She concentrated on the window. On the dark beyond it. She did not jump, she would insist until her last day on earth. She was pushed. That was her story, told from a hospital bed, from a wheelchair, from a suite at the Ritz, repeated to anyone who would listen with the same unbroken certainty: … Read more

Deep inside a filing cabinet at Sullivan Correctional Facility in Fallsburg, New York, there is a letter dated 2005, addressed to the Warren County Prosecutor’s Office in New Jersey. In it, in his own handwriting, a man described exactly how he had killed a teenage girl. He wrote where he took her, what he did … Read more

On the afternoon of June 10, 1933, a stolen Ford V-8 was tearing north through the Texas Panhandle toward the small town of Wellington. Clyde Barrow drove the way he did everything, far too fast, as if the rules of the road had been written for someone else. In the back seat sat W. D. … Read more

The old man on the porch did not look up for a long time after Ambrose Teague asked the way to the Sorrel Fork. He sat in his chair, chewing on nothing, staring out at the green folds of the mountain as if he could see through them to something on the other side. Finally, … Read more

In 1966, a recruiting visit to Harvard University turned into a confrontation. Students, increasingly aware of Dow Chemical’s role as a primary manufacturer of napalm, blockaded the interview room where a company representative was scheduled to meet candidates. The slogan “Dow makes napalm” became a rallying cry, and the tactic spread. By 1967, a protest … Read more

They called her the White Lady, and the name had followed her like a shadow since childhood. Born in Jamaica to enslaved African parents, her skin had come into the world pale and her hair bright white, a condition that marked her as different from the first breath she took. Before she was old enough … Read more

On October 7, 1966, the late afternoon sun stretched across the gravel driveway of Rough Point, the vast English manor in Newport, Rhode Island, that sat perched on cliffs above the Atlantic. A two-ton Dodge Polara station wagon idled near the iron gates. Inside sat Doris Duke, 53 years old, worth more than a billion … Read more

He had spent his life reading the records other men wanted forgotten, and he had learned that the most terrifying word in any county ledger was not “killed” and not “missing. ” It was “closed. ” Closure meant a man in some office had decided the matter was finished, signed his name to it, and … Read more

The telephone in the district attorney’s office rang with the kind of call that made a detective’s hand hover over the receiver. It was 1949, two years after Elizabeth Short’s body had been found cut in two in a vacant Los Angeles lot, and the case had gone cold enough that every new tip was … Read more