After 29-year-old Sharita Cristwell told Maryland police that her ex-boyfriend, Harry Lindsey, had beaten and strangled her—something that should have triggered the state’s felony strangulation protections—a judge released him on home detention.

Less than three weeks later, police say Lindsey shot and killed Sharita. This story highlights how often strangulation, which is considered a predictor of future homicide, is often minimized in court, despite research showing survivors are far more likely to be killed by a partner after being strangled.

Sharita’s family says the system failed her, and now, two young daughters are caught in a custody fight in a family grieving an entirely preventable loss.

➜ Read the full story (The Washington Post— free gift link)

Leaders of a Minnesota congregation within the Old Apostolic Lutheran Church spent decades shielding a trusted church member, Clint Massie, who they knew to be responsible for abusing young girls in numerous states.

Instead of reporting the crimes, preachers pressured the victims into “forgive and forget” sessions that kept Massie in the community, and allowed him to continue harming children.

Police first learned of the allegations in 2017, but the church’s silence and witness pressure stalled the case for years. Finally, new victims revealed a long pattern of abuse inside a tightly controlled religious environment where secrecy was doctrine.

➜ Read the full story (ProPublica)

In early November 2025, a house cleaner in Indiana was fatally shot after she and her husband accidentally tried to unlock the wrong home, believing it was a residence they had been paid to clean.

Within two minutes of their arrival, homeowner Curt Andersen fired a single round through his closed front door, killing 28-year-old María Florinda Ríos Pérez de Velásquez.

Prosecutors have charged Andersen with voluntary manslaughter, arguing that Indiana’s self-defense law does not apply because there was no forced entry or reasonable threat.

The shooting has intensified debate over “stand your ground” and “castle doctrine” protections, all while Maria’s family seeks justice. For viewers of Netflix’s The Perfect Neighbor, her killing is a tragic familiarity.

➜ Read the full story (The Washington Post— free gift link)

A Guardian investigation two years in the making revealed massive lapses in Queensland, Australia’s police response to Hannah Clarke in the weeks before her estranged husband, Rowan Baxter, murdered her and their three children in 2020.

Newly revealed body-camera footage, text messages, and internal records, some of which were never reviewed by investigators, show that Clarke consistently reported stalking, phone hacking, strangulation, and threats before she was murdered.

Much of those allegations were never entered into the police database, the report found, meaning other officers were unaware of the danger she faced. Footage also shows officers appearing to coach Baxter on how to challenge a protection order, even as Clarke’s risk level should have been reassessed as “extreme,” according to reports.

➜ Read the full story (The Guardian)

With the help of A.I. and decades-old family photos, historians have finally identified the Nazi gunman in the iconic Holocaust image “The Last Jew in Vinnitsa” as 34-year-old Jakobus Onnen, a former teacher turned SS officer.

The match, confirmed at 99.9% confidence, provides long-sought answers to a photograph that has come to define the brutality of the Holocaust. The victim in the image, sitting at the precipice of a pit full of other victims, is still unknown.

➜ Read the full story (The New York Times — free gift link)

In this 2016 Tampa Bay Times feature, reporter Lane DeGregory explains how a 5-year-old girl who adored her father ended up being dropped to her death from a bridge by the man everyone agreed loved his daughter. DeGregory documents John Nicholas Jonchuck Jr.’s life of violence, mental illness, and manipulation.

Perplexingly, Jonchuck’s trail of domestic abuse reports and arrests never triggered a serious intervention by law enforcement or child protective services. This story is a well-written, devastating portrait of a family, and an indictment of how many chances are missed to protect children in seemingly obvious danger.

➜ Read the full story (Tampa Bay Times)

➜ Nearly 50 years after 22-year-old Judith Lord was sexually assaulted and murdered in her Concord, New Hampshire, apartment, modern DNA testing confirmed her former neighbor, Ernest Gable, as her killer. The case was long derailed by flawed FBI hair analysis, reports say.

➜ Six years after Jose Mendoza of Montana vanished on a trip home from visiting his mother, his sister, Carmen Couch, is still pushing for answers. She’s focusing on odd bank activity and his abandoned Subaru on the Wind River Reservation as signs of foul play.

➜ Federal officials say former Olympic snowboarder Ryan Wedding reinvented himself as a violent, murder-ordering kingpin tied to multiple killings. Now, they believe he is currently in Mexico while authorities offer $15 million for information leading to his arrest.

➜ To aid searches for the more than 100,000 people currently missing in Mexico, researchers are combining pig cadaver studies with drones and AI to detect the signatures of clandestine cartel burial sites.

➜ After spending 38 years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit, Peter Sullivan says police beat and bullied him into a false confession. The injustice was finally overturned when new DNA testing proved his innocence.

📚 The Tragedy of True Crime
Convicted felon John J. Lennon, currently serving 28-years-to-life in New York, has become one of the country’s leading prison journalists. His new book, The Tragedy of True Crime, aims to challenge the genre’s obsession with sensationalism.

In a conversation with The Marshall Project, Lennon argues that true crime too often flattens people into villains, and that writing from inside prison allows him to explore guilt, remorse, and motivation with a depth outside reporters can’t match.

➜ Check out the book: Bookshop.org | Amazon

🔊 Keeper and Killer
WLRN’s new four-part podcast Keeper and Killer explores the heartbreaking case of Daniel Weisberger, a Florida Keys teen whose long-standing mental health struggles and years of custody turmoil led to the murder of his younger 14-year-old brother.

Through courtroom reporting and well-researched family history, the series follows Daniel’s descent from Boy Scout to defendant as his attorneys argue he should be found not guilty by reason of insanity. It’s a cautionary tale about untreated mental illness, and how the justice system routinely fails juveniles who need help the most.

➜ Listen to the podcast

▶️ Zodiac Killer Project
Filmmaker Charlie Shackleton set out to create a thoughtful, cliché-free true crime documentary about the Zodiac Killer, only to watch the project collapse when he lost the rights to his source material. So instead, Shackleton decided to confront the true crime industry’s own ethical blind spots, and ended up with his new film, Zodiac Killer Project.

The documentary turns into a critique of the genre itself, exposing how familiar tropes, moral shortcuts, and a constant demand for darker stories shape what audiences crave. In the process, Shackleton suggests that our obsession with true crime may say less about unsolved murders than about our own appetite for the macabre.

➜ Read the full story

On November 29, 1979, 73-year-old retired schoolteacher Alice Stock was found suffocated and sexually assaulted in her home in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida.

Several years earlier, a teenager who lived across the street, Cesar Barone, had entered her home and attempted to force her to undress at knifepoint. He left when she refused. After her murder, Barone was considered a prime suspect in the case.

Decades later, Barone, born Adolph James Rode, would be convicted of four early 1990s murders in Oregon. He is still believed to be responsible for Stock’s murder, though the case against him was dropped in July 2000 because the time elapsed had “substantially affected the availability of evidence to obtain a conviction,” said a Florida prosecutor.

📚 Read: Oregon death row inmate dies, taking secrets with him, OregonLive

▶️ Watch: World's Most Evil Killers, Cesar Barone, Peacock

🔊 Listen: Cesar Barone, True Crime All The Time

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