Tag: Crime

An excerpt from The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit — Michael Finkel’s book on Christopher Knight, the hermit who survived by committing 1,000 break-ins over nearly three decades.

Want to become an international gold smuggler? Harold Vilches started his life of crime with a Google search for gold dealers in Peru and YouTube videos on how to make your own gold ingots.

For her story in Wired, Elizabeth Weil fell down a rabbit hole of conspiracy, arson, faked kidnapping, bankruptcy, and lawsuits that swirls around the 752-pound Bahia Emerald.

It took Leah Carroll years to determine that her mother was murdered by an organized crime syndicate as a suspected drug informant.

TV producer Nicole Lucas Haimes details her fascination with one North Carolina man whose attempt to run an honest court got him killed.

A filmmaker travels the U.S. and Canada to speak with Indigenous women about the constant threats to their safety and their lives.

Mitigation specialist Jennifer Wynn investigates the upbringings of defendants on trial — often for their lives — to humanize clients in a bid to convince at least one juror to bypass the death penalty for a life in prison without parole.

Susan Read’s short fiction centers on a Kafka-esque interrogation in the back room of a coffee shop — you know, the one where they wear the green aprons — that’s a stinging indictment of the byzantine policies, procedures, and psychology of being a low wage employee.

This week, read stories by Mark MacKinnon, Rachel Cusk, Carmen Maria Machado, Suketu Mehta, and an excerpt from Bill Hayes.

At The New York Review of Books, James Fenton reports from the night shift in Manila, giving us a glimpse into the war on drugs in the Philippines, from “buy-bust” undercover operations to EJKs (extrajudicial killings).

Fisheries observer Keith Davis monitored fishing vessels on international waters, devoting his life to protecting the seas — until he went missing. At Hakai Magazine, Sarah Tory reports on his disappearance.

At The New Yorker, Rachel Aviv profiles Albert Woodfox, a man originally sentenced to 50 years in prison for robbery. A member of the Black Panthers and the Angola 3, Woodfox spent over four decades in solitary confinement, despite a stunning lack of evidence against him in a prison murder.

When you work the night shift for too long, the murders start to link up with one another, blending cause and effect in a centrifugal force that gnaws away at the city. The veteran reporters start to see this; the man gunned down one night is related to an ongoing gang dispute, which originates in […]

I grew up idolizing my brother. Then he killed a man.

After 25 years of fighting a losing war on drugs and with a heroin epidemic raging in his home state of Massachusetts, Gloucester Police Chief Leonard Campanello decided to take matters into his own hands. He opened his police station’s doors to any addict seeking help, promising to get them into treatment. Writing for Boston Magazine, Chris Sweeney […]

In a recent piece for Mother Jones, Molly Redden looked at why it can be particularly hard for wrongfully convicted women to be exonerated (Women make up about 11 percent of the people convicted of violent crimes, but just 6 percent of those exonerated of violent crimes). Despite their good intentions, most innocence projects fail to bring […]

From reporter Jason Cherkis and the Huffington Post’s new Highline magazine comes a devastating story about ’70s teen rock band the Runaways. Bassist Jackie Fuchs reveals that early in the band’s history, she was drugged and raped by their producer Kim Fowley in front of several bandmates, including Joan Jett. She stayed silent for decades. […]

To begin to get a grasp on the economic toll, Mother Jones turned to Ted Miller at the Pacific Institute for Research and Evaluation, an independent nonprofit that studies public health, education, and safety issues. Miller has been one of the few researchers to delve deeply into guns, going back to the late 1980s when he began analyzing societal […]

The set-up was like something out of a movie—Four California Highway Patrol officers with little to no undercover experience decide to pose as Vegas players to take down motorcycle thieves in LA. Southern California’s street bike culture had made motorcycle theft a major problem in recent years, and so the officers would need to infiltrate the scene in order to pull […]

The Jinx—a six-part documentary miniseries about alleged murderer and real estate scion Robert Durst—aired its final episode this past Sunday, a day after Durst’s real life arrest for the murder of his close friend Susan Berman. Berman was killed in 2000. In 2002, Ned Zeman profiled Durst (and his alleged crimes) for Vanity Fair. The excerpt below offers […]

A short piece published in BBC Magazine explored the science of whether murderers are born or made. A British neurocriminologist named Adrian Raine has made a career out of studying the brains of violent criminals. Raine was the first person to conduct a brain imaging study on murderers, and has since scanned the brains of numerous homicidal individuals, looking for similarities. […]

The charade involved theater-major panache. Cashers dressed up in wigs, dyed their hair, and donned makeup to pull off the scam. “I even played a black lady and a Chinese lady,” New bragged to cops in her interrogation. “The wigs make it.”

In a piece for the Financial Times John Paul Rathbone wrote about the murder of Glauco Villas Boas, one of Brazil’s best-known cartoonists. Glauco was a leader of the Céu de Maria church, one of the many churches in Brazil that treat hallucinogenic ayahuasca tea as a sacrament. The young man charged with murdering Glauco had partaken in the religious rituals […]

There are lots of stories these days (as there should be) about sex trafficking. The bulk of these stories focus on victims: mostly women, mostly poor, who are taken away from families and familiarities and sold for sex. In the third story in his series about human trafficking, Travis Loose turned to the law enforcement […]

Recently, Roy Wenzl profiled a woman named Kerri Rawson for The Wichita Eagle. Rawson’s life was upended a decade ago, when an FBI agent knocked on her door and informed her that the man she’d always known as a loving father was in fact the BTK serial killer. Wenzl’s piece is a compelling and meticulous portrait of a […]

When three students at the University of North Caroline were shot and killed earlier this month, The Daily Tar Heel, UNC’s student newspaper, covered and covered and covered the story.

Readers and writers love a good true-crime story. There’s plenty of intrigue and suspense and enough intimate details to give the audience a good shiver. Stories about crime victims, however, are more difficult to report and write. Readers don’t want to pity the victim of a crime as much as cheer her on. The reporter […]

You pull up the news story and look at the bruised and bloody eye of the anonymous victim. You wonder if you know him. You feel a little guilty about just how glad you are that it isn’t you. You’re disheartened that it happened so close to you. You’re disheartened that it can happen anywhere. […]

Below, our favorite stories of the week. Kindle users, you can also get them as a Readlist. Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. * * *

College newspapers serve as incubators for the real deal, at least until your local news becomes a national story. When a big story happens, like last week’s shooting of UC Santa Barbara students, the college newspapers often have the best coverage. They know the place and the players. Trusted by and familiar to sources, they […]