Volume 21

A fishing family on a remote South Australian beach heard the screaming first — a bloodied Brazilian backpacker named Beatriz bursting from the Salt Creek scrubland, begging them to save her friend Lena from the man still out there. Read the full story →

Twelve-year-old Valerie Smelser vanished from a Virginia gas station restroom on a freezing January night in 1995. The story told by Norman Hoverter, the man traveling with her mother, would soon begin to unravel. Read the full story →

Leigh Ann Sabine always joked that the wrapped bundle on her patio was a medical skeleton — and asked her neighbors to use it as a prank after she died. When they cut through forty-one layers of plastic, the joke ended. Read the full story →

Motivational speaker Jeffrey Locker was found bound behind the wheel of his station wagon in East Harlem, stabbed seven times. What led the Long Island family man to that street corner was stranger than any robbery. Read the full story →

A beeping smoke detector in a vacant Wichita apartment led a maintenance man to a scene that broke veteran detectives — and reopened the trail of a predator who had stalked the highways along I-70. Read the full story →

Mushroom foragers in a Bavarian forest near Regensburg found bones fused with hardened quicklime — remains someone had tried to chemically erase. Christian F. believed he had committed the perfect murder. Read the full story →

On a dark stretch of Ortega Highway in 1999, a security guard found Dr. Kenneth Stahl's car idling with its window blown out and two bodies inside — the night of what was supposed to be a birthday dinner. Read the full story →

When police forced entry into Gail Smith's Berryville, Virginia, home after four days of silence, her prized garden was rotting on the vine — and the answers lay with the two people closest to her. Read the full story →

Dr. Anthony Pignataro cruised Buffalo in a red Lamborghini selling cut-rate cosmetic surgery. In his makeshift basement operating room, paramedics found patient Sarah Smith dying — and the doctor holding a bent coat hanger. Read the full story →

A blood-soaked sleeping bag dumped beside an Oregon highway held the belongings of twenty-year-old Carrie Love, a Seattle woman who had just taken a job with trucker Jesse Pratt — and never made it to her destination. Read the full story →

When four-year-old Genny Rojas was found burned and lifeless in her aunt and uncle's Chula Vista apartment, Veronica Gonzales begged the neighbors not to call police — and she and her husband Ivan each had a story to tell. Read the full story →

Michelle Knight was rushing to a custody hearing in 2002 when a familiar Cleveland school bus driver named Ariel Castro offered her a ride — with a quick stop at his ordinary-looking house on Seymour Avenue. Read the full story →