Dear Lee,

If long-gone celebrities of interest to collectors were written up in the same way Internet gossip sites cover celebs today, what would we be reading? Here are some headlines we’ve imagined. Can you guess the events?

“Trusted Silversmith Turned Counterfeiter Is Hanged,” “Crazed Gardener Kills Architect’s Paramour with an Ax,” “Wife Makes Toy a Success after Husband Moves to South American Commune” and “Famed Author and His Wife Drown in Lusitania Attack.” Here are the true stories behind the lurid headlines:

Back in 1750, a Virginia silversmith named Lowe Jackson made his own Spanish doubloons and gave one to his barber. The barber learned the “gold” coin he thought was genuine was actually gold-plated metal. The penalty for counterfeiting back then was death. Jackson fled before his trial but was captured in South Carolina, sent back for trial, found guilty and hanged two years later.

The “crazed gardener” killed Frank Lloyd Wright’s mistress, her two young children and four others with an axe in 1914. At the time, Wright and his entourage were living in Taliesin, the house in Wisconsin he designed and built for his own use.

Richard James invented the Slinky toy in 1945. It was the start of a successful toy company. But in about 1960, James left his wife, Betty, and six children to join a Bolivian religious cult. Betty discovered that her husband had given corporate money to the cult, leaving the firm in debt. She became CEO and made the company a success again by creating dozens of new Slinky toys. Richard James died in 1974. Betty died at age 90 in 2008.

Elbert Hubbard was a Larkin Soap and Buffalo Pottery executive, author of the best seller, “A Message to Garcia,” founder of the Roycroft community, and a married father with three sons. He also had a long affair with a schoolteacher named Alice Moore, a boarder at the family’s home outside of Buffalo, N.Y.

When Alice moved to Boston in 1893, Hubbard followed her, saying he was going to enroll in classes at Harvard. In 1894 Alice gave birth to Hubbard’s daughter and one year later Hubbard’s wife, Bertha, also produced a daughter for him. The whole episode became a national scandal a decade later when Hubbard married Alice six days after his divorce from Bertha was finalized.

In 1915 Elbert and Alice sailed to Europe on the Lusitania. It was sunk by a German U-boat. Another passenger said that the couple refused life jackets and lifeboats, went to their cabin and simply closed the door and waited to drown.