Volume 7

Law graduate Lauren Giddings often sensed someone had been inside her Macon, Georgia apartment while she was away. Days before her bar exam in June 2011, she emailed a friend that she was afraid to stay there alone — then was never heard from again. Read the full story →

Leonard Tyburski, dean of students at Detroit's Mackenzie High School, was obsessed with order, cleanliness, and control. During a screaming argument at the bottom of the basement stairs, his wife Dorothy taunted him one time too many — beside the family's chest freezer. Read the full story →

In Pennsylvania's Pocono Mountains, Cheryl Kunkle raised her son Greg Rowe on resentment and control. When sixteen-year-old Kristin Fisher refused the abortion Greg demanded and gave birth to baby Kaylee, mother and son came to share far more than a grudge. Read the full story →

After her young son David died, St. Louis mother Ellen Boehm bought a new car rather than pay his $2,348 funeral bill — and seemed more upbeat than ever. She still held a $5,000 life insurance policy on each of her surviving children. Read the full story →

In 1972, Bevan Spencer von Einem was hailed a hero for rescuing two men thrown into Adelaide's River Torrens. Seven years later, sixteen-year-old Alan Barnes stuck out his thumb on Grand Junction Road to hitch a ride home — and never arrived. Read the full story →

Fifty-six-year-old Texan Bill Nelson met Omaima Aref, a twenty-three-year-old Egyptian beauty, over a game of pool in a Costa Mesa dive bar, and a whirlwind romance began. Weeks later, a Thanksgiving Day phone call to his stepdaughter was the last anyone heard from Bill. Read the full story →

Betty Devore carried the scars of a brutal Iowa childhood — beatings, rape, and a mother in and out of mental institutions. Three weeks after meeting charming antique dealer Harold Frieberg at a singles meeting in Fairfield, she married him. Her buried past came along. Read the full story →

Hoping to rekindle a stagnant marriage, Steven Hricko booked a Valentine's weekend at a Maryland resort featuring a murder-mystery dinner theater show. His wife Kimberly — a surgical technologist whose job included disposing of unused drugs — was suddenly, surprisingly affectionate. Read the full story →

Hilma Witte's Indiana household was ruled by her husband Paul's beatings — until it wasn't. Before the story ended, a grandmother lay dead in her bed, shot with a medieval crossbow as she slept, and Hilma's teenage sons carried the secrets. Read the full story →

Seventeen-year-old Leanna Walker told friends she planned to run away with Sky McDonough, a self-styled Rastafarian who quoted Bible verses about killing a wife who leaves. When she vanished from Milford, Pennsylvania, the search closed in on the woods around a llama farm. Read the full story →

Daniel Carlson came home to the family's trailer in tiny Kapowsin, Washington, to find his wife Lisa shot to death on the couch. On the 911 call he spoke in a flat monotone, unable to recall his own address — and police found no forced entry. Read the full story →

When a sheriff's cruiser stopped teenage hitchhikers Nancy Trotter and Paula 'Sue' Wells on Florida's Treasure Coast in July 1972, Deputy Gerard Schaefer lectured them about the creeps and kidnappers out there — then kindly offered the girls a ride to Jensen Beach. Read the full story →