OFFICIAL CAUSE OF DEATH: Thought to be tuberculosis.

BUT: Egyptologist Bob Brier says a 1969 X-ray of Tut's skull suggests a hard blow to the back of the head. The aged Aye, as vizier, could have let a hit man into Tut's bedroom. A commoner, Aye succeeded childless Tut by wedding his widow (and half-sister), who vanished after the nuptials.

OFFICIAL CAUSE OF DEATH: A fever, sudden abdominal pain, and two weeks later "invincible" Alex was a goner. Theories include poisoning, pancreatitis, alcoholism aggravated by a broken heart after the death of his lover, fellow warrior Hephaestion.

BUT: Maybe it was typhoid fever, proposed the New England Journal of Medicine in June 1998. The infectious disease can cause a perforated bowel (and so, abdominal pain) and ascending paralysis, which could explain the odd legend that Alexander's body did not decompose. Unable to move, the king of the world might have seemed dead before he really was.

OFFICIAL CAUSE OF DEATH: Possibly malaria. But one Mongol account suggests a rival chieftain's wife mortally wounded Genghis during a tryst.

WHERE'S THE BODY? In the Mongolia steppes, somewhere on a mountain known as Bhurkajn Khaldun. But no one can identify the mountain. Mongol soldiers slew the 2,000 folks who escorted Genghis to his tomb, where he was supposedly buried with treasure, then were themselves killed. That's one way to keep a secret.

LATEST TWIST: Khan-crazed Chicago lawyer/multimillionaire Maury Kravitz, 68, is leading an expedition to Mongolia this month to find the grave. Kravitz, whose team will use ancient texts that measure distances in pony strides, claims he has a secret clue.

OFFICIAL CAUSE OF DEATH: Old age.

BUT: Research for a Discovery Channel documentary is reviving the rumor that Good Queen Bess was a good ol' boy. The story: Elizabeth died at age 9 of disease. Unwilling to tell Henry and face his wrath, the girl's guardians subbed a lad from the nearby village of Bisley. Once the masquerade had begun, it could not be undone. If true, the tale would explain why Bess never wed–and why she had ordered no autopsy upon her death. In 1870, a respected vicar, Thomas Keble, reportedly discovered remains of a female child garbed in royal-style clothes, while work was being done on Elizabeth's Gloucestershire house. Keble reinterred the body–but nobody knows where.

OFFICIAL CAUSE OF DEATH: Thought to be complications from alcoholism.

BUT: Maybe a mad cat-or bat-bit him. Doctors studying Poe's medical records point to waves of delirium and seizures he suffered in the days before his death as a possible sign of rabies. Poe reportedly had been on the wagon for six months before his demise.

OFFICIAL CAUSE OF DEATH: No one knows for sure. But two unidentified bandits stole a company payroll in November 1908 on a Bolivian road, then died two days later in an army shootout. That might have been Butch and the Kid. But Cassidy's youngest sister told researchers her brother came back to the United States and died in 1937.

BUT: Independent historians Daniel Buck and Anne Meadows found a November 1908 edition of the Tupiza, Bolivia, newspaper, listing guests at the Hotel Términus, including one "Santiago Lowe." James Lowe was a Butch alias; Santiago is a Spanish version of James. Buck and Meadows say in a new article that Butch's sister eventually "implied to at least two researchers that she was just having fun with her stories." They also note that the Kid's letters home stopped after the Bolivian shootout.

OFFICIAL CAUSE OF DEATH: Flying to Paris to plan a Christmas concert for the troops, he crashed in the English Channel in a dense fog. The Nazis claimed Miller's death in a Paris brothel was covered up by the Allies. No one believed them.

BUT: An RAF logbook shows a fighter jettisoned unused bombs, accidentally hitting a plane. Was it Miller's?

OFFICIAL CAUSE OF DEATH: Unknown. After dining with friends on August 6 at a West 45th Street chophouse, he hailed a cab around 9 p.m. and was never seen again.

WHODUNIT: Initial evidence suggested the judge skipped town to escape a corruption scandal. On the day he disappeared, he allegedly packed up private files and withdrew more than $5,000 (about $50,000 in today's dollars) from the bank. But Alice Amelar, a Crater buff who has been researching the judge for 20 years, believes "the Democrats" had Crater killed, fearing that his testimony in a grand jury investigation of the sale of judgeships would hurt FDR's presidential hopes: "Mr. Roosevelt hoisted himself into the presidency on the body of his friend." In the 1950s, a Dutch clairvoyant "sensed" Crater's body buried near Yonkers.

LAST WORDS: "I'm going up to Westchester for a swim; see you tomorrow."

OFFICIAL CAUSE OF DEATH: Undetermined, perhaps accidental ingestion of pesticide. Stuffed and mounted, his body is the most popular exhibit at Australia's Museum of Victoria.

BUT: The Mafia may have poisoned the steed. Target of a failed assassination attempt in 1930–an unknown shooter opened fire but was foiled by the horse's trainer–Phar Lap won so often that Mob-backed bookies didn't want to pay out.

OFFICIAL CAUSE OF DEATH: Shot by FBI agents on July 22 outside Chicago's Biograph Theatre.

BUT: The FBI may have killed the wrong man. The missing autopsy report resurfaced 50 years after Dillinger was gunned down. The corpse had brown eyes, but a 1923 Navy physical examiner described Dillinger's eyes as blue. And scars don't match up. Rumors persist that the FBI shot Dillinger look-alike and small-time criminal Jimmy Lawrence, who may have been set up by Dillinger's girlfriend. Jay Robert Nash, who has written a book on the case, claims Dillinger watched the shootout, then fled to Oregon.

OFFICIAL CAUSE OF DEATH: Brain swelling, an adverse reaction to the painkiller Equagesic, given to him by a friend rumored to be his mistress.

LATEST TWIST: The story making the rounds in Hollywood these days is that Lee may have died of adrenal gland failure, perhaps exacerbated by overuse of cortisone, or that jealous and corrupt Hong Kong movie moguls might have poisoned his marijuana stash.