The West Memphis Three, teenagers who were convicted in 1993 of brutal killings that they certainly did not commit on the basis of local gossip that they were satanists (as evidenced by Metallica fandom), suddenly found themselves released this summer after over 17 years in prison. But what life awaited them?

A group of misfit boys from the fringes of Las Vegas form a clique. Then, with murky motives, they decide to murder one of their own and bury him in a desert pit.

How the U.S. government used a serial con who was caught running a mail-order steroid pharmacy in Mexico to prove that Google was knowingly placing ads for illegal drugs.

John Dirr’s son Eli didn’t really have cancer. In fact, neither Eli nor John Dirr ever existed.

A decade-long Internet hoax unravels.

A murder case in Mississippi catches the eye of amateur sleuths on Facebook, who proceed to harass everyone involved in the case.

After a lab linked to him was raided, James Jeffrey Bradstreet’s body was found with a bullet wound to the chest. His death was ruled a suicide, but other theories abound.

A business opportunity stemming from “a moment in time when the debate over how colleges should address sexual assault has reached a fever pitch.”

“What it means — for the reporting we do, for the brands we represent, and for our own mental health — that we don’t stop being black people when we’re working as black reporters. That we quite literally have skin in the game.”

Creating a new, clean police force in the Ukraine.

A profile of jailed trader Tom Hayes, who was either behind the Libor scandal or became its fall guy.

In 1998, a cop named Jon Aujay went for a run in the desert. He never came back. The department decided it was suicide, but that is not the only theory.

She was a Canadian student whose travels brought her to the cheap hotel on Skid Row. The only clue in her disappearance was a strange elevator video in which she peeks and then gestures with her hands down an unseen hallway.

They were the New York crew that once pulled off the Lufthansa heist, one of the biggest thefts in American history and the basis for Goodfellas. Nearly 40 years later, most are dead. The survivors are old, broke, and snitching.

He was arrested for pushing his three grandsons so hard on a Grand Canyon hike that rangers feared for their lives. Their account of the summer they spent with their youthful grandpa would include an uncanny understanding of marijuana strains and a stopover in Jamaica.

Last February, John Jonchuck Jr. dropped his 5-year-old daughter off a bridge to her death. This is the story of what happened, and what didn’t, in the years before the murder made headlines.

A war criminal’s life on the run.

Between 1937 and 1973, Earl Johnson served out the sentences on nine felonies, worked for Charlie “Cherry Nose” Gio, became friends with a Soviet spy, and tried to kill “Joe Cargo” Valachi of the Cosa Nostra with a poison dart.

When juveniles are found guilty of sexual misconduct, the sex-offender registry can be a life sentence.

On the border of Utah and Arizona, Mormon fundamentalists have long lived according to their own rules. When a former sect member and his family moved to the town where he’d grown up, they expected a homecoming. What they got was a war.

“‘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.”

Since exposing the Neapolitan mafia by publishing Gomorrah at age 27, Roberto Saviano has lived for nearly a decade under armed guard, shuttling between anonymous hotels and army barracks.

They were an ordinary pair of small-time criminals in the UK. Then they figured out how to blow up an ATM.

A draft dodger invents a pop music career for himself – without recording any songs.

A man in Puerto Rico stumbles on a brick of cocaine, and rather than sell it he decides to bury it. Others, hearing his story, cook up a plan to retrieve it.