Ciphered: True Crime Explored

December 26, 1996. In the pre-dawn quiet of an affluent Boulder, Colorado neighborhood, a frantic 911 call shatters the holiday peace. Patsy Ramsey, a former beauty queen, reports that her six-year-old daughter, JonBenét, has been kidnapped. On a back staircase inside their sprawling home, police find a bizarre, two-and-a-half-page ransom note demanding $118,000 and warning against contacting auth...

January 15, 1947... In a vacant, weed-strewn lot in residential Los Angeles, a young mother makes a horrifying discovery. It appears at first to be a broken mannequin, but the truth is infinitely more gruesome: the body of a young woman, severed cleanly in two, drained of all blood, and posed with grotesque precision. The victim is Elizabeth Short, a 22-year-old aspiring actress with striking blac...

"I like killing people because it is so much fun." In the summer of 1969, this chilling confession—delivered in a complex, 408-symbol cipher—was mailed to three San Francisco Bay Area newspapers. It was the public debut of a new kind of predator, one who didn't just murder but performed, turning his crimes into a terrifying game of cat-and-mouse with the entire nation as his audience...