The True Crime Issue
The Hows and Whys of Prison Escapes
Famed crime writer Donald E. Westlake on history's most famous jailbreaks.
The Golden Zone: Hunting a Hit Man in Mexico
We were hunting a man who was paid to kill people, he was bisexual. His preferred weapon was an Uzi submachine gun that left its victims nearly unidentifiable. He was employed by a powerful organization with a lot of money to spend and even more to...
Why People of Color in New York City Still Don't Trust the Cops
Broken Windows policing targets racial minorities.
Who Is the West Mesa Bone Collector?
Five years after Albuquerque's "crime of the century," police have few clues about what happened to 11 women found buried on the West Mesa.
Photographing Crime Scenes in Chicago on One of the Most Violent Weekends of the Year
I spent a long, hot summer night riding from shooting to shooting with a newspaper photographer.
It’s a Secret: My Time with Charles Sobhraj, the Bikini Killer
I often speculated that the Bikini Killings were a twisted, homoerotic death ritual triggered by amphetamine psychosis. I wanted to suggest this to the Bombay police, but since I was on speed myself, I decided that wasn't the best idea.
RT to Kill: It’s All Fun and Games Until Someone Tweets a Death Threat
On the night of March 11, a Twitter user stood at a window in downtown LA and took a photo of his rifle, the barrel aimed at what appeared to be a couple of pedestrians standing on a street corner in the distance.
The Art of Ransom
The kidnapping biz is booming these days. Once the specialty of South American guerrilla armies and drug cartels, abducting and bartering for human beings has become a global industry in the past decade.
Postmortem: The Life and Deaths of a Medicolegal Death Investigator
I've spent most of my life employed as a medicolegal death investigator. My career began at a coroner's office in New Orleans and concluded more than three decades later. I participated in 7,000 forensic autopsies and completed more than 2,000 next-of...
True Crime Shit
Aileen Wuornos was a serial killer who murdered seven men while working as a prostitute. You already know that because Charlize Theron won an Oscar for playing her in a movie. These are the prison-issue panties Wuornos wore while awaiting execution in...