Tag: murder

If reporting becomes excessive, it can do more harm than good.

The ex-convict, who became a history scholar behind bars, prepares to start classes at NYU instead.

In an excerpt from her memoir, Carolyn Murnick tries to piece together the stabbing murder of her childhood friend.

James Lasdun chronicles a murder trial in which his own dentist is the defendant.

Michael Thevis built a lucrative pornography empire in the 1970s only to spend the rest of his life in prison.

A 1992 murder of a young boy unravels a journalist’s dark family secrets.

In 1985, a girl was abducted and left to die in Winnipeg’s severe cold. While her parents, Cliff and Wilma Derksen, did not yet know the killer’s identity, they made a decision to forgive.

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

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).

In the Oxford American, John O’Connor searches the Everglades for the facts within the folklore of sugar cane farmer and outlaw E.J. “Bloody” Watson.

What’s one more crime in the murder capital of the world?

After three decades, author Linda Spaldin tries to help exonerate a woman on whose trial she had been a juror.

In the April 2008 issue of Los Angeles magazine reporter Mark Arax wrote about Los Angeles’ beloved Zankou Chicken chain, and how one owner tore the founding family apart by murdering two of its members and killing himself. The story is a compelling mix of family dynamics, fast food and the complex American dream. It was […]

Many people say the 1960s ended at Altamont, when the Hell’s Angels fatally stabbed an eighteen year-old black man named Meredith Hunter during a huge, Woodstock-like music festival. The Rolling Stones were playing “Under My Thumb” during the murder, just feet away. In Slate, Jack Hamilton writes about the album the Rolling Stones recorded after […]

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. […]

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 […]

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 […]

In 1998 a district attorney sent a teenager to life in prison for his role in a murder of a 16-year-old girl. In Texas Monthly, Pamela Colloff revisits the case and looks at why the DA is questioning the life sentence years later: The DA did not pull any punches once The State of Texas […]

Kiera Feldman is a reporter for The Nation Institute’s Investigative Fund. She wrote “Grace in Broken Arrow” for This Land Press, which was featured on Longreads in May. I’m of the belief that a good murder story should put you out of commission for a while. There is a storyworld to journey into, and it is a doozy. […]

The first in a two-part series deconstructing the case against Michael Morton, who was convicted in 1987 of killing his wife but has maintained his innocence: Michael was breathing hard. ‘Is my son okay?’ he asked. ‘He’s fine,’ Boutwell said. ‘He’s at the neighbors’.’ ‘How about my wife?’ The sheriff was matter-of-fact. ‘She’s dead,’ he […]

More than 40 years after the “Fatal Vision” murders, Errol Morris’s new book re-investigates a case once covered by the likes of Janet Malcolm and Joe McGinniss: In February 1970, at Fort Bragg in Fayetteville, North Carolina, a pregnant woman named Colette MacDonald and her two children, Kimberley, 5, and Kristen, 2, were slaughtered in […]

A murder of a young newlywed went unsolved for 23 years, until a cold case homicide unit picked up the file and found a missing clue. Sherri’s file perplexed Francis. The crime report stated that a swab had been taken from the bite mark on Sherri’s arm, but it was not listed in evidence and […]

A strange real-life murder inspires a new film starring Jack Black and Shirley MacLaine. How does the victim’s real family feel about being the subject of a black comedy? I was living in Los Angeles when Aunt Marge was murdered in 1996 and hadn’t been to Carthage, where I was born, in quite a few […]

Tim Hennis was an Army sergeant serving at Fort Bragg in 1985 when he was charged with the murder of a woman and her two young daughters. His case has gone to trial three separate times, and the military’s intervention has raised questions about what constitutes double jeopardy: That Saturday, Hennis’s neighbors recalled, he had […]