A former Saint and Super Bowl champion, Will Smith, was shot and killed by another player named Cardell Hayes. Their fatal collision highlights the fine line between triumph and tragedy in football and life in New Orleans.

When a husband and wife killed 14 at an office Christmas party in San Bernardino, they also orphaned their 6-month-old daughter. This is her life — and the life of the aunt and uncle who want to adopt her — a year later.

A minute by minute account of the officers and first responders on the scene of the San Bernadino shooting and the subsequent firefight between police and and the Farooks.

How FPAQ, the Canadian group that controls 72 percent of the world’s supply of maple syrup, caused one of the greatest agricultural crimes in history.

The house at 114 Lake Avenue in Bristol, CT that kept calling Aaron Hernandez, a NFL star by 20, back to “a volatile underworld of guns, drugs, and violence.”

In January, the body of a 17-year-old athlete was found in his high school’s gym. The authorities ruled it an accident. His friends and family aren’t convinced.

How Michael Manos, a.k.a. the Glam Scammer, a career con man who relied on a combination of fake reality TV shows and fake fundraisers to bilk people in Atlanta, Dallas, and D.C., finally got caught.

A profile of Perry Fellwock, a.k.a. Winslow Peck, who exposed the NSA in an 1972 article for Ramparts magazine.

Eleven members of an Australian rugby club traveled to Bali. After a bomb went off at a nightclub, only five of them made it home.

How a 40-year-old IT consultant became nod, one of Silk Road’s highest volume heroin dealers, who turned informant and then fugitive.

Dorothy Stratten was the focus of the dreams and ambitions of three men. One killed her.

Jane Neubauer was just out of basic training when a secretive military unit recruited her for an undercover mission. She and the Air Force disagree about what happened next.

The author on how he was conned by Christian Gerhartsreiter, aka "Clark Rockefeller."

Excerpted from Blood Will Out.

On the many lives and careers of Owsley Stanley (1935-2011), chemist, sound design innovator, and outback jeweler, whose name appears in the OED as a synonym for “a particularly pure form of LSD.”

Schaeffer Cox, who is accused of plotting to kill State Troopers and a federal judge, shifted rapidly from a Ron Paul campaign worker and Tea Party activist to a hardcore militia leader. His conspiracy revealed, mainstream Alaskan politicians are scrambling to distance themselves from their ties to Cox.

A murder case in Los Angeles, cold since the late ’80s, heats up thanks to breakthroughs in forensic science and leads detectives to “one of the unlikeliest murder suspects in the city’s history.”

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.

On the brother of the Sultan of Brunei, Prince Jefri Bolkiah, who has “probably gone through more cash than any other human being on earth.”

David Headley helped plot the Mumbai terror attacks. Now his best friend is on trial for conspiring with him. The prosecution’s key witness: David Headley. The story of an informant trying to save his own life from the witness stand.

The story of an imam convicted on a suspect terrorism charge and the place he was sent: a jail in the Midwest where nearly all of the prisoners are Muslims.

Slowly, Bobo pulled off his shoes, his socks. He stood up, unbuttoned his shirt, dropped his pants, his shorts. He stood there naked. It was Sunday morning, a little before 7.

On William H. McMasters, who ten days after being hired as Charles Ponzi’s publicist wrote a scathing exposé in The Boston Post that revealed the biggest fraud, at the time, in American history.

An interview with Rudy Giuliani’s fresh-out-of-college head speechwriter, who wrote the eulogies for every policeman and fireman who died on 9/11, giving him “the dark distinction of probably writing more eulogies than anyone else alive.”

The Haqqani family, an organized crime militia dubbed the “Sopranos of the Afghanistan war,” will almost surely outlast the U.S. occupation and thus seize tremendous power after the U.S. exits.

As part of his obsessive search for evidence of UFOs, Gary McKinnon worked his way into thousands of government computers. The U.S. charged him with terrorism. Doctors diagnosed him with Asperger’s. And his lawyers started arguing a new version of the insanity defense.