Editor's Pick
Unsolved

Jack The Ripper

A warning before this article. The Whitechapel murders involved sustained physical mutilation of the dead, and any honest account of them must say so. This piece does not dwell on graphic detail beyond what the case requires, but the killings…

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The Moors Murders

A serious warning before this article. The Moors Murders involved the abduction, sexual abuse, and killing of children. The youngest victim was ten years old. The trial included the playing in open court of an audio tape recording of one…

Lizzie Borden

Lizzie Borden took an axe / And gave her mother forty whacks. / When she saw what she had done / She gave her father forty-one. The schoolyard rhyme is wrong on almost every count. Abby Borden was not Lizzie’s…

The Son Of Sam

For thirteen months between July 1976 and August 1977, a man with a .44 calibre revolver shot couples in parked cars across the outer boroughs of New York City. He killed six people and wounded seven. He wrote letters to…

Patrick Mackay

He has been called Britain’s forgotten serial killer. He was diagnosed as a psychopath at fifteen, was convicted of three killings at twenty-three, confessed at the time to eight more, and has been imprisoned continuously since 1975 — making him,…

The Peoples Temple

On the afternoon of 18 November 1978, in a clearing in the Guyanese jungle, 918 people died. Most of them were poisoned. Some of them were children. Their leader, a man who had once been celebrated by mayors and congressmen…

Waco

What began as a federal raid to serve a search warrant ended, fifty-one days later, with seventy-six people dead in a burning building in the Texas scrubland. The Waco siege is one of those events whose facts are agreed upon…

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Editor's Pick

Jack The Ripper

A warning before this article. The Whitechapel murders involved sustained physical mutilation of the dead, and any honest account of them must say so. This piece does not dwell on graphic detail beyond what the case requires, but the killings…

The Black Dahlia

A warning: this article concerns a murder whose physical particulars are extraordinarily violent. It is not possible to tell the story honestly without referring to them, and they are part of why the case became famous in the way it…

The Zodiac

Five murders. Two survivors. Four ciphers, two of which are still uncracked. More than fifty years of suspects, theories, documentaries, and confessions that turned out to be nothing. The Zodiac is the most famous unsolved case in American criminal history,…