A kidnapping deemed a hoax, the newbie detective who cracked the case, and the Harvard-trained lawyer whose mental unraveling set the whole story in motion.

Stories about wrongful convictions open our eyes to systemic injustices in the U.S. court system. Maurice Chammah, a staff writer at The Marshall Project, compiles his recommended longreads within the genre.

The world is full of make-believe. Some of it is sweet, some of it is sick. It persists because we have found no other antidote for pain.

They set out to solve a cold case. The more they dug, the more terrifying the truth became.

In Scott Kimball, the FBI thought it had found a high-value informant who could help solve big cases. What it got instead was lies, betrayal, and murder.

The inside story of author Blake Bailey’s grooming of middle-school girls.

“Then, after he was done seeing patients for the day, he’d begin his other work. The work no one could find out about. The work that would destroy his life, along with hundreds of others.”

To catch a serial killer.

How an HIV specialist in Germany is using media law to erase reporting of sexual abuse allegations against him.

Our top picks in Crime Reporting for 2020.

“Do you know what it means to have a wound that never heals?”

“She continued to write me, though she presumably risked retribution: more time in solitary, more nutraloaf, additional restrictions.”

Discover a website that solves crimes without its members ever leaving home.

The mental and physical toll of life in a white supremacist state is unavoidable for BIPOC, even if it manifests differently for different people.

In Victorian London, a gang of U.S. hustlers attempts a ten-million-dollar heist on the safest bank in the world. Can the detective who inspired Sherlock Holmes catch them?

“If we do not know what our government is doing, we cannot hold it accountable. If we do know, our enemies know too. That can be dangerous.”

“That’s when her son came upstairs and told her, a little uncertainly, that he seemed to have stopped the worst malware attack the world had ever seen.”

A headline-grabbing murder-for-hire plot helped expose the dark side of exotic animal ownership in the U.S. Is there now enough momentum to reform the industry?

“Weiss…a subtle, under-the-radar bureaucrat who fought his country’s adversaries with red tape and a headful of contrarian ideas. I understood him as a man whose entire life was secrets. “

By bringing new dimensions to an unjust process, a well-told story has the power to impact some of our most flawed systems.

New York midwife Elizabeth Catlin faces 95 individual felony counts at her upcoming trial. For what? For doing her job. Politics and patriarchy make the work of many credentialed, experienced midwives illegal — to the detriment of women and underserved communities.

How youth in Rochester, New York, are working to save their neighborhood — and themselves — by forging pathways away from violent street crime.

What’s in the hold, captain? Oh nothing, just tonnes upon tonnes of illegal Chilean bass — nothing to see here!

Can Fitbit data help to convict the alleged perpetrator of a brutal murder?

“Even with a preponderance of evidence and testimonies, every man on trial got away with murder. This fact was not front-page news but tucked beneath odd stories called ‘Flashes of Life.'”

He faked an insanity defense, got out, and immediately committed another crime, and this time people are dead. He’s going to plead insanity again.

“We were interested in dead girls, but so interested in them that we were trying to do the opposite of what had been done before.” 

Seven years ago, a young woman from Tache, British Columbia, went out for the evening and never came back. Her family won’t stop looking for her, and they deserve answers.

The “United States and its allies exploited other nations’ gullibility for years, taking their money and stealing their secrets.”

Archie Moretti believed he could steal and get away with it. It’d just take a little nepotism.