Did a handsome young Green Beret doctor kill his pregnant wife and two daughters? Or, as he claims, did a group of candle-carrying hippies carry out a vicious home invasion while chanting “Acid is groovy, kill the pigs”? A mystery that spanned three decades.
Two brothers dreamed of baseball stardom. One would end up killing the other.
In the late 90s, an American man adopted a 5-year-old from the Ukraine. A decade later, one of the two would be accused of molesting young boys. The other would be charged with murder.
When the Rolling Stones played Altamont.
Bill Ferguson does not believe his son, Ryan, killed a popular newspaper editor. To prove it, he’s drained his savings, performed public re-enactments of the crime, and alienated almost everyone in his Missouri city.
Two men named Nathan committed murders. Only one received a death sentence.
Greg Ousley killed his parents and has been locked up for nineteen years.
Is that enough?
On the evening of November 7th 1974, the 7th Earl of Lucan, an inveterate gambler and Backgammon champion with a taste for power boats, snuck into his estranged wife’s basement. He then bludgeoned their nanny with a lead pipe and placed her in a canvas sack, before attempting to murder his wife. Recognizing his voice, she convinced him that she could him escape, then slipped out a bathroom window. Lord Lucan was never seen again.
The murderous tale of Washington D.C. fabulist Albrecht Muth and his late wife Viola Drath.
How the author became tangled up with an international con man who may or may not have murdered several people.
John MacNeil was convicted by the state of Massachusetts of second-degree murder. He was given a life sentence. He escaped. He was caught. Through an incredible feat of jailhouse lawyering, he somehow got himself paroled and exiled to Canada. Then he came home.
How a Harvard-educated neurologist, a courtly southern gentlemen, and a Hollywood rent boy ended up at the center of an international manhunt that spread from the staid business community of Columbus, Ohio to the coffee shops of Amsterdam.
In the remote wilderness along northern British Columbia’s Highway 16, at least 18 women have gone missing over the past four decades. Is it the work of a serial killer or multiple offenders?
The anatomy of a wrongful conviction in Texas.
Twenty-one-year-old Briton Lucie Blackman came to Tokyo and found work in the Roppongi district hostess bars, where businessmen come to flirt with paid companions, and Western women draw a premium fee. Two months later, she disappeared. She would be found underneath a bathtub in a beachside cave.
A group of Long Island misfits with aspirations towards Satanic worship disappeared into the woods to take mescaline. One of them never came back.
A cop kills a fellow officer during a drug bust and claims it was an accident. Others suspect that it wasn’t.
A nasty divorce ends in murder and national notoriety.
The case of the murdered real-estate legend and her enraged assistant.
In 1981, Randall Smith murdered two hikers on the Appalachian Trail. Twenty-seven years later, he tried to do it again.
A fingerprint expert spends decades investigating the death of an unidentified boy found in the woods in 1957.
A portrait of Trayvon Martin’s killer.
She survived an evil, gruesome attack. Her partner did not. An account of a victim, a widow, telling her story on the witness stand.
Update, 4/16/12: This piece was just awarded the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing.
On a Victorian-era murder case, and the novel it inspired.
The real-life events that inspired the new Richard Linklater dark comedy Bernie:
It’s a story about people believing what they want to believe, even when there’s evidence to the contrary. It’s a story about people not being what they seem. And it’s a story, as the movie poster says, “so unbelievable it must be true.” Which it is. I know this because the widow in the freezer was, in real life, my Aunt Marge, Mrs. Marjorie Nugent, my mother’s sister and, depending on whom you ask, the meanest woman in East Texas. She was 81 when she was murdered, and Bernie Tiede, her constant companion and rumored paramour, was 38. He’ll be eligible for parole in 2027, when he’ll be 69.
