Some crimes are so heartbreaking or shocking that they change laws, change society or even earn the label Crime of the Century. But the stories that made headlines in decades past aren't necessarily remembered today.

I'm Amber Hunt, a journalist and author,

and in each episode of this show,

I'll examine a case that's maybe lesser known today

but was huge when it happened. This is crimes of the centuries. Oh, Peter Buxton believed in his work. He believed even more in his

parents had fled

parents had fled Czechoslovakia to escape the Nazi regime when he was an infant.

After graduating from the University of Oregon,

he'd studied in the Army as a psychiatric social worker,

an assignment that set him up nicely

for his first professional job as a venereal disease investigator for the United

States Public Health Services.

Based at San Francisco's Hall Clinic in 1965, Buxton happened to hear coworkers talking about an agency

research study that had been going on for 40 years in a poverty-stricken rural part of Alabama.

They were studying the effects of untreated syphilis among black men. The operative word here is untreated like they weren't being given treatment

though treatment existed.

Buxton said, quote, it didn't sound like what a PHS institution should be doing, end quote.

He didn't think most doctors would like it either. What about the

Hippocratic Oath? What about first do no harm? Buxton needed more info.

What he was hearing couldn't be the whole story or needed more on the study. He found it included more than 623 poorly educated black men, 400

or so who had syphilis with arrest being a control group that did not,

and the vast majority of the inflicted had never been treated for the disease,

...