Latest Posts
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Adam Walsh: The Murder of a Six-Year-Old That Changed How America Protects Its Children
A mother in a Hollywood, Florida, department store left her six-year-old son watching a video game demo for a few minutes in the summer of 1981. He was never seen alive again. The half-century of American child-protection law that followed… Continue reading
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Adnan Syed and the Murder of Hae Min Lee: When a Podcast Became Evidence
A seventeen-year-old high school senior was strangled in Baltimore in January 1999. The boy convicted of killing her spent twenty-three years in prison, became the subject of the most-downloaded true-crime podcast ever made, and walked out a free man in… Continue reading
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The Disappearance of Madeleine McCann: Eighteen Years and a Race Against a Prison Release
A British mother checked her daughter’s bed at a Portuguese resort on the night of May 3, 2007, and found it empty. Madeleine McCann was almost four years old. Eighteen years later, German prosecutors have publicly named the man they… Continue reading
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The Toolbox Killers: The 1979 Audio Tapes That Veteran FBI Agents Refused to Play Twice
Five teenage girls were murdered by two ex-convicts in the hills above Los Angeles in the summer and fall of 1979. The killers recorded one of the attacks on audio cassette. Forty-seven years later, those tapes are still locked in… Continue reading
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Israel Keyes: The Killer Who Buried His Kits in Advance
He flew to a city he had never lived in, rented a car, drove for hours, and dug up a buried kit of weapons and tools he had hidden years earlier. He chose his victims at random. He used cash.… Continue reading
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The Atlanta Child Murders: Thirty Black Children, One Conviction, and the Doubt That Never Left
Between 1979 and 1981, at least thirty Black children, teenagers, and young adults were murdered in Atlanta. The man eventually convicted in two of those killings was Black, was prosecuted using fiber evidence that had never before decided a homicide… Continue reading
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BTK: The Killer Who Couldn’t Stop Talking
For seventeen years, Dennis Rader murdered ten people in Wichita and slipped back into the life of a compliance officer, scout leader, and church council president. He stopped for thirteen years. Then in 2004, for reasons no one fully understands,… Continue reading
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The Zodiac Killer: The Cipher Murders That Outlived Their Author
Between 1968 and 1969, a man calling himself Zodiac murdered at least five people in Northern California. He sent the newspapers letters in code. One of his ciphers took fifty-one years to crack. He has never been identified. The case… Continue reading
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JonBenét Ramsey: Thirty Years of Wrong Theories in a Boulder Basement
For three decades, the strangling of a six-year-old girl in her family’s Boulder basement on Christmas night 1996 has been America’s most picked-over unsolved homicide. The investigation made every mistake an investigation can make. The DNA on her clothing belongs… Continue reading
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Lizzie Borden: The Forty-Whacks Murder That America Never Settled
On a hot August morning in 1892, the wealthiest banker in Fall River, Massachusetts, was hacked to death in his own parlor. His wife had been killed upstairs an hour earlier. The only adults known to be in the house… Continue reading
Enigma True Crime 