The story of the 1969 murder spree by Charles Manson and “Family” as told by those close to the case.

The story of a high school quarterback’s descent into madness, and its tragic end.

Five prostitutes disappear. Bodies turn up on a Long Island beach. On the women lost, and the families left behind.

How an Italian thug looted MGM, brought Credit Lyonnais to its knees, and made the Pope cry.

A high school student disappears, only to turn up more than 10 years later – posing as a high school student.

On H.H. Holmes “an old hand at corpse manipulation and insurance fraud,” who built a house of death in 1890s Chicago.

After the United States demanded the extradition of a drug lord, a bloodletting ensued.

Steven Donziger, an American lawyer, headed up a successful lawsuit against Chevron on behalf of Ecuadorans. Then the legal tables turned on him.

Con man turned pastor turned con man; a profile of a serial scammer and the movie he tried to make about himself.

Inside carpenter brothers Ryan and Dylan, and their stripper sister Lee-Grace Dougherty’s eight-day, fifteen-state, AK-47-wielding crime spree.

On then-agent, now-congressman Michael Grimm and what happens when an F.B.I. informant turns out to be a con man.

Pavel Galitsky, 100 years old, blogger and Skyper, survivor of 15 years in Stalin’s Siberian Kolyma mines.

In an odd way, crime has fallen off the political landscape. To an extent it's been replaced on the agenda by concern about the dire consequences of mass incarceration. But violent crime itself remains a major area in which the United States lags behind other developed countries. To suggest that smarter management of the criminal justice system could make it less brutal while simultaneously creating large reductions in the quantity of crime sounds utopian. And yet the proposals for parole system reform found in this article are utterly convincing.

-M. Yglesias

Virginia authorities possess DNA evidence that may exonerate dozens of  convicted men. Why won’t the state say who they are?

A report from the trial of Ivan Demjanjuk—a.k.a. “The Last Nazi”—who died on March 17.

On L.A.’s Homeboy Industries, which offers former felons—including at least one disgraced CEO—the chance to work.

The story of Trina Garnett, “one of approximately 470 prisoners in Pennsylvania serving life without parole for crimes they committed as teenagers.”

The truncated, violent lives of Richard Matt and David Sweat before their prison escape.

Working on the high seas is always dangerous, but the Dona Liberta has a particularly bad reputation.

How an apartheid-era psychiatrist went from torturing gay soldiers in South Africa to sexually abusing patients in Canada.

Twenty-five years later, the deaths of a couple on the Trail remain shocking – and mostly unexplained.

What happened when one of San Francisco’s most notorious underworld bosses tried to go clean.

How one woman’s sexual assault by four University of Oregon football players in 1980 unwittingly led to the state’s expansive free speech protections.

The DEA warns that drugs are funding terror. But is the agency stopping threats or staging them?