The Melinda Muniz Murder Case
In 2013 Mitch Ford, his 25-year-old fiancee Melinda Muniz and his 3-year-old daughter Grace from a previous marriage lived in Plano, Texas, the sprawling suburban community north of Dallas. Ford...
View ArticleSamuel Cohen: The Unrepentant Con Man
In 2002 Samuel Cohen, a 44-year-old San Francisco con man, talked the founders of a nonprofit foundation called Vanguard into investing millions into his company, Ecast. Vanguard, created in 1972...
View ArticleWas Kendrick Johnson Murdered?
Kendrick Johnson attended Lowndes High School in Valdosta, Georgia. The thin muscular 17-year-old played on the football and basketball teams. After attending his fourth period class on Thursday,...
View ArticleThe Rebecca Bryan Murder Case
In 2011 Rebecca "Becky" Bryan, a 51-year-old real estate agent, lived in the Oklahoma City suburb of Mustang with her 53-year-old husband Keith. Keith Bryan, a firefighter since 1981, was chief of...
View ArticleThe Rabbi Bernard Freundel Criminal Voyeurism Case
For 25 years Modern Orthodox Rabbi Bernard "Barry" Freundel was the spiritual leader of the Kesher Israel Synagogue in the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C. Former U.S. Senator from...
View ArticleClub Kid Michael Alig: A Life of Drugs and Murder
In 1988 22-year-old Michael Alig appeared on the cover of New York magazine under the headline, "Club Kids." Alig, a high-profile figure in the city's party scene formed a group of fellow...
View ArticleThe Execution of Clayton Lockett
On June 3, 1999 in Perry, Oklahoma, 23-year-old Clayton Lockett, a violent criminal accompanied by a pair of crime associates invaded a home and severely beat the occupant. While Lockett was...
View ArticleA Cold-Blooded Poisoner
In May 2018 Terese Kozlowski, after being married to Brian Kozlowski for 29 years, filed for divorce. She did not, however, move out of their home in Macomb County, Michigan. During the month...
View ArticleCriminal Dimwits: The Murder-For-Hire "Mastermind"
The three main characters in a murder-for-hire scheme are the mastermind, the hitman and the target. Bit players include enablers, advisors and hands-on accomplices. No category of crime features...
View ArticleThe Patrick Dunn Vigilante Murders
If you check your local sex offender registry you will probably be shocked by the length of the list. (You may also be shocked to find out who's on it.) The shear number of American men who have...
View ArticleAngels of Death Cases: Serial Murder by Poisoning
Murder by Poison Most people who die from poisoning do so accidentally. As a mode of criminal homicide, poisoning, compared to guns, knives, blunt objects and ligatures, is rare. According to FBI...
View ArticleBite Mark Evidence on Trial: The William Richards Murder Case
In 1993, 44-year-old William Richards and his wife Pamela, while building a house near Hesperia, California in the high desert in San Bernardino County, lived in a motor home. Because there were...
View ArticleBreaking Out of Prison Is the Easy Part
In August 1993, a 19-year-old armed robber and arsonist named Michael David Elliot and a criminal associate entered a house near Midland, Michigan with their guns drawn. They had come to the...
View ArticleThe Lisa McPherson Scientology Case: A Medical Examiner's Meltdown
On March 29, 2015, HBO aired a documentary about the Church of Scientology called "Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief." The expose was based on Lawrence Wright's book of the same...
View ArticleProfessor Rainer Reinscheid's Revenge
Rainer Klaus Reinscheid was an Associate Professor in the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences at the University of California, Irvine. The 48-year-old lived in the Orange County city of 223,000,...
View ArticleThe Wayne Mills Murder Case
Jerald Wayne Mills grew up in the town of Arab, Georgia in the northern part of the state. At the University of Alabama where he played football, he earned a degree in education. But instead of...
View ArticleJ. Edgar Hoover's FBI Crime Laboratory
Shortly after becoming the FBI's fourth director in 1924, J. Edgar Hoover envisioned a national crime laboratory under the auspicies of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Hoover had been...
View ArticleThe Diane McDermott Murder Case
Americans have enjoyed detective fiction since the 1930s. The early police detectives of literature and film were far more impressive than their thick-skulled real-life contemporaries. In the U.S....
View ArticlePioneers of Fingerprint Identification
In 1901 Scotland Yard became the world's first law enforcement agency to routinely fingerprint its arrestees. Fingerprints came to America in 1904 when the St. Louis Police Department established...
View ArticleDon't Bring Your Guns to Gonzaga
In the fall of 2013 Gonzaga University students Erik Fagan and Daniel McIntosh resided in a university owned off-campus apartment complex in Spokane, Washington. The seniors at this Jesuit...
View ArticleExposing 9th Graders to Pathological Murder
Students in an Australian high school didn't have to wait until college to enroll in a stupid, useless course. A 9th grade teacher in Corio, a suburb of Greelong, Victoria on Australia's...
View ArticleDr. Ralph Erdmann: The Forensic Pathologist From Hell
Most forensic pathologists are hardworking, well intentioned and competent. Even the best of them make honest mistakes. But over the years there have been several high-profile embarrassments to...
View ArticleThe Case Of The Stray Bullet
On Friday night, December 16, 2011, a 15-year-old Amish girl named Rachel Yoder, while on her way home in a horse-drawn buggy from a Christmas party at an Amish produce farm, fell dead out of the...
View ArticleThe Right to Give Your Child a Wrong Name
Generally, because of the First Amendment right of free speech, there is nothing the government can do to stop a parent from giving a kid a weird and arguably stupid name. The only remedy for...
View ArticleThe Nicholas Helman Ricin Case: Beware of the Jilted Nerd
In 2013, 19-year-old Nicholas Helman lived with his mother in Hatboro, Pennsylvania, a town of 8,000 in Montgomery County within the Philadelphia metropolitan area. One of the young man's...
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