Volume 20

When police knocked on the door of 7 Pump Hill in Great Baddow, Essex, for a routine welfare check, Virginia McCullough had been waiting four years, three months, and twenty-eight days for that moment — and for what lay hidden behind the walls. Read the full story →

In January 1984, residents of Aurora, Colorado, began waking to a nightmare: an intruder standing over their beds with a hammer. The attacks were only the beginning of a spree that would take decades to unravel. Read the full story →

Sarah Hallow's frantic 911 call said her stepdaughter had drowned in the bathtub — but when Elk River officers reached eight-year-old Autumn Hallow, her skin was dry, her body frail, and rigor mortis had already set in. Read the full story →

Seventeen-year-old Taylor Behl arrived at Virginia Commonwealth University brimming with excitement for college life. She had no idea that Ben Fawley — a 38-year-old 'goth' photographer whose apartment was a shrine to death — was watching her. Read the full story →

Nurse Janice Trahan fell for Dr. Richard Schmidt, a married Lafayette gastroenterologist who promised to leave his wife. What happened when she finally tried to end the affair would become one of the strangest medical cases in Louisiana history. Read the full story →

On a July night in 1974, a charming stranger lingered at the bar of Fagiani's Cocktail Lounge in Napa as Anita Andrews closed up alone. It would take decades to learn who the smooth talker really was. Read the full story →

Sixteen-year-old Preston Lord was walking away from a Halloween party in Queen Creek, Arizona, when a mob of teenagers descended. The beating exposed months of organized violence festering beneath Gilbert's wealthy suburban surface. Read the full story →

Derek Medina was a regular at the Miami Denny's where single mother Jennifer Alfonso worked the graveyard shift — generous with tips, obsessed with his phone, and far more dangerous than his self-help books suggested. Read the full story →

In July 1979, Rose Hlavka came home to a silent Portland apartment and found her twenty-year-old sister Anna Marie strangled with a clock radio cord — a crime so cold it would wait decades for an answer. Read the full story →

A grandfather's trembling 911 call led Spotsylvania County deputies to four black garbage bags scattered in the Virginia woods — and into the drug world of Bronwyn Meeks, Dominic Samuels, and a meal that would be someone's last. Read the full story →

It began on Baseline Road in Phoenix in August 2005, when a calm stranger with a silver handgun ambushed three children walking home from church — the first attack in one of Arizona's most terrifying crime sprees. Read the full story →

Sixteen-year-old Becky Watts was home alone in Bristol's Crown Hill neighborhood on an ordinary Thursday in February 2015. By evening she had vanished — and the search would lead somewhere her family never imagined. Read the full story →