Volume 4

Doted on by his pistol-packing mama in tiny Rosebud, Texas, Kenneth McDuff grew from small-town bully into one of the most sinister figures in Texan history — a killer handed unprecedented leniency by the very system meant to stop him. Read the full story →

On New Year's night 1977, thirteen-year-old Bruce Kim left a party at a run-down Centralia, Washington apartment building and never came home — a murder so obscure the author knows it only because he grew up a few blocks away. Read the full story →

Will Matheson grew up in a chaotic Sydney hoarder house shadowed by tragedy and developed a deep fixation with death — years before anyone thought to look inside the oversized cricket bag that was far too heavy to lift. Read the full story →

On Valentine's Day 2007, stay-at-home dad Stephen Grant walked into the Macomb County Sheriff's office to report his jet-setting executive wife Tara missing — and wept for the cameras while searchers worked nearby Stoney Creek. Read the full story →

Given up for adoption to protect her from her volatile father, Katie Fusco grew up happy in Dover, New York — until, just after turning eighteen, she went looking for her biological family and found Steven Pladl waiting. Read the full story →

Teenage prodigy Candace Hiltz was bound for Stanford Law when she was found shot dead in her family's remote Copper Gulch, Colorado home — a still-unsolved case that took a strange turn when a delinquent storage unit went up for auction. Read the full story →

Rick Chance, the windshield king of Phoenix TV commercials, arrived at a hotel-room business meeting carrying a briefcase holding more than a million dollars in jewelry — unaware of what Brandi Hungerford had planned for the evening. Read the full story →

Hann and Bich Pan pushed their daughter Jennifer toward perfection at any cost — and when she told police three armed men had burst into the family's Toronto-area home, investigators noticed her story didn't quite add up. Read the full story →

On October 5, 2012, ten-year-old Jessica Ridgeway started her ordinary morning walk to school in Westminster, Colorado and vanished — while the man who had attacked a jogger at nearby Ketner Lake months earlier was still unidentified. Read the full story →

Bartenders Zack Bowen and Addie Hall became French Quarter folk heroes for riding out Hurricane Katrina in style — a year before a note found on the roof of the Omni Royal Orleans Hotel sent police to their Rampart Street apartment. Read the full story →

On the morning of his sixth wedding anniversary, Mike Williams set out alone to hunt ducks among the stumps of Lake Seminole and never returned — and with no body to recover, investigators reasoned the lake's alligators had left nothing to find. Read the full story →

In sleepy Kičevo, Macedonia, three older women were beaten and strangled between 2005 and 2008 — and mild-mannered local journalist Vlado Taneski covered the murders with an uncanny eye for details no reporter should have known. Read the full story →