Volume 8

Rebecca Koster promised her mother she'd message when she made it home from a night out in Holbrook, Long Island. The message never came — and a single fingerprint on a strip of duct tape led police to a stranger named Evans Ganthier. Read the full story →

Signal box operator Gary Vinter stabbed co-worker Carl Edon thirty-seven times in a trackside workshop, then calmly returned to his post. Years later, released from prison a second time, the six-foot-seven Vinter had a new bride — one who already knew she'd made a terrible mistake. Read the full story →

Konstantin Simberg arrived in Phoenix from Russia dreaming of the America he'd seen on MTV — fast cars, easy money, beautiful girls. Then he fell for Kseniya, a dancer at Christie's Cabaret, and his American dream began a dark slide toward a place called Fossil Creek. Read the full story →

Texas teenager Jason Massey tortured animals to feed the urges festering inside him and filled notebooks with fantasies of death. When a younger boy asked him for a ride to see his girlfriend, thirteen-year-old Christina Benjamin, Massey started making plans of his own. Read the full story →

Just before 11:00 a.m., Marlene answered the doorbell of her Florida home to find a clown in an orange wig holding balloons and a basket of flowers — a gift, she assumed, from her husband Michael Warren. What happened next took decades to unravel. Read the full story →

When Mary Pratt's body was found dumped on a dead-end Dallas street in 1990, it seemed another tragedy of Oak Cliff's rough streets — until the pathologist lifted the dead woman's eyelid and discovered her right eyeball was missing. Read the full story →

Martha McKay returned to Horseshoe Lake, Arkansas, to restore Snowden House, the antebellum mansion of her childhood summers — the same estate where her mother had been murdered years before. The teenager convicted of those crimes, Travis Lewis, wouldn't stay behind bars forever. Read the full story →

Grant Amato spent more than $2,000 a night on Silvie, a Bulgarian cam model he'd never met but called his girlfriend, inventing a life of BMWs and big houses. His real, devoted family in Chuluota, Florida had no idea what his obsession would cost them. Read the full story →

Women had been vanishing from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside since 1983 — so many, and so invisible, that authorities took nearly a decade to notice. The trail eventually led out of the city to a pig farm and a man named Robert 'Willy' Pickton. Read the full story →

Peering through his new high-powered telescope over the Ohio River, Tim Walthall watched a young woman set up her beach chair on the Kentucky shore — then witnessed something that sent him racing for the phone. The search for Heather Teague never truly ended. Read the full story →

Joe Ball — bootlegger, brawler, crack shot — ran the Sociable Inn off Highway 181 in tiny Elmendorf, Texas, a rowdy roadhouse with poker tables, cold beer, and a pit of live alligators. Then people around Joe started to disappear. Read the full story →

Ashley Young was compassionate to a fault and believed in second chances. That generosity led her to Jared Chance — a bully with thirty-eight brushes with the law in his first ten years of adulthood, and the man the author says would destroy her. Read the full story →