"A narrative about a notorious killing in Northern Ireland and its devastating repercussions. In December 1972, Jean McConville, a thirty-eight-year-old mother of ten, was dragged from her Belfast home by masked intruders, her children clinging to her legs. They never saw her again. Her abduction was one of the most notorious episodes of the vicious conflict known as The Troubles. Everyone in the neighborhood knew the I.R.A. was responsible. But in...

On September 5th, 1934, a young beachcomber made a gruesome discovery on the shores of Cleveland's Lake Erie: the lower half of a female torso, neatly severed at the waist. Over the next four years, twelve more bodies would be scattered across the city. Some were beheaded while still alive. Amid the growing uproar, Cleveland's besieged mayor turned to his newly-appointed director of public safety: Eliot Ness. Ness had come to Cleveland fresh from...

"On a cool June evening in 2009, after performing a concert at London's Royal Academy of Music, twenty-year-old American flautist Edwin Rist boarded a train for a suburban outpost of the British Museum of Natural History. Home to one of the largest ornithological collections in the world, the Tring museum was full of rare bird specimens whose gorgeous feathers were worth staggering amounts of money to the men who shared Edwin's obsession: the Victorian...

"Between 1898 and 1912, families across the country were bludgeoned in their sleep with the blunt side of an axe. Jewelry and valuables were left in plain sight, bodies were piled together, faces covered with cloth. Some of these cases, like the infamous Villisca, Iowa murders, received national attention. But few people believed the crimes were related. And fewer still would realize that all of these families lived within walking distance to a train...

Describes how author Truman Capote became obsessed with the true crime story of a Manhattan socialite who shot her banking heir husband in 1955, and discusses how publication of his book led to her suicide and his own scandalous downfall.

"A shocking massacre in 2019 sparks a probing investigation into the strange, violent history of a polygamist Mormon outpost in Mexico. A harmless, unassuming caravan of women and children was ambushed by masked gunmen in northern Mexico on November 4, 2019. In a massacre that produced international headlines, nine people were killed and five others gravely injured. The victims were members of the La Mora and LeBaron communities-fundamentalist Mormons...

Two men, each handsome and unusually adept at his chosen work, embodied an element of the great dynamic that characterized America's rush toward the twentieth century. The architect was Daniel Hudson Burnham, the fair's brilliant director of works and the builder of many of the country's most important structures, including the Flatiron Building in New York and Union Station in Washington, D.C. The murderer was Henry H. Holmes, a young doctor who,...

The reporters said it was a sexy story-church, money, greed, adultery, blood, a defenseless child with profound disabilities, and a good man who never saw it coming, all the elements that garnered column inches and high ratings. The main players on the stage included a talented journalist who played the organ at church, a cunning narcissist who hid behind a pretty face and a sweet demeanor, and a respected businessman and father. The plan, her plan,...

The former U.S. poet laureate and author shares a chillingly personal memoir about the brutal murder of her mother at the hands of her former stepfather.

"In 2014, the world witnessed the start of a mysterious series of cyberattacks. Targeting American utility companies, NATO, and electric grids in Eastern Europe, the strikes grew ever more brazen, including the first-ever blackouts triggered by hackers. They culminated in the summer of 2017, when the malware known as NotPetya was unleashed, penetrating, disrupting, and paralyzing some of the world's largest companies--from drug manufacturing to software...