1536
May 15, Anna Boleyn and Lord Rochford were accused of adultery, incest, treason.


1567
May 15, Mary, Queen of Scots married James Hepburn, Earl of Bothwell.
1873 May 15, Nikolay N. Tcherepnin, composer of ballets, songs, was born in St Petersburg, Russia.


1915
May 15, In Germany Clara Immerwahr, chemist and wife of chemist Fritz Haber, shot herself in the heart with her husband’s service weapon in their garden, possibly in response to his having personally overseen the first successful use of chlorine at the Second Battle of Ypres on April 22, 1915. That same morning, Haber left for the Eastern Front to oversee gas release against the Russians.


1930
May 15, Ellen Church, the first airline stewardess, went on duty aboard an Oakland-to-Chicago flight operated by Boeing Air Transport, a forerunner of United Airlines.


1991
May 15, President Bush took Britain’s Queen Elizabeth the Second to a baseball game between the Baltimore Orioles and the Oakland Athletics. The queen left after two innings; the A’s won, 6-to-3.




1997
May 15, Attorney General Janet Reno requested the death penalty for Unabomber suspect Theodore Kaczynski. However, under an arrangement in which he admitted his guilt, Kaczynski later agreed to be sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole.


2003
May 15, June Carter Cash (73), the Grammy-winning scion of one of country music's pioneering families and the wife of Johnny Cash, died of complications from heart surgery.

2005
May 15, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice paid a surprise visit to Iraq to express support for its new government.


2008
May 15, In Mexico Pres. Calderon held a signing ceremony for an agreement with ElbaEsther Gordillo, head of the national teacher’s union, to promote the “Alliance for Educational Quality, an effort to improve teacher quality.


2012
May 15, In Florida Tonya Thomas (33) fatally shot her four children, ages 12-17, and then killed herself in Port St. John.


2014
May 15, A woman and a firefighter drowned in Serbia and hundreds of people in the Balkans were evacuated from their homes as rain-swollen rivers flooded roads, bridges and railways, closed schools and cut off power and phone service in Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia and Romania.

2014
May 15, In Sudan Mariam Ibrahim (26), a pregnant woman doctor who married a Christian man in 2011 and who was convicted earlier this week on charges of "apostasy," was sentenced to death. The court in Khartoum also ordered Ibrahim be given 100 lashes for committing "zena" — an Arabic word for illegitimate sex. On May 27 Ibrahim gave birth to her child in jail. On June 23 the Court of Cassation canceled her sentence and ordered her release. On June 24 Khartoum airport passport police arrested Meriam Ibrahim after she presented emergency travel documents issued by the South Sudanese embassy and carrying an American visa. She was freed again on June 26. On July 16 a suit by her father to establish her as his Muslim daughter was dropped.