Rachel Monroe

“Put simply, the world of violent crime is masculine, at least statistically. But the consumers of crime stories are decidedly female. Women make up the majority of the readers of true-crime books and the listeners of true-crime podcasts. Women are not just passively consuming these stories; they are also finding ways to participate in them.”

What happens when a small tourist hub is suddenly made strange by violence?

“There’s a pervasive idea that crime doesn’t happen in our national parks, that these bucolic monuments to nature inspire visitors to be more noble, law-abiding versions of themselves. But parks are filled with people, and people commit crimes.” Enter the little-known Investigative Services Branch (ISB).

After two siblings got kidnapped on the Navajo reservation, jurisdictional issues and a structural breakdown of the Amber Alert system slowed the search. Trying to protect Indigenous children on tribal lands requires increased police training and federal funding, but funding often means compromising some tribal sovereignity.

Con man Derek Alldred met women on a dating site and swindled them out of more than a million dollars. The women found that there was little law enforcement could do to help them, so they banded together to take him down.

Manson bloggers, the world of murder fandom, and the philosophy of being — can you ever escape who you are, or were?

A new breed of online real estate speculator is capitalizing on abandoned properties and people who can’t pay their mortgages, and it’s bad for you and the country.

Tulum was once a sleepy Mexican town where Mayan ruins overlooked white-sand beaches. But in the last decade, developers, hippies, and the social media set took advantaged of affordable real estate to transform Tulum into a destination for lifestyle tourists. But last summer, the price for that affordable real estate became clear as the government began to evict longtime residents and business owners..

How a movement toward simple, nomadic life in Volkswagen vans has become commercialized sponsor-fodder in which “vanlifers” trade social media currency for subsidized van repairs and discounts. Is this a new partially barter-style economy or just an outdoors, office-free variation of work pressure to tend ravenous social media accounts? Is it really freedom or just another way to sell your soul, one social media post at a time?

Rachel Monroe investigates a T-shirt quilt empire that went under and the laypeople-turned-detectives who dedicated themselves to recovering their mementos lost in the chaos.