The rise and murderous fall of the Harkey family, the scions of a pecan dynasty.

“The grand jury witness who testified that she saw Michael Brown pummel a cop before charging at him ‘like a football player, head down,’ is a troubled, bipolar Missouri woman with a criminal past who has a history of making racist remarks and once insinuated herself into another high-profile St. Louis criminal case with claims that police eventually dismissed as a ‘complete fabrication.’”

Three men are exonerated, almost 40 years after a 12-year-old’s coerced testimony led to their murder convictions.

On the 1934 lynching of Claude Neal, and the Florida town that kept the identity of those responsible a secret.

An uneasy relationship between two people squatting in a crime scene house.

"But that guy was gone. In between the fourth and fifth beer at the bar, he disappeared in a haze of yellow and heat. Someone’s joke. A crack of broken glass. Tony and the guy out the door. Maybe in the back alley. And then it was all Tony Disco sidling up to me at the bar, his arm warm against mine, his breath like juniper. And now here he and I were, slumped on a dead woman’s couch."

Nancy and Frank Howard were happily married for three decades. Then he fell in love with another woman, embezzled $30 million, and hired a parade of inept hit men to kill his wife.

On Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik and the rise of Islamophobia in Norway.

Horrifyingly astute reflections on a series of murders.

"The bank clerk gave John a pinched look as he pulled out his calculator, checking if she’d paid him the correct interest when cashing out Mother’s savings bonds. (She had, to the penny.) He sensed her subtle gloat. John didn’t care. He’d ended two people’s pain that day, single-handedly. Was SHE ever that kind?"

“‘Have you ever killed anybody?’”

A jury recommends life in prison; the judged orders a death sentence.

“‘Why does my dad have duct tape by his pillow?’”

George Spahn and his California ranch, before and after the Manson family showed up.

The mystery of a death in Dallas.

Kelli Stapleton, whose teenage daughter was autistic and prone to violent rages, had come to fear for her life. So she made a decision that perhaps only she could justify.

Monaco’s richest woman was shot in ambush outside a hospital. Her heirs stand to inherit over a billion dollars each.

A mini epic of murder, theft, and nature in the Old West.

"He trotted down the steep slope and across the range, passing monuments of salt cedar and sagebrush and croppings of bouldered limestone and sandstone. Everett marched on, glancing back to the pass like clockwork. His vision began to blur and he mistook shadows of dashing clouds overhead as armies of villains bent on doing him harm. He crept on as his headache worsened and soon he forgot his sentried errand. He kept low to the ground and stopped himself twice from collapsing completely, bracing himself on passing man-made edifices of rock and earth. His limp had worsened and he stumbled upon wreckage of some wrecked wagonette and used a long timber from the wagon-bed as a crutch until it snapped in half ten minutes later. The sun was hot and without his hat or coat he felt the full effects of it on the nape of his neck."

“You probably don’t believe me, but I didn’t kill Harry.”

The aftermath of a sudden death.

Why a decades-long string of murders near the Mexican border has gone unsolved.

Nearly 70 years after Bugsy Siegel’s unsolved murder in Beverly Hills, a family finally comes forward: they know who did it.

The murder of a West Virginia teenager by her two best friends.

The debate over who’s responsible when a child kills.

A Japanese photographer examines the scene of the St. Valentine's Day massacre; a story from the author of The Black Hour.

"Was it the worst I’d seen? I turned to the camera, viewing the scene anew. Four men lay in a row, as though they had been tucked into a large bed. One slept at their feet, face down. The last hunched on his knees at a round-backed wooden chair. Blood ran toward the center of the room. Later that day when I returned to the newsroom, I would release the image from the machine in my hands, like a dragon from a cage. The city would see the blood, black, and no one would remember that someone—call him Togo or call him Fujita, the name will not be printed—had stood in the dust of men’s bones to face the dragon so that they did not have to."

On the comedian’s relationship with his son and how it changed the course of The Cosby Show.