Crime at Bedtime

The assassination of Gianni Versace on the 15th of July 1997 was the shocking end of one of the deadliest killing sprees in modern American history. On that summer morning, the world-famous Italian fashion designer walked home from a café to his Miami Beach mansion, Casa Casuarina, and was shot dead on his own front steps by a 27-year-old man named Andrew Cunanan. But Gianni Versace was not Andrew...

The attack on Nancy Kerrigan on the 6th of January 1994 became one of the most notorious scandals in the history of the Olympic Games, and it involved one of the most famous rivalries in sport: Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding. On that afternoon, at the United States Figure Skating Championships in Detroit, the reigning American champion Nancy Kerrigan finished a practice session and walked down a...

At approximately 12 minutes past midnight on the morning of Monday the 13th of June 1994, in the leafy Los Angeles neighbourhood of Brentwood, a group of residents on South Bundy Drive were woken by the barking of a distressed Akita dog. The dog was wandering the street. It had blood on its paws. It had blood on its coat. The dog belonged, as the neighbours knew, to a 35-year-old woman named Nicol...

Shortly after midnight on the morning of Tuesday the 15th of November 1966, in the small Ohio River town of Point Pleasant, West Virginia, in the county of Mason, two young married couples in a black 1957 Chevrolet drove out along State Route 62 to see what there was to see at the abandoned munitions plant seven miles north of town. The plant had been decommissioned since the end of the Second Wor...

At approximately 12:35 in the morning on Wednesday the 29th of April 2015, in a small clearing in the jungle of a prison island called Nusa Kambangan, off the southern coast of Central Java in Indonesia, a group of eight men and one woman stood in a line, facing a 13-member firing squad. Two of them were Australians. The younger of the two was 31 years old. His name was Andrew Chan. He had been bo...

On the morning of Tuesday the 13th of December 2016, a video began to circulate on Mexican social media that would, within 48 hours, be seen by millions of people around the world. It had been recorded in the small town of San Miguel Totolapan, in the state of Guerrero, in the Tierra Caliente region of south-western Mexico. It showed a middle-aged woman speaking directly into the camera, in Spanis...

At approximately 11 o'clock on the evening of Thursday the 11th of October 1973, two men walked into the Jackson County Sheriff's Office in the small Gulf Coast city of Pascagoula, Mississippi, and told the sheriff on duty that a few hours earlier, on the west bank of the Pascagoula River, they had been abducted by aliens. The older of the two men was Charles Hickson. He was 42 years old. He was a...

At approximately 10 o'clock on the evening of Saturday the 27th of July 2019, a 23-year-old man in the Toronto suburb of Markham, Ontario, logged in to a private chat server on the messaging app Discord and began, in real time, to type a message that would be seen, over the course of the following 18 hours, by dozens of video gamers scattered across the world. His name was Menhaz Zaman. His userna...

On the morning of Wednesday the 29th of July 2015, New South Wales Police homicide detectives arrested a 68-year-old retired firefighter at his home in the south-western Sydney suburb of Campbelltown. His name was Leonard John Warwick. The charges laid against him ran to 32 offences, including four counts of murder, one count of attempted murder, and thirteen counts of causing bodily harm or prope...

On the evening of Monday the 15th of August 1977, in a field outside the small town of Delaware, Ohio, a radio telescope the size of three football fields was listening to the sky. There were no astronomers present. The telescope could not be steered. It sat on the ground, pointed straight up, and let the rotation of the Earth do its work for it. As the planet turned, patches of the night sky drif...

On the afternoon of Tuesday the 1st of January 2019, a group of beachcombers walking along Jetty Island, a small sandy island in the estuary off Everett, Washington, found a black Timberland work boot half-buried in the sand. It had been in the water for some time. The leather was waterlogged, the laces crusted with silt. Inside the boot was a human foot. Within days, DNA testing had matched the f...

On the evening of Thursday the 3rd of May 2007, a British couple on holiday in the resort of Praia da Luz on Portugal's Algarve coast finished dinner with friends at a tapas restaurant, roughly 50 metres from the ground-floor apartment where their three children were sleeping. Kate and Gerry McCann had, over the course of the evening, taken turns checking on the children at approximately half-hour...

