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

American demand for drugs gave birth to the cartel war that is paralyzing Mexico, but American guns purchased legally across the Southwest and smuggled over the border have made it staggeringly lethal.

An investigation of the American sex trafficking industry.

A glimpse into the overcrowded California State Prison, Los Angeles County.

In the 1970s, Kelbessa Negewo was a midlevel administrator in Ethiopia’s brutal Red Terror regime. In the 1990s, he was a bellhop in an Atlanta hotel. Then someone he had tortured back home recognized him.

A woman is killed. Her husband is accused. A famous/infamous medical examiner investigates.

What’s going on here isn’t just science. It’s something deeper, something stranger, something at the same time both terrifying and fascinating.

An annotated transcript:

MR. SEALE: [The marshals are carrying him through the door to the lockup.] I still want an immediate trial. You can’t call it a mistrial. I’m put in jail for four years for nothing? I want my coat.

Joyce Hatto, unknown to even the most ardent classical music collectors until late in her life, released a string of incredible performances of great works, distributed by her husband’s mail-order CD business. But how was it possible for her to record difficult works at such a dizzying rate? And if wasn’t her playing, who was it?

On the ground in Nigeria with the nation’s notorious scam artists, who share a remarkable number of qualities with America’s top entrepreneurs.

John Demjanjuk has had a huge year. Twenty years after being sentenced to die, he finally climbed to the pinnacle of the Wiesenthal Center's list of Nazi war criminals this April, shortly after the Germans filed the arrest warrant that allowed the OSI to put him on the jet to Munich.

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

Doc moves quickly. He takes off his windbreaker, tosses his leather bag on the counter and unzips it. He pulls out a slate-blue polyester vest, V-necked, with six buttons. He raises his arms and jumps into it and then says, with an air of deep satisfaction, "Aah." Doc is proud of his bulletproof vest.

The questionable close relationship between a mobster/informant and an F.B.I. agent during a bloody Colombo crime family battle.

When he was 16, Mark Clements talked his way into four life sentences. Twenty-eight years later, he talked his way out.

The anatomy of a bungled, massively expensive undercover sting conducted by the Seattle Police Department.

A bank robber tells the story of a successful heist.

In June, 1942, a German submarine dropped four young Nazi agents off on a Florida beach. Their mission was to blow up bridges, factories, and Jewish-owned department stores. Among them was Herbert Haupt, the 22-year-old son of a German-American family in Chicago.

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

Bernard Peters and his son, Scott, robbed and shot a Salvation Army worker in 1996. Since then, they’ve been sharing a cell at Elmira Correctional Facility.

All told, the military acknowledged this summer, 14 soldiers from the base have been charged or convicted in at least 11 slayings since 2005 — the largest killing spree involving soldiers at a single U.S. military installation in modern history.

How slot machines snuck into the mall, along with money laundering, bribery, shootouts, and billions in profits.

Inside Obama’s most glaring reversal.

For 18 months, Coatesville, Penn., was besieged with an improbable number of arsons.  But who started the fires – and why?