A little over 30 years ago, a Northern Neck fisherman went to prison for the brutal slaying of a homecoming queen and mother of two. Now, a reexamination of the case by a hard-charging UVA lawyer has turned up troubling questions.

A bizarre 1970 Arctic killing over a jug of raisin wine shows that we need to think about crime outside our atmosphere now.

Deep in the jungle, the tourists were targetted, but only the porters were hacked by the machetes. Was it a robbery? Or a deeper pattern of violence amongst ancient tribes?

How a serial killer and his teenage accomplice used listings for “the job of a lifetime” to lure their victims, all down-and-out single men, to the backwoods of Ohio.

In 1985, a lost 22-year-old wrote a letter to a Manson girl-turned-model prisoner, asking for advice on conquering his demons. Then they fell in love.

An abridged history of violence in "America's first suburb."

Note: Elon Green is a contributing editor to Longform.

“‘It’s like a novel,’ a newspaper editor once told me, shaking his head. When I recently asked Ruggeri, the chief investigator, to sum up the case, she stared at her desk and just said ‘incredible’ four times.”

A Stockholm prostitute is found hacked apart in a dumpster, her head is never found. Two accomplished doctors, confirmed creeps, are arrested. Uncertainty endures.

In the beginning, they were known as die Dönermorde – the kebab murders. The victims had little in common, apart from immigrant backgrounds and the modest businesses they ran.

Olathe, Kansas, became a global magnet for tech talent, thanks to plentiful jobs, cheap housing, and good schools. Then someone opened fire on a pair of Indian-born engineers.

For the last two decades, the varied personalities behind the Vidocq Society—retired cops, sketch artists, FBI agents—have gathered in Philadelphia to tackled cold-case homicides over lunch. They claim to have solved more than half.

The decades-long saga of Miami’s Take Once Cocktail Lounge, where you might get shot, your money will definitely be laundered, and everybody will know your name.

Hitman-for-hire darknet sites are all scams. But some people turn up dead nonetheless.

The author attends a Tolstoy conference as a grad student. She wears flip-flops, sweatpants and a flannel shirt, and tries to determine if Tolstoy was murdered.

No one knew how Suzanne Jovin ended up in a wealthy neighborhood away from Yale’s campus in New Haven, or why she was brutally stabbed on the sidewalk, apparently by someone she knew. The only suspect that police named was her thesis advisor.

She was the daughter of movie mogul Harry Warner. He was 15 years younger and embezzled her money, landing himself in jail. In prison, he offered a young inmate named Richard Matt $100,000 to kill her.

In 2006, Alexander Litvinenko, a former Russian spy working for British intelligence, was poisoned. As he lay dying, he worked with detectives to find his killer.

Asunta Fong Yang was adopted as a baby by a wealthy Spanish couple. Aged 12, she was found dead beside a country road. Not long after, her mother and father were arrested.

A reporter on her way out of India probes a case of a woman beaten to death by her husband in public.

The story of a lynching in rural CO in 1900, while hundreds watched, done with the complicity of press and cops, and why it still resonates today.

He was a college freshman partying in Manhattan for the first. He ran into a woman he knew from college, got separated from his friends, and ended up at a house party full of strangers. By the next morning, his body would be dumped in a Brooklyn driveway. Fifteen years later, the “circumstances of his death remain muddled.”

How a brilliant self-made software programmer from South Africa single-handedly built an online startup that became one of the largest individual contributors to America’s burgeoning painkiller epidemic. In his world, everything was for sale. Pure methamphetamine manufactured in North Korea. Yachts built to outrun coast guards. Police protection and judges’ favor. Crates of military-grade weapons. Private jets full of gold. Missile-guidance systems. Unbreakable encryption. African militias. Explosives. Kidnapping. Torture. Murder. It's a world that lurks just outside of our everyday perception, in the dark corners of the internet we never visit, the quiet ports where ships slip in by night, the back room of the clinic down the street.

During New York’s ’80s and ’90s crack epedemic, a flashy detective who “imagined himself a crusader who created his own rules” and his star witness, a crack addicted prostitute who seemed to constantly be at the scene of homicides, sent dozens of men to prison for life. Now, they are under investigation.

At the very bottom of the porn totem pole is the “mope”, a barely paid assistant who hangs around and occasionally performs. Stephen Hill was mope-ing for Ultima Studios in exchange for pocket money and a place to crash. Learning he was going to be evicted, he sharpened a prop machete.