An abused woman reacts to her downstairs neighbor's murder.

"Laurie thinks he tries to cry, and she appreciates the effort. She kisses Jimmy in return, pretends it doesn’t hurt when he scrapes his teeth over her collarbone, and ignores the phone when it rings. If it’s her mother, she’ll call again soon enough; if it’s another reporter, well, Laurie doesn’t have much to say."

How an honors student became a hired killer.

On the “black widow” of Keller, Texas.

A mysterious stranger in the woods; horrific escalations.

"When we were eleven Billy Jacobs told us he had seen three people standing at the edge of the woods. One was the redheaded man–or someone who from a distance resembled the redheaded man, a sicker, thinner incarnation of him. The three held big glass bottles as they waved to Billy. One let a cigarette fall from his mouth and the others shrieked with laughter. They stumbled away and were gone."

On Marie-Madeline Marguerite, a 1600s French serial killer.

An unsettling story of murder and telemarketing; originally published in 2007 and recently anthologized in The New Black, edited by Richard Thomas.

"There is a noise—the noise teeth might make biting hurriedly into melon—punctuated by a series of screams. It makes me want to tear the headset away from my ear. And then I realize I am not alone. Someone is listening. I don't know how—a certain displacement of sound as the phone rises from the floor to an ear—but I can sense it."

The preacher ran a prostitution ring out of his halfway house. The teenager posed as his nephew and later claimed he feared for his own life. Only one man they drove into the woods would survive.

In the late 1960s, a German named Günther Hauck disappeared in Brazil. When he emerged, he was calling himself Tatunca Nara and claimed to be the chief of the Ugha Mongulala, an previously unknown Indian tribe. Since then he has lived in the Amazon, his legend growing. Jacques Cousteau hired him as a guide. An Indiana Jones movie was based on his stories. And three people who made pilgrimages to see him never came home.

How Javaris Crittenton went from basketball phenom to standing trial on a murder charge.

The survivors of a mass shooting, 20 years later.

The gangs of Brooklyn’s Brownsville, an area with the higest concentration of public housing in America.

A hairdresser confronts class issues and a local murder.

"During my lunch break, I thought about what I thought about Elena Czarinsky. Honestly, I’d never liked her much. She was one of those women who flashed her electronics around to remind everyone she had a real job where she was irreplaceable. She tipped with the generous lunacy of a woman who’s had to take her clothes off for a living. Once she told me she got off bad guys just to show she knew the law better than the next guy, and it wasn’t an apology. Actually, I could have hated the woman."

How two boys, 10 and 11, were sentenced to years in a detention facility for a crime they didn’t get a chance to commit.

How the Newtown Bee covered Sandy Hook.

The author of I Know What You Did Last Summer investigates her own daughter’s unsolved murder.

Why six people admitted roles in two murders they most likely didn’t commit.

On the murder of a popular bar owner in a ghost town near the Mexican border.

How P. Rajagopal, the founder of one of the world’s largest vegetarian restaurant chains, got away with murder.

The life and mysterious death of dissident Bulgarian writer and radio journalist Georgi Markov.

Young love in an rural American town is beset by ominous setbacks.

"The only person he could make out was Reverend Kelly, a traveling preacher from England. He sat by a lamp, which illuminated his sharp cheekbones and pointy nose, his sagging mouth formed into a smirk. And those beady eyes. Willie didn’t like the way he’d seen those eyes following Lena around earlier in the night."

“Which is how, despite the drinking, the stealing, the racist outburst, the abysmal courtroom performance, the disbarment, and the ultimate imprisonment of his lead attorney, an intellectually disabled man has ended up on the verge of execution.”

Twelve years ago, Michael Stewart killed his mother during a psychotic episode. How he and his family are coping today.

A small town in Upstate New York, and one family in particular, endures a five-year string of car accidents, suicides, and murders.

A teenager orchestrates his own attempted murder via an Internet chatroom.

The murder of an Iranian band in Brooklyn by one of their own.

Previously: Nancy Jo Sales on the Longform Podcast.