Tag: True Crime

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.

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

To catch a serial killer.

Greed, grift, and murder in the black market for gold.

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

“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.” 

“Somewhere along the way it became very clear to me that I was writing the book she never would.”

True crime has a reputation for being trashy, but a recent renaissance has it tipping into advocacy.

While the Sally Horner case gave ‘Lolita’ its main character, the Edward Grammer case gave the book an almost perfect murder.

Someone poisoned eighteen of Buck Birdsong’s calves in the past four years. But who? And why?

She keeps watch over one of the largest databases of missing persons in the country. For Meaghan Good, the disappeared are still out here, you just have to know where to look.

Christopher Goffard’s seven-part series on a dangerous Orange County con man is an astonishing tale of love and violence.

It was the thirtieth fire in less than two months. Who was trying to burn down Accomack County?

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

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

In these six stories, a drunk driver confesses via viral video, an ex-Catholic returns to confession, a high-school cheater reveals her indiscretions, and more.

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 […]

“Though Alice said that her sister had never written the book, for years Harper told Tom Radney that it was near completion. In 1997, Radney told a newspaper reporter, “I still talk to Nelle twice a year, and every time we talk, she says she’s still working on it.” Madolyn Radney told me that while […]

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 […]

Here are three riveting, tragic stories of true crime.

A Dallas murder suspect is also a paranoid schizophrenic, and his changing mental state raises questions about whether he can stand trial: With medication he becomes someone else entirely, capable even of calm rationality. He would have to be induced into a state of synthetic sanity before he could stand trial for a crime that […]