We now know that the CIA quietly tested mind-bending psychedelics on unwitting American citizens. But how do we know?

In Part 2 of our series on MK-Ultra, we're going to tell you the story of how one of the CIA's many dirty secrets was revealed to the world, and how they were forced not only to hand over damaging information about their mind-bending escapades but also to inadvertently help promote the book that followed.

More importantly, what does any of this have to do with Fidel Castro's beard?

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Rumours about NASA scientists trying to teach dolphins to talk and getting frisky in the process have long been internet lore. But what really happened when Margaret Howe took on the task of training a sexed-up sea mammal to speak? And how on earth did they get it funded?

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In the wake of an Allied victory, the threat of a communist New World Order loomed over the West. Desperate to beat the Soviets at their own game, the USA gave the secret service all the money and drugs they needed to create a real-life Manchurian Candidate.

Left with their minds in tatters and their relationships all but destroyed, the subjects of the CIA program ‘MKUltra’ were unwitting lab rats in the USA’s never-ending search for a truth serum.

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Kirk Anderson was abducted from an LDS meeting house in Surrey by his ex-partner – and ex-beauty queen – Joyce McKinney.

He said he was taken to a small rural cottage, tied to a bed, and sexually assaulted for three days. According to McKinney, everything was above board – Kirk just liked things kinky.

But the British tabloids only cared about one thing: the wisecracking Southern belle Joyce McKinney made for great headlines. All the papers needed was a picture of her naked, to sell the story of the century. And they'd do anything to get it.

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When the body of a weeks-old baby was found in a plastic bag in a shed, covered in soil and rubbish, it marked the end of one of the UK’s strangest and most tragic criminal manhunts. The baby’s parents were Constance Marten and Mark Gordon – an aristocratic heiress and an American convicted rapist.

As a jury wrestled for months over the couple’s guilt, more and more shocking details came out. Details of nights spent in a cheap tent out on the freezing moors. Of Gordon’s brutal criminal history. And the heartbreaking image that stuck in the nation’s mind more than anything else: the accusation that the baby had spent its short life carried around, in the depths of winter, in nothing but a plastic shopping bag.

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Nicknamed "Artemis" and "The Limping Lady" by Nazi Germany, Virginia Hall was, without a doubt, one of the most effective—and certainly the most feared—Allied spies during the Second World War. She helped countless POWs escape and funneled a constant stream of weapons into and information out of Nazi-occupied Europe. Her contribution is almost unfathomable, yet most people don't even know her name.

This is her story.

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When the son of Mormon family vlogger Ruby Franke turned up bound, emaciated and apparently covered in blood – it horrified the police, the internet and Franke’s millions of followers.

The uber-strict brand of parenting advice she preached on her YouTube channel, “8 Passengers”, had been drawing online criticism for years. But even her loudest detractors couldn’t know how despicable and unhinged her punishments had grown. That is, until a diary, found among evidence of torture in a windowless basement, revealed the depths of her abuse to the world.

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In our unexpected third part on this neverending rabbit-hole of a case, we finally take on the big, crucial factors that have sent the internet into a frenzy: the taillight, the flirty texts, the inverted video, and the conduct of one Trooper Michael Proctor.

And, finally, we give our verdict: is Karen Read guilty of murder?

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