The call came on the night of November 17, 1969. Rudolph Hess, the man who had once stood second only to Adolf Hitler in the Nazi hierarchy, lay near death in the British Military Hospital in Berlin. For twenty-eight years—his son’s entire adult life—Hess had refused to see his family, judging the supervised, tightly restricted … Read more

On May 23, 1945, a man in British custody in the German town of Lüneburg bit into a hidden glass capsule. The cyanide killed him within minutes. The man was Heinrich Himmler, the Reichsführer SS, architect of the Holocaust, and he had just cheated the gallows. His capture in disguise and his suicide meant he … Read more

On the night of October 1, 1993, twelve-year-old Polly Klaas was having a sleepover with two friends in her home in Petaluma, California, a quiet town forty miles north of San Francisco. Her mother and younger sister were asleep in a nearby room. The girls played games and laughed, enjoying the ordinary happiness of childhood, … Read more

The photograph sat on the table between them, and for a long moment no one spoke. The woman who had commissioned it had given a false name, but the photographer’s wife had recognized her at once, and now the truth was out in the open. In the image, the widow stood alone, yet beside her … Read more

In February 1868, the settlers of Llano County, Texas, had learned to live with the threat of Comanche raids. The county, nestled in the Texas Hill Country west of Austin, had seen violence before. Back in 1841, Texas Ranger Jack Hayes had made a legendary stand against a much larger force of Comanche warriors from … Read more

On October 7, 1955, in the late afternoon, a man stepped down from a freight car at Friedland in Lower Saxony. A paper tag hung around his neck, and in his pocket he carried a photograph of a woman he had not seen in eleven years. He walked, because running was something his legs no … Read more

In the hills of Sinaloa, the eldest son of Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán remains a fugitive worth ten million dollars to anyone who delivers him to American justice. Iván Archivaldo Guzmán Salazar is on the DEA’s most wanted list. The U. S. Department of Justice has indicted him. Interpol knows his name. And yet, while … Read more

On the night of April 8, 1967, a fifteen-year-old girl lay under the floor of a root cellar behind her family’s house in eastern Kentucky, listening to the voices of two men through the planks above her. She stayed there for forty-one minutes. When she finally came up, her two older sisters were dead, both … Read more

The mail carrier saw the mounds first. Seven of them, roughly the length of a grown person, laid out in a neat row behind the cabin. The ground was freshly turned. The cabin door stood open. Inside, the hearth was cold and every piece of furniture had been arranged in a perfect circle facing the … Read more