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.

“…these emails paint a portrait of a platform whose creators are fundamentally unable to track what goes on within it, and point to easily exploitable loopholes that scammers have steamed their way through by the truckload.”

LSS: Because Trump wants to be pals with Saudi crown prince Mohammad Bin Salman.

‘“A bagel,” the newspaper of record explained in 1960, “is an unsweetened doughnut with rigor mortis.”’

“At least 442 service members across almost every branch of the armed forces had been conned—by prisoners—out of a total of more than half a million dollars.”

We asked writers and editors to choose some of their favorite stories of the year. Here is the best in crime reporting.

Cody Dalton Eyre, a 20-year-old Alaskan Native, was having a mental health crisis on Christmas Eve, 2017 when his mother called 911 for help. So why did police officers end up shooting and killing him?

Diligent reporters revisit the histories of two conmen, and how their actions have risked others’ lives in the balance.

Trying to keep a mouthy Russian oligarch safe from Vladimir Putin is harder than it looks. Especially when the oligarch has a penchant for publicly poking the bear.

“When you lay down to go to sleep, you better be prayed up, because there’s no guarantee you’re waking up.”