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Every case, told in full.

The Poet

For four years a stalker called the Poet terrorized Wichita secretary Ruth Finley with rhyming letters, cut phone lines and a stabbing, while police watched her house and never saw an intruder. Then one letter described the police chief’s wife.

The Vanishing Act

In July 1970 the Crawford family car was found at the bottom of Loch Ard Gorge with a mother and her three children inside, staged to look like a murder-suicide. Their father, Elmer Crawford, was seen at home that day and never again.

One of Their Own

Nurse Sherri Rasmussen was beaten, bitten and shot in her Van Nuys condo three months after her wedding. Police called it a burglary gone wrong. Twenty-three years later, the saliva in the bite mark led to one of their own detectives.

The Monster of the Andes

In 1980 a crowd in an Ecuadorian market town held a stranger who was leading a young girl away. Pedro Alonso López went on to show police the graves of 53 girls, served 14 years, and walked out of a Colombian hospital in 1998. No one knows where he is.

Cinnamon

When Linda Brown was shot in her sleep in 1985, her 14-year-old stepdaughter Cinnamon was found in the backyard doghouse with an apology note and took the blame. It was more than two years before she told investigators who had planned it.

Amerithrax

A week after 9/11, letters filled with anthrax spores began arriving at newsrooms and Senate offices, and five people died. The FBI spent years on a man it never charged before the science pointed to a flask in an Army lab at Fort Detrick.

The Unicorn

Ira Einhorn was a celebrated Philadelphia guru who spoke at the city’s first Earth Day. When his former girlfriend Holly Maddux disappeared in 1977, he said she had gone traveling. Eighteen months later, detectives opened a trunk in his closet.

Her Father’s Daughter

Kathleen Folbigg’s four children died in infancy over ten years in New South Wales, and her diaries were read to a jury as confessions. She spent 20 years in prison before geneticists found a rare gene variant the trial had never considered.

It Couldn’t Be Helped

A week after his wife asked for a divorce, former firefighter William Gravlin took a taxi back to the family home in Troy, Michigan. By morning his wife and six children were dead, each covered with a blanket and a note of apology.

Jannah Bride

Online, a 21-year-old pizza delivery driver from Dearborn Heights told the young woman he hoped to marry that he planned to shoot up a Detroit church. She was not who she said she was. She worked for the FBI.

The Dollmaker

Anatoly Moskvin was Nizhny Novgorod’s leading expert on its cemeteries. When police finally traced years of desecrated children’s graves to his family’s flat in 2011, they found 26 “dolls” among his books.

The Bishop of North Marshall Street

Gary Heidnik ran his own church and a half-million-dollar stock account from a run-down house in North Philadelphia. In the basement he kept six women chained in a pit he had dug. One of them talked her way out.

No Fire, No Food

In March 1994, North Star Expeditions staff pulled sixteen-year-old Aaron Bacon from his Phoenix bed and drove him to Utah's remote Escalante canyon country, where the wilderness program's rules said no food sharing — and no fire until you earned it.

The Grieving Widow

Jamie Faith was walking the dog with his wife Jennifer on their quiet Dallas street when a masked gunman shot him seven times, then turned on her with duct tape. Doorbell cameras up and down South Waverly Drive caught everything.

The Engagement Ring

Michelina Lewandowska followed her fiancé Marcin Kasprzak from Poland to Huddersfield, England, and kept wearing his ring long after the engagement died. One May morning in 2011, he smiled and said he had something to show her.

A Fatal Lie

On Anzac Day 1999, Keith Hibbins and his partner took an evening stroll through Melbourne's Fitzroy Gardens — just as a crying woman on the park's edge told six young men from the football a story that wasn't true.

The Gum Ruse

Susan Vesey celebrated her twenty-first birthday in Everett, Washington, in July 1980. By morning she was dead on her bedroom floor, her infant son unharmed beside her — and the case would stay cold for decades.

The Skull

Dr. David Birkett, a respected Middlesbrough dermatologist who collected ancient skulls, got a handwritten note about a parcel from a courier company called Demon Despatch. The company didn't exist, and the phone number led to a man waiting beside a booth.