him in the summer of 2007:

The minimum salary for a major league baseball player today is more than half a million dollars. Most players make a lot more than that — some in the tens of millions a year.

But there was a time when ball players earned salaries measured in the tens of thousands, not millions. When they played on grass and traveled by train.

It was during that era that a young radio sportscaster broke into the business. His name was Curt Gowdy, and over the coming decades he became one of America’s best known sports broadcasters.

I met him in 1993, the year he wrote a book about what he called “the innocent days of sport.” But he conceded, the years 1945 to 1960 were probably kinder to the team owners and executives than the players.

On August 6, 1945, the United States became the first — and so far, only — nation to use a nuclear weapon in war. That was the day the Enola Gay dropped a bomb codenamed “Little Boy” that decimated the city of Hiroshima, Japan.

But Hiroshima didn’t have to happen.

And in 1991, I met a man who tried to prevent it.

His name was Martin Quigley. In World War Two he worked for the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS — the forerunner tp the CIA.

Quigley told me that in finding and recruitingv just the right person to get a message to Tokyo, he had a critical choice to make:

So Martin Quigley got secret messsages through his contact to the Japanesee foreign ministry, in the form of two diplomatic cables.
In any case, the communication continued — and Martin Quigley put his mark on history:

Martin Quigley died in 2011 at age 93.

Among the large field of Democrats runnin for president in 2020 is 67-year-old author and activist Marianne Williamson.

She waged an unsuccessful campaign for Congress in 2014, and announced last January that she would seek the Democratic nomination for president.

The principles she’s running on now were apparent 22 years ago, in 1997, when I talked with her about her then-newly-published book called “The Healing of America.”

A “Now I’ve Heard Everything” disclaimer: this interview should not be seen as an endorsement of the Williamson candidacy. In this forum, I neither endrose nor oppose any candidate.

On the night of July 25, 1956, the Italian luxury liner “Andrea Doria” was struck by the Swedish liner “Stockholm” about 40 miles off Nantucket, and sank some 11 hours later.

It wasn’t on the scale of the Titanic, but 46 people died.

Among the surviving passengers aboard the Andrea Doria that night was nine-year-old Pierette Domenica Simpson, looking forward to arriving in America with her grandparents from their native Italy.

In 2006 she wrote a book about her shipwreck experience. That’s when I met her.

A snowstorm in 1987 changed Jami Goldman’s life forever.

She was 19 at the time, driving home with a friend from a ski trip, when their car slid into a snow bank along an isolated northern Arizona road.

The women were stranded and alone for 11 days. By the time they were rescued, Jami had suffered severe frostbite, and lost both legs.

But instead of accepting life as a paraplegic, Jami began running. Yes, running, on specially-made prosthetic legs. Eventually she became a competitive runner, and inspirational speaker.

I met her in 2001:

Last weekend we all celebrated the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing.

And one of the most important behind-the-scenes people responsible for the success of the mission — indeed, the success of the entire U.S. space program — was an extraordinary aerospace engineer named Chris Kraft.

He was instrumental in establishing what we now know as “Mission Control.”

Kraft lived just long enough to mark that big anniversary last week. Yesterday, he passed away at age 95.

I talked with Chris Kraft in 2001:

The answer: This iconic host of “Jeopoardy” since 1984 is marking his 79th birthday today, July 22nd.

Who is Alex Trebek?

I had so much fun that day, in November 1990, talking to the great Alex Trebek, who was promoting a book called, appropriately enough, the “Jeopardy Book.”

Get ready now for some real behind the scenes stuff about the show America can’t get enough of.

On July 20th, 1969, Buzz Aldrin was 39 years old, a few months older than Neil Armstrong, as the two men became the first human beings ever to set foor on the moon.

Circling above them in the Apollo 11 command module was Michael Collins, age 38.

Now, Neil Armstrong died seven year ago, but Aldrin and Collins — both approaching 90 now — are still here to mark the fiftieth anniversary of one of the most significant days in all iof human history.

I was privileged to meet and interview both men — Collins in 1988, Aldrin in 2000