Seven-year-old Maria Ridulph disappeared from Sycamore, Illinois. Her body would be found near Woodbine, Illinois, on April 26, 1958.[23] Jack McCullough (formerly known as John Tessier) would be convicted of the murder in 2012, but released from prison in 2016 and declared innocent in 2017 after a post-conviction review of evidence.[24] The case remains unsolved.
Huisheng, Japanese noblewoman (b. 1938), joint suicide by firearm with her lover Takemichi Ōkubo. The event became known as the Amagisan shinjū (天城山心中, Love Suicide at Mount Amagi).[37]
Sally (Thyra) Bowman (43), her daughter Wendy (14), and family friend Thomas Whelan (22) were beaten and shot to death at Sundown Station in South Australia while traveling by car from Alice Springs to Adelaide. 25-year-old Raymond John Bailey would be arrested for the murders in January 1958, convicted, and hanged on 24 June 1958. Investigative journalist Stephen Bishop asked for a posthumous pardon for Bailey in February 2013, but the request was denied.[42]
All 326,000 Dutch nationals were expelled from Indonesia.[43]
In Bochum, West Germany, a gas explosion in an apartment house killed at least nine people and injured 15.[44]
The first U.S. attempt to launch a satellite failed, when the IGY Vanguard TV-3 rocket, the first with three live stages, exploded on the launch pad.[33][51] The Soviet TASS news agency promptly reported the explosion.[52] President Eisenhower requested a full report on the launch failure from the United States Department of Defense.[53] Physicist Joseph Kaplan, chairman of the U.S. National Committee for the International Geophysical Year, cautioned the American public against hysteria over the failure, noting that initial experiments "seldom succeed".[54]
The crash of Aerolíneas Argentinas Flight 670 in a rainstorm, 180 miles (290 km) southwest of Buenos Aires, killed 61 people. At the time, this was the worst aviation accident in the history of Argentina.[66][67]
The United States Air Force created a Directorate of Astronautics to manage and coordinate astronautical research programs, including work on satellites and antimissile-missile weapons. Brigadier General Homer A. Boushey was named to head the office.[33][90][91]James H. Douglas Jr., U.S. Secretary of the Air Force, rescinded the order on December 13, considering the creation of such a group before the activation of the Advanced Research Projects Agency to be premature.[33][92]
American lyricist and librettistAlan Jay Lerner married Parisian lawyer Micheline Muselli Pozzo di Borgo in Manhattan. This was Lerner's fourth marriage and di Borgo's second.[175][176] The couple would divorce in 1965.
The Scottish freighter SS Narva sank in the North Sea while going to the aid of a collier in distress. All 28 crewmen aboard the Narva were lost. The crew of the collier were rescued.[199][200]
The eighth congress of the Black African Students Federation in France (FEANF) began; it would conclude on December 31. The congress called for Algerian independence, the establishment of a pan-African conference, the creation of an African youth festival, and political independence in Africa.[244]
Fred Combs, a 36-year-old American racing driver, was killed in a race crash at the Manzanita Speedway in Phoenix, Arizona. He was ejected through the roof opening of his car when a pin in his seat belt buckle assembly failed.[266]
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