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19891776 Club

Robert Bardo shoots Rebecca Schaeffer at her door; she dies at Cedars-Sinai at 21

Bardo, 19, had stalked her for three years and paid a detective $250 to pull her home address from California DMV records.

Rebecca Schaeffer, 21, lived alone in West Hollywood and was preparing for an audition with Francis Ford Coppola for The Godfather Part III. That morning, July 18, 1989, a 19-year-old named Robert Bardo knocked on her door, then returned an hour later after having breakfast at a nearby diner. He had stalked her for three years and had paid a detective agency $250 to pull her address from California DMV records. He shot her once in the chest at 10:15 am. She died thirty minutes later at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center…

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More from July 18
1966

Young and Collins ride Agena's engine to 412 nautical miles; no human has flown higher

Gemini 10 docks with its target vehicle hours after liftoff from Cape Kennedy, with Collins set to walk outside and retrieve hardware from a second Agena still drifting in orbit.
1863

Shaw is killed at the parapet; the 54th Massachusetts storms Fort Wagner

One of the first Black regiments in the Union Army leads the beach assault on Charleston harbor's fort, suffering heavy losses but silencing doubts about whether these soldiers will fight.
1914

Congress creates an aviation section inside the Signal Corps; $250,000 to get it started

Public Law 143 gives the Army's handful of planes a formal home, but keeps aviation folded inside the Signal Corps rather than making it a branch of its own.
19681776 Club
Backed by Arthur Rock and registered today as NM Electronics, the new venture already has a third man: chemical engineer Andy Grove, employee number three.
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Read the full July 18 edition →Everything that happened on July 18 →
More from Cold War America
1952

U.S. detonates Ivy Mike at Enewetak; Elugelab Island is gone

The 7:15 a.m. shot, fired just before a presidential election, yields 10.4 megatons from a device more than twenty feet tall.
1983

Reagan signs the King holiday bill, fifteen years after the first one was introduced

Congress passed it by wide margins, but the President had once dismissed the push behind it as "an image, not reality."
1988

A Cornell graduate student's program slips onto the Internet from a computer at MIT

Robert Tappan Morris, 23, launches it at about 8:30 p.m. from another campus so it won't trace back to Cornell; the network holds roughly 60,000 machines.
1948

The Tribune's early edition crowns Dewey; the returns say otherwise

A printers' strike pushed the press deadline hours earlier, and about 150,000 copies roll before the count turns.
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