At approximately 7:15 in the evening on Friday the 12th of September 1952, three young boys were playing in the schoolyard of Flatwoods Elementary School, in the small Appalachian town of Flatwoods, West Virginia. It was almost fully dark. One of them looked up. A bright, pulsating object was streaking across the sky. It appeared to descend and crash on a nearby hillside, on the property of a loca...

On the morning of Thursday the 11th of December 2008, two FBI agents knocked on the door of a penthouse apartment on Manhattan's Upper East Side. The man who answered the door was 70 years old, silver-haired, and one of the most respected figures on Wall Street. His name was Bernard Lawrence Madoff. He had served as chairman of the NASDAQ stock exchange. He had advised the Securities and Exchange...

At just before three in the morning on Saturday the 19th of March 2011, a 22-year-old woman named Sian O'Callaghan left a nightclub in the centre of Swindon, Wiltshire, and began the 800-metre walk home to the flat she shared with her boyfriend. She never arrived. Within days, Detective Superintendent Steve Fulcher of Wiltshire Police had identified a suspect. Within a week, he had made a decision...

On the afternoon of Saturday the 10th of August 1901, two English women stepped off a train at Versailles, near Paris, on holiday together. One was 55-year-old Charlotte Anne Moberly, the first Principal of St Hugh's College, Oxford. The other was 38-year-old Eleanor Jourdain, her incoming Vice Principal. They toured the palace. They found it uninspiring. They opened their guidebook and decided to...

On a warm Friday morning in April 2005, Ray Gricar, the sitting District Attorney of Centre County, Pennsylvania, walked out of his office in Bellefonte, got into his red Mini Cooper, and drove east on Route 192 towards the town of Lewisburg. He was 59 years old. He was eight months from retirement. He had spent 20 years as one of the most respected prosecutors in central Pennsylvania. At 11:30 th...

On the morning of the 7th of June 1992, a 19-year-old woman named Janelle Kirby drove across Springfield, Missouri, to a small house on East Delmar Street, looking for her two best friends. They had graduated from high school the day before. They were supposed to be driving down to a resort in Branson. When Janelle pushed open the unlocked front door, she found the family's terrier agitated, the g...

On a winter night in 1961, in a stone bunker on a hilltop outside Turin, two young Italian brothers sat in front of a wall of homemade radio equipment and heard something they would spend the rest of their lives trying to explain. The slow, wet sound of a man breathing his last breaths from somewhere above the Earth. Over the following years, Achille and Giovanni Battista Judica-Cordiglia would re...

At just past three in the morning on the 19th of November 1986, a snowplough driver named Joseph Hine was driving along the edge of Lake Zoar in rural Connecticut when he saw something that did not belong. A rented truck. A woodchipper attached to the back. And a man standing beside it, operating the machine, in the middle of a snowstorm, in the middle of the night. Hine kept driving. He had a job...

For eleven months, Taylor Parker told everyone she was pregnant. She posted gender reveals on social media. She showed off sonograms. She accepted gifts. Her boyfriend believed her. Her friends believed her. So did a young mother in New Boston, Texas named Reagan Simmons-Hancock, who had let Taylor photograph her wedding the year before and had defended her against the doubters. But Taylor Parker...

A young father in Vermont was changing his eighteen-month-old son's nappy when the little boy looked up at him and said something that no toddler should be able to say. Daddy, when I was your age, I used to change your nappies. His father searched his face for a smile. There was none. The little boy looked back at him with the calm certainty of a child stating a fact. And the strange thing was, hi...

On the morning of the 27th of May 1817, a 20 year old woman named Mary Ashford was found dead in a water-filled pit near the English village of Erdington. She had been at a dance the night before. She had been sexually assaulted before her death. The man last seen with her, a 24 year old named Abraham Thornton, was arrested and acquitted in a trial that would become one of the most controversial i...

On the 17th of February 2014, a 14 year old British boy named Breck Bednar took a pre-paid taxi from his mother's home in Surrey and travelled 30 miles to a flat in Grays, Essex. He believed he was going to meet a friend from his online gaming group. A friend who was going to give him a tour of his computer business. A friend who had spent months earning his trust. By the next morning, Breck was d...

High on a hillside above the River Esk in Cumbria stands one of the oldest occupied houses in England. Muncaster Castle has been home to the Pennington family for over 800 years. A king once sheltered here after losing his throne. A cruel jester named Tom Fool once stalked its grounds. A young carpenter was beheaded in its stables. A housemaid was murdered on the road outside its main gate. And in...