Volume 14

On Thanksgiving Day 2012, two teenagers slipped into the basement of Byron Smith's secluded home in Little Falls, Minnesota. What the retired security engineer did next — with an audio recorder running — ignited a national debate over how far self-defense can go. Read the full story →

A car left running all night on a quiet Richmond street led police to Debbie Davis's apartment in September 1987 — the first in a series of brutal stranglings across Virginia that would push detectives toward a brand-new forensic tool called DNA. Read the full story →

Melissa Turner had reinvented herself — shedding ninety pounds and building a career as a cosplay cam girl — before an October 2019 call to 911 reporting her boyfriend Matt Tressler unresponsive in their backyard. The security cameras told a different story than she did. Read the full story →

Twenty-one-year-old British backpacker Grace Millane was partway through her round-the-world gap year when she matched with a man named Jesse on Tinder in Auckland. On December 1, 2018, she agreed to meet him for drinks — and was never seen again. Read the full story →

Jan Cornell rushed home before her early-morning shift in May 1990 to find her Cape Coral townhouse silent — her eleven-year-old daughter Robin and roommate Lisa Story inside. The DNA left behind would wait twenty-six years for a match. Read the full story →

Struggling Orange County actor Daniel Wozniak needed money for his wedding and honeymoon. His friend and neighbor Sam Herr, an Army veteran, had $62,000 in combat-pay savings — and Wozniak had written himself a script no one saw coming. Read the full story →

Pam Hupp was the last person to see her friend Betsy Faria alive — and the newly named beneficiary of her life insurance. When Betsy's husband Russ was convicted of her murder, the story seemed over. It was only beginning. Read the full story →

Twelve-year-old Tina Marie Harmon stopped for a fudgesicle in Creston, Ohio, and never caught up with her friends. Two men were charged in her death — while matching orange carpet fibers kept turning up wherever more young girls were found. Read the full story →

Model and former Raiderette Linda Sobek changed her answering machine on November 16, 1995, saying she would be on location all day for a photo shoot. She never returned to hear her messages — and attention turned to photographer Charles Rathbun. Read the full story →

In the months before Mother's Day 2017, Joshua Webb of Colton, Oregon, told friends that a black box in his garage was recording him and that voices in his head were growing louder. What he carried into an Estacada grocery store that day defied belief. Read the full story →

Five-year-old Nathan O'Brien begged to sleep over at his grandparents' Calgary home the night of their estate sale in June 2014. When his mother returned the next morning, Nathan, Alvin, and Kathy Liknes were gone — and the house told a grim story. Read the full story →

Bill McGuire vanished after a heated argument with his wife Melanie, a New Jersey fertility-clinic nurse, in April 2004. Then three suitcases surfaced in the Chesapeake Bay — each holding part of a grim answer. Read the full story →

By seventeen, Jeffrey Franklin had transformed from a happy Huntsville honor student into a withdrawn stranger locked behind his bedroom door. In March 1998, his parents' tidy brick home on Camelot Drive became the scene of one of Alabama's most horrifying family crimes. Read the full story →