Volume 19

Seven-year-old Athena Strand, who dreamed of being a Viking princess in pink armor, hopped off the school bus near her home in Paradise, Texas, in November 2022. By nightfall she was missing — and the search led to a delivery driver named Tanner Horner. Read the full story →

At 2:09 a.m. in Columbia, South Carolina's Five Points district, college senior Samantha Josephson opened her Uber app and stepped toward a waiting car. It looked like her ride. The man behind the wheel, Nathaniel Rowland, was not. Read the full story →

Michelle Busha fled her strict Bay City, Texas home and called her family from the road — until the calls stopped in the spring of 1980. That May, a young woman found murdered near Blue Earth, Minnesota, was buried without a name, a Jane Doe for decades. Read the full story →

After a Saturday night dinner date in January 2007, Channon Christian and Christopher Newsom lingered in a Knoxville apartment parking lot, unaware of the shadows moving between the cars. The carjacking that followed became one of Tennessee's most horrific crimes. Read the full story →

Best friends Jasmin and Yvonne, both sixteen, left a German discotheque at 3:00 a.m. in October 1994 and accepted a ride from a friendly middle-aged couple — a motherly woman and her quiet husband. Neither girl made it home to Limburg. Read the full story →

Hunters walking a frozen Indiana soybean field in January 1992 thought they had found a burned mannequin. It was twelve-year-old Shanda Sharer — and those responsible were four teenage girls, drawn together by jealousy over a single classmate. Read the full story →

In an Idaho Falls group home for men rebuilding their lives, German-born Hans Woerrlein — 'extremely smart, super sweet' — was paired with a quiet new roommate named Douglass Taylor. Their late-night talks about religion and secret societies took a dark turn in March 2020. Read the full story →

For years, Michele Kalina kept one closet in the family's Reading, Pennsylvania apartment locked, forbidding her daughter ever to look inside. In July 2010, nineteen-year-old Elizabeth finally opened it — and called 911 about what she found in a cooler. Read the full story →

Nineteen-year-old Brianna Denison fell asleep on a friend's couch near the University of Nevada, Reno campus in January 2008, a teddy bear tucked under her head. By morning she was gone — and police realized a predator had been stalking the university district for months. Read the full story →

Exploring the woods behind his family's eighteen-acre Indiana estate in 1994, thirteen-year-old Erich Baumeister carried a human skull back to the house. His father Herb had an explanation — one that would hold for two more years. Read the full story →

Late on a Sunday night in May 2002, a familiar face in uniform knocked at the locked door of a Mesa, Arizona Jack in the Box, claiming he had been called in to work. Assistant manager Fausto Jimenez recognized recently fired coworker Christopher Hargrave — and turned the lock. Read the full story →

Seventeen-year-old Mary Quigley never made it home from a back-to-school keg party in Santa Clara, California, in September 1977. For decades the question of who followed her into the night went unanswered — until DNA pointed to a name: Richard Archibeque. Read the full story →