In May 2023, a teenager told Yates County police officers that her adoptive father had been abusing her since 2021, when she was 13. The girl was removed from the home and her case was assigned to an investigator, who admitted she didn't believe the girl.
The teen was eventually sent back to the home, where the abuse continued. Despite Yates County District Attorney Todd Casella filing complaints and pushing for termination of the investigator, she received only a written reprimand, was later demoted for additional failures, and continues to patrol as a deputy sheriff. This case of officer misconduct, the story reports, is only one of many.
➜ Read the full story (The New York Times — free gift link)
In August 2024, a Wisconsin father vanished on a lake at night, triggering an extensive search that consumed a small county’s resources and a family’s grief.
But what initially appeared to be a tragic drowning unraveled into something strange and darker: a faked death, a slip across international borders, and the attempt at a new life half a world away. The fallout for the family left behind is the hardest part to look at.
➜ Read the full story (The Atlantic — free gift link)
In December 2022, eight teenage girls—drunk, restless, and spiraling through a night of violence—killed 59-year-old Kenneth Lee near a downtown Toronto shelter after a fight over a bottle of alcohol.
The crime seemed unbearable, and a system scrambled to understand how something so senseless could happen so fast. The courtroom, months later, found only fragments of answers: no clear motive, just a collision of adolescence, chaos, and a man who didn’t survive.
➜ Read the full story (The Walrus)
For half a century, a Tennessee town built its identity around sheriff Buford Pusser—the bat-wielding lawman immortalized by the Walking Tall films—and the story that mobsters killed his wife.
A new state investigation blows that legend apart, uncovering evidence that Pusser likely murdered Pauline himself and staged the ambush that made him a folk hero. The town’s response is the strangest part. Faced with the truth, many would rather keep the myth alive and well.
➜ Read the full story (Slate)
A 16-year-old boy was shot dead on a Jacksonville dirt road, and police labeled it “self-defense” despite having no shooter willing to claim they fired the gun.
That’s just one reason why Jacksonville now ranks No. 1 in the nation for killings cleared as justifiable, a designation that can quietly bury messy or unwinnable investigations. This story follows a mother’s fight for answers in a system that keeps telling her the case is closed, even if it isn’t solved.
➜ Read the full story (The Wall Street Journal — free gift link)
Florida’s Governor Is a Veteran. So Are Seven Inmates He’ll Send to the Execution Chamber This Year.
Florida is executing people at a modern-era record pace this year, and nearly half of those men are military veterans. Many have PTSD, brain injuries, or trauma from deployments that juries never heard about.
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, himself a veteran, keeps signing death warrants while sidestepping the question of whether service should matter in the most final punishment the state can impose. This story follows the families, advocates, and former soldiers watching the clock run out, wondering why a “veteran-friendly” state is so quick to kill its own.
➜ Read the full story (Mother Jones)
THROWBACK READ
In 2006, at 16, Amber Wyatt reported that she’d been raped by two of her high school classmates, only to be hit with disbelief, bureaucratic indifference, and a wave of cruelty from classmates that consumed her life.
Police and prosecutors let the case quietly die, even with physical evidence in hand, and the rumor mill did the rest. This story from 2018 asks what justice looks like when an entire system shrugs at a girl who needed help.
➜ Read the full story (The Washington Post)
Quick Reads
➜ A group of Texas criminology students helped crack a 34-year-old cold case, leading police to arrest a woman long suspected in the 1991 shooting death of 25-year-old Cynthia Gonzalez.
➜ Brian Walshe, a Massachusetts man accused of murdering and dismembering his wife Ana, pleaded guilty to two related charges, admitting he disposed of her remains but continuing to deny the murder charge as his trial proceeds.
➜ After Trey Reed, a Black freshman at Delta State University, was found hanging from a campus tree—the ninth such case in Mississippi since 2000—his family and community are challenging the suicide ruling.
➜ Nearly 50 years after 15-year-old Marissa Harvey was found strangled in San Francisco, investigators used DNA pulled from her clothing, and chewing gum left on her back, to identify and convict a Colorado man who evaded justice for decades.
➜ More than 32 years after police coerced a false confession from 20-year-old Danny Davis, new DNA evidence finally cleared him, dismissing his decades-old murder conviction and ending one of the state’s bleakest wrongful imprisonment cases.
➜ Researchers have confirmed that the skeleton unearthed beneath a Budapest monastery in 1915 belongs to Duke Béla of Mascó, a 13th-century royal cut down in 1272 by three assassins who left him with 23 sword wounds.
What to Read & Stream
19th Century Cannibalism
In Captain’s Dinner, author Adam Cohen recounts the 1884 Mignonette cannibalism case, in which a shipwrecked crew of four sailors killed 17-year-old Richard Parker and drank his blood to survive. The book begs the question: is it ever legal, or moral, to sacrifice one life to save others?
➜ Check out the book: Bookshop.org | Amazon
Blood Relatives
The New Yorker’s sixth season of “In The Dark” focuses on the White House Farm murders of August 1985, considered one of England’s most notorious family massacres. Writer Heidi Blake digs into the story to reveal why the case’s well-known narrative might be much different than previously thought.
Thoughts & Prayers
HBO’s Thoughts & Prayers (trailer) pulls viewers into the surreal world of America’s $3 billion active-shooter preparedness industry, revealing how students, teachers, and families train for mass shootings as a normal part of school life.
Allison after NXIVM
The latest season of CBC’s Uncover podcast features the story of Allison Mack, who went from actress to member of NXIVM, a cult led by convicted sex offender Keith Raniere.
Black Dahlia Murder Witness
Journalist Eli Frankel’s new book, Sisters in Death, upends Black Dahlia lore by revealing a long-hidden eyewitness account and uncovering evidence that shifts the case’s origin story and prime suspect in unforeseen ways.
➜ Check out the book: Bookshop.org | Amazon
The Province, February 17, 1982
This Week in True Crime History
On November 21, 1981, the body of 13-year-old Roswitha Fuchsbichler was found by joggers in the woods north of Prince George, British Columbia, a week after she went missing.
Roswitha’s murder was ultimately linked to Edward Dennis Isaac, a serial killer responsible for three young women’s deaths along the remote Canadian corridor now known the “Highway of Tears.”
In this stretch from Prince George to Prince Rupert, on the coast, more than 80 women—many Indigenous—have gone missing or been murdered since the 1970s.
At least three known serial killers, including Isaac, were known to be active in the area, but many of the disappearances are still unsolved.
➜ Listen: Highway of Tears Pt. 1: It Starts With One (Serial Killers podcast)
➜ Watch: Searchers: Highway of Tears, Vice (YouTube)