Speculation that Lord Richard John Bingham successfully fled abroad, evading capture for the murder, has been rife; while alleged sightings in Australia, Ireland, South Africa and New Zealand have elevated the peer to myth-like status.
Well, one gathers from reading the interview with Alice Randall that accompanies the bound galleys of her book, because "Gone with the Wind" has "reached the status of myth in our culture," and, like all myths, it leaves out a lot, which the new myth puts back in.
One hundred and fifty years on, the Lincoln-Douglas debates enjoy the dubious status of myth.
There are books that seek to give ordinary life the status of myth, as if offering a shortcut to the peculiar immortality conferred on the straying heroines and vengeful heroes of the murder ballads.
Lincoln's debates with Stephen A. Douglas in the summer and fall of 1858 have the status of myth, but they were, William Grimes wrote in The Times, "part of an often dirty political campaign, not a series of Socratic dialogues".
As much as anything, it was the combination of that one great victory against the French and then the odyssey back and forth across the mountains that raised Garibaldi's reputation in many Italian minds to the status of myth.
In 1964, a coffin representing Jean Moulin's remains was ceremonially transferred to the Panthéon in the presence of President de Gaulle, thus conferring on him the ultimate posthumous accolade of his heroic status of myth and legend.
With his mysterious disappearance during a military reconnaissance flight over occupied France on July 31 , 1944 and then the worldwide success of his final book, "The Little Prince," he assumed the status of myth, one that has kept the French in thrall ever since.
Almost instantly elevated to the status of myth, the trial and execution of the anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti remains one of the blackest pages in the American national story, a cautionary tale of lethal passions fueled by political fear and ethnic prejudice.
