Volume 6

Taw Benderly answered Loretta Bowersock's room-for-rent ad penniless and charming, and stayed for eighteen years — until December 14, 2004, when he rushed up to a Tucson mall security desk claiming Loretta had simply vanished from outside Dillard's. Read the full story →

When eighteen-year-old Heather Gibson tried to break up with Chad Wiersma, he drove her to a remote spot outside Kalamazoo and threatened to kill her and her family — the opening act of an obsession that would not let go. Read the full story →

Seventeen-year-old Gwen Araujo had found the courage to live openly as a girl in California's Bay Area — but in the late summer of 2002, she began partying with a group of young men at the Merél brothers' house in Newark, where suspicion about her was growing. Read the full story →

Devout Tom Pendergast made it his God-given mission to rescue wayward boys, so when he found six-foot-four teenage runaway Carl Eder sleeping in a coat closet at the Mission Beach Ballroom, he brought him home to his wife and children in El Cajon. Read the full story →

Struggling mother Rayne Perrywinkle thought the kindly stranger offering a $150 Walmart gift card for her daughters' clothes was an answered prayer — but 'Don' was a man a Jacksonville girl had once hidden from inside a playground slide. Read the full story →

Jo Rogers and her daughters Michelle and Christe left their Ohio dairy farm for their first real vacation, snapping photos from a hotel room overlooking Tampa Bay — days before the Coast Guard began pulling bodies, roped to concrete blocks, from the water. Read the full story →

Johnson County police wrote off the pentagrams and '666' graffiti around Whiteland, Indiana as harmless heavy-metal kids — but Mark Goodwin's homegrown cult, Satan's Disciples, had begun recruiting among the traveling carnival crews. Read the full story →

Robert Mark Edwards was raised on beatings and addiction and turned early to burglary — and when a woman was found beaten and strangled, the bloody can of hair styling mousse left on her bed became the case's strangest piece of evidence. Read the full story →

Ted Binion, heir to the Horseshoe casino fortune, buried millions in silver in a desert vault near Pahrump, Nevada — and only two people had the security codes: Binion himself and his young girlfriend's new friend, Rick Tabish. Read the full story →

On a snowy January morning in 1972, eight-year-old Shelly Mickelson climbed into her trusted neighbor Robert Moorman's Chevelle for a lunch her mother never approved — the start of a story that would end at the Blue Mist Motel in the prison town of Florence, Arizona. Read the full story →

Feeling ill, bartender Tami Engstrom left her shift early and stopped at the Nickelodeon Lounge in Masury, Ohio, where she showed off her new diamond ring and drank into the night with her uncle's friend, Kenneth Biros — and never made it home. Read the full story →

When Julie Paterson vanished after a trip to a Darlington pub in April 1998, her boyfriend Alan knew she would never miss a visit with her daughter — and weeks later, a police dog led its handler into the overgrown garden of a house that wasn't abandoned after all. Read the full story →