WHERE are Neil Armstrong’s moon boots?

What became of Elvis Presley’s spangly Las Vegas jumpsuit?

Does anybody know the whereabouts of Marilyn Monroe’s flimsy white dress from The Seven Year Itch?

These are the questions burning in my mind, dear reader.

I was reading about American photographer Henry Leutwyler on assignment at the New York Police Department a few years ago. A small, black revolver lying on a chair caught his attention.

“That’s the gun that killed John Lennon,” he was nonchalantly told by a Manhattan cop.

But to Leutwyler, a lifelong Beatles fan, the object held a certain macabre fascination.

He took a picture of it. It got him thinking, and it sent him on a project to photograph seemingly unremarkable items whose histories had rendered them exceptional.

Over the years, in addition to the pistol Mark David Chapman used to murder Lennon, he has snapped the following: Michael Jackson’s sequinned glove, Mahatma Gandhi’s leather sandal, the cane and tramp shoes belonging to Charlie Chaplin, Fred Astaire’s tap shoes, a paintbrush of Andy Warhol’s, Janis Joplin’s guitar and Bob Dylan’s harmonica.

Now tell me you wouldn’t find it fascinating to see any one of those items yourself. It got me thinking about what became of other objects associated with turning points in history.

And here, for your delectation, are some you might have been lying awake at night worrying about.

The blood-stained tunic worn by Archduke Franz Ferdinand can be viewed in Vienna’s Military History Museum. The assassination of the Austrian archduke and his wife in Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, triggered a complex series of events that eventually led to the First World War.

The ball which Geoff Hurst put in the back of West Germany’s net three times during the 1966 World Cup Final at Wembley is these days rightfully in the hands of Mr Hurst himself.

It is a tradition that the scorer of any hat-trick gets to keep the ball. It was 30 years, however, before Hurst finally took possession of the ball. At the end of the 90 minutes in July 1966, the distinctive orange football was picked up by German goalscorer Helmut Haller.

In 1996 a national newspaper orchestrated a meeting between Haller and Hurst where the ball was duly handed over.

And finally if you want to see Neil Armstrong’s Apollo 11 space suit, worn during his two-hour, 31-minute, 40-second Moon walk in 1969, then you need to visit the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC.

If you know the whereabouts of Presley’s jumpsuit or Monroe’s dress, do let me know.