437 children were removed from Yearning for Zion Ranch as part of the largest custody battle in American history. They were eventually returned to the compound polygamist Warren Jeffs made infamous—but questions remained.

Notes from the campaign trail in Nevada with Ron Paul.

Part of Longform.org’s guide to the 2012 GOP field at Slate.

In the days after 9/11, Mark Stroman went on a revenge killing spree in Texas. Rais Bhuiyan survived and, a decade later, tried to stop Stroman’s execution.

Inside the Afghan Local Police, who are accused of killing and raping villagers, and are believed to be the United States’s last shot in Afghanistan.

With a brutal cancer prognosis, a woman learns to live on borrowed time.

Gerry Adams, the leader of Sinn Fein, denies that he was ever in the IRA. The murder of Jean McConville threatened to expose him as a liar.

Rumor had it that a teenager had cut off a man’s penis, and the cops happened to have a murder victim that answered that description. Nothing else lined up.

When Putin suggested to Obama that the White House and the Kremlin speak through an intermediary, he named who he thought was the obvious candidate: his friend Steven Seagal.

Harsh sentences have given us an aging prison population, and all the medical problems that come with age are beginning to choke the system.

Decades after a young nun was murdered, a group of former Catholic high school students begin to suspect that an abusive priest may have been the culprit.

How packaged-food companies like Campbell and Hershey are responding to the backlash against pesticides, preservatives, high-fructose corn syrup, growth hormones, antibiotics, gluten, and genetically modified organisms.

A West Hollywood aesthetician made headlines after allegedly trying to have a business rival killed. But the real story, involving ongoing harassment and a member of the so-called Bling Ring, may be more complicated.

How the Mosley Motel, off U.S. 19 in Florida, became the temporary home to at least 27 families turned away from full shelters.

A group of teens allegedly create a violent game with a simple premise: “to knock out a stranger with a single punch.”

In 1963, William Zantzinger was convicted of manslaughter in the death of Hattie Carroll and then immortalized – and somewhat defamed – by Bob Dylan. What’s he been up to since then?

An interview on the logistics of running North America’s only legal facility for drug addicts to push heroin and cocaine and other types of substances into their veins.

Matthew Roberts was a fledgling musician in L.A., DJing at a strip club and prone to nightmares. But when he learned Charles Manson might be his biological father, his whole life suddenly made sense.

Murderous editors, allegations of insanity, connections to the Church of Satan, illegal predatory-pricing schemes, and more than $21 million on the line—the crazy alt-weekly war in San Francisco has it all.

Profile of the flip-flop wearing 61-year-old ‘dude’ who turned around a dying company by selling all-American sex to teens – and isn’t apologizing.

A young journalist’s low-paid odyssey through publications from the Hong Kong iMail to Gawker adrift in the “nothing-based economy.”

In the chaotic days before the Berlin Wall fell, the East German secret police shredded 45 million pages. Fifteen years later, a team of computer scientists figured out how to put it all back together.

After one of the most decisive wins in Kentucky Derby history, Barbaro broke his leg at the Preakness, ending a promising career and beginning a herculean effort to save his life.

Ty Cobb, who would go on to be the greatest baseball player of his time, was a 17-year-old minor league prospect when his mother shot and killed his father at home in Georgia.

A Hollywood screenwriter finds out his identity’s been stolen when a hooker calls–from his private office–demanding to be paid for the sex they didn’t just have.