In April 1975, Margaret Pritchard, a 63-year-old widow who had worked for the Census Bureau for eleven years without incident, volunteered for a routine assignment in the mountains northwest of Asheville, North Carolina. She was known for her reliability, her strict adherence to protocol, and her willingness to take on difficult territory. The area called … Read more

On May 13, 1943, in a dusty processing yard on the North African coast, the largest surrender of Axis forces in the war had just ended. Roughly 267,000 German and Italian soldiers laid down their arms across the Cap Bon Peninsula and the port cities of Tunis and Bizerte. Six months of desert fighting was … Read more

Late afternoon light slanted through the windows of Something Sweet, a candy store on Pio Avenue in South Philadelphia, on September 14, 1984. Salvatore Testa walked through the door expecting a routine meeting. His best friend, Joe Pungitore, had called him earlier. Just business, Joey had said. Nothing unusual. Testa was cautious by nature. At … Read more

The black Mercedes slowed for the hairpin bend, and Jozef Gabčík stepped into the road. He raised his Sten gun, aimed at the man in the back seat, and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened. The gun had jammed. Reinhard Heydrich, the most feared man in the Third Reich after Hitler himself, should have ordered his … Read more

Serafín Zambada Ortiz turned another year older, and the occasion passed with none of the fanfare that once surrounded his name. He is the son of Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada, the man who co-founded the Sinaloa cartel and spent more than five decades as one of the most powerful drug traffickers in the Western Hemisphere. … Read more

On May 9, 2016, Christopher Hampton walked into Bristol Crown Court and pleaded guilty to the murder of Melanie Road. The trial lasted one hour and twenty minutes. It had taken thirty-two years to arrive. Hampton, then sixty-four, sat expressionless as the judge described what he had done on a warm June night in 1984: … Read more

On the evening of April 18, 1942, the most powerful naval commander in the Pacific closed the door of his private cabin aboard the battleship Yamato and did not come out. Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, the architect of the Pearl Harbor attack, had handed command of the Combined Fleet to his chief of staff and sat … Read more

The water of the Withlacoochee River ran low and warm that summer of 1873, the air of South Georgia thick enough to lean on. A stretch of the riverbank had been cleared of brush and deadfall, converted into a private swimming hole by a family with standing in the county. On the bank stood a … Read more

Ellis Cranfield asked for a shot of whiskey before he would say a word. It was fall 1978, and the game warden had walked into the Christian County Sheriff’s office in Ozark, Missouri, with something he needed to get off his chest first. He had been tracking a wounded deer through the cedar brakes above … Read more