The strange life of Boston Corbett, the soldier who killed John Wilkes Booth in 1865.

The story of dog-scent lineup innovator Keith Pikett and the not-so-scientific science behind forensics.

A private investigator asks a magazine to write a puff piece on his business. The journalist finds a real story.

In 1991, Frank Sterling confessed to a crime he didn’t commit. His story highlights a common – and controversial – method of police interrogation.

The barbaric brutalization of Abner Louima and the tragic fate of a handful of flawed Brooklyn cops.

Sheikh Amer Hassan’s parties were notoriously debauched, evidence of a growing permissiveness in Karachi high society. His murder by a pair of young brothers surprised few.

Has Mexico become a failed state?

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.

Investigating the investigation of the 2001 anthrax attacks.

The story of Dean Corll and his accomplices, who killed over 20 teenage boys in the Heights neighborhood of Houston in the early 1970s, and the families searching for their missing sons.

In the 1880’s, a shabbily dressed man popped up in numerous America cities, calling upon local scientists, showing letters of introduction claiming he was a noted geologist or paleontologist, discussing both fields at a staggeringly accomplished level, and then making off with valuable books or cash loans.

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.”

An undercover report on Afghanistan’s drug-smuggling border police that is now heavily used for intelligence training.

Depending on who you ask, Mohammed Jawad was either 12 or 17 when he was detained. Nobody disputes that he spent seven years at Guantánamo before he was exonerated. The story of a boy who grew up as a detainee.

Why did a small-town girl have her family brutally murdered?

One part rapist, one part con-man; the story of the seemingly unconvictable Hy Doan.

Stuck between the Taliban and the U.S. Military, Afghanistan’s farmers risk their lives both when they grow, and when they refuse to grow, fields of poppies.

Prison rape is an epidemic; but the bulk of abuses are not by prisoners themselves, but by guards and other prison workers.

After nearly 15 years in a Peruvian prison, an American woman convicted of aiding a Marxist terrorist group finds parole in Lima full of contradictions.

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.

How the culture of academia helped Amy Bishop, a University of Alabama scientist who murdered colleagues during a faculty meeting, fall apart.

First-person accounts from the 2004 siege of a Russian school in Beslan by Chechen terrorists.

“One evening, my home phone rang. ‘You have a collect call from Bernard Madoff, an inmate at a federal prison,’ a recording announced. And there he was.”

The Gabrielle Giffords shooting, from the vantage point of three central figures: Daniel Hernandez helped save the congresswoman’s life; Patricia Maisch stopped the shooter from reloading; Bill Badger tackled him.

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.