Volume 27

In March 1994, North Star Expeditions staff pulled sixteen-year-old Aaron Bacon from his Phoenix bed and drove him to Utah's remote Escalante canyon country, where the wilderness program's rules said no food sharing — and no fire until you earned it. Read the full story →

Jamie Faith was walking the dog with his wife Jennifer on their quiet Dallas street when a masked gunman shot him seven times, then turned on her with duct tape. Doorbell cameras up and down South Waverly Drive caught everything. Read the full story →

Michelina Lewandowska followed her fiancé Marcin Kasprzak from Poland to Huddersfield, England, and kept wearing his ring long after the engagement died. One May morning in 2011, he smiled and said he had something to show her. Read the full story →

On Anzac Day 1999, Keith Hibbins and his partner took an evening stroll through Melbourne's Fitzroy Gardens — just as a crying woman on the park's edge told six young men from the football a story that wasn't true. Read the full story →

Susan Vesey celebrated her twenty-first birthday in Everett, Washington, in July 1980. By morning she was dead on her bedroom floor, her infant son unharmed beside her — and the case would stay cold for decades. Read the full story →

Dr. David Birkett, a respected Middlesbrough dermatologist who collected ancient skulls, got a handwritten note about a parcel from a courier company called Demon Despatch. The company didn't exist, and the phone number led to a man waiting beside a booth. Read the full story →

Ina and David Steiner ran a small newsletter covering eBay from their Natick, Massachusetts home. In August 2019 came the strange subscriptions, the threats, and a preserved fetal pig — a campaign traced somewhere no one expected. Read the full story →

Ashley Freeman turned sixteen on December 29, 1999, and her best friend Lauria Bible stayed over at the family trailer near Welch, Oklahoma. Before dawn the trailer was in flames, and the two girls were gone. Read the full story →

Lindsay Jellett, a gentle, well-loved man of forty-one, left his Ararat care home for his daily walk on a cold May evening in 1994 and never came back for dinner. What was done to him defied belief twice over. Read the full story →

The Craigslist ad promised a caretaker job on a 688-acre Ohio cattle farm — a fresh start for men down on their luck. The farm didn't exist, and the man behind the ad was known around Akron as Chaplain Rich. Read the full story →

When paralegal Kandi Hall went to work for young Idaho attorney Emmett Corrigan, they were sleeping together within two weeks — both of them married. By March 2011, her husband Rob was watching, and the affair was a secret no longer. Read the full story →

Behind a closed bedroom door in suburban Melbourne, a quiet former babysitter named Matthew Graham ran the dark web's most notorious child-abuse network under the name Lux — until investigators on three continents started pulling the thread. Read the full story →