Volume 11

Eight-year-old Sandra Cantu skipped across the street outside her Tracy, California mobile home park on March 27, 2009, and was never seen again. At a community vigil, a tearful Sunday school teacher named Melissa Huckaby pressed a note into the hands of police. Read the full story →

By the time British banker Rurik Jutting reached Hong Kong — a vice president who cried at his desk and snorted cocaine through the workday — the boy raised to believe he was a 'great one' was unraveling. Room 3109 was waiting. Read the full story →

Interior designer Jade Janks had cared for her ailing stepfather, Tom Merriman, through his decline in Solana Beach, California. Then, on his computer, she discovered more than a hundred intimate photos of herself — meticulously organized, some dating back to when she was sixteen. Read the full story →

Fourteen-year-old Chris Steiner vanished from his Baraboo, Wisconsin home on the night of July 4, 1994, leaving a window screen cut from the outside and muddy footprints on the carpet. A year later, thirteen-year-old Thad Phillips woke to find himself being carried into the dark. Read the full story →

A maid opening room 205 of a Santa Fe motel in November 1983 found a twenty-two-year-old woman strangled with a red handkerchief, her hands bound with a pillowcase. When secretary Teri Mulvaney was murdered months later, her family already had a name: David Bruce Morton. Read the full story →

Two days after Christmas 1962, six-year-old Mona Rae Minyard walked to Portland's Three Brothers Market with a five-dollar bill and her mother's short grocery list. She never came home — and suspicion settled on Joseph Walton Holmes, the man who lived just across the field. Read the full story →

The Kinney family said they discovered their best friend Brad McGarry shot dead in his basement while dropping off a weed eater in Bel-Air, Ohio. The house was ransacked, yet nothing was missing — and David Kinney's tearful account began to unravel. Read the full story →

Elliot Rodger grew up amid Hollywood privilege — a filmmaker father, lavish holidays abroad — nursing resentments that began with his parents' divorce and never stopped growing. The shy boy who couldn't make friends would come to call himself something far grander. Read the full story →

Freshman cheerleader Emma Walker and senior football star Riley Gaul were Central High School's picture-perfect couple in Knoxville, Tennessee — he the polite boy next door, she a girl dreaming of nursing newborns. Her parents' fondness for Riley wouldn't survive what came next. Read the full story →

Born to a bootlegger's family in small-town Missouri, Charles Ray Hatcher grew from a bullied, brutalized boy into a cold and remorseless predator. His life became a revolving door through America's prisons — and the danger returned each time the door swung open. Read the full story →

Karen and Kraig Kahler had the marriage other couples tried to emulate. Then, the Saturday after Thanksgiving, a neighbor in Burlingame, Kansas, watched a man park a red SUV outside great-grandmother Dorothy Wight's farmhouse and stomp toward the porch carrying something large. Read the full story →

Nasra al-Enezi's mental illness went undiagnosed her whole life in Kuwait, where stigma kept her suffering in silence as she raised two special-needs sons. When her husband Zayed decided to take a second wife, the wedding celebration ended in catastrophe. Read the full story